A certified “nu metal” horror movie, The House on Haunted Hill caused my hair to erupt in bleached tips, my pants to baggify themselves, and a 40 foot long wallet chain to explode out of my pocket, uncoiling like the weapon of a Mortal Kombat character. Suddenly, wounds were crawling through my skin. I try so hard and come so far, but in the end it doesn’t even matter.

It’s pretty good, overall: a gimmicky but scare-packed film with creative VFX, and even inspiring hints that there may be a real, live human writing the script. I don’t remember much of the 1959 version (except it has Vincent Price), but I remembered lots of things from this one. The pencil through the neck. The theme park ride. The shit with the camera. The other, different shit with the zoetrope (the movie doesn’t trust you to know what that is, they call it an “Saturation Chamber” or something). The waterboarding part. The sheer volume of practical effects was enjoyable. The editing is great, and creates massive amounts of chaos from William Malone’s workmanlike direction. It uses that strobe-pulse fluttery-moth shot-through-a-spinning-fan trick you saw in Jacob’s Ladder, to the point where it becomes a fetish. Don’t watch this if you have epilepsy.

The design of The Darkness (the embodiment of the evil in the house, not the rock band) walks a fraught line between “mediocre late 90s CGI that hasn’t aged well” and “genuinely creative and unsettling”. That one shot where they map an animated texture over a 3D model looks terrible, like a videogame.

…but the more abstract Rorschach-blot design looks excellent.

Casting is, admittedly, not the movie’s strong suite. Geoffrey Rush plays a ludicrously hammy 1950s panto villain. Fun, but what’s the point of updating the movie into the 90s and then writing such an anachronistic character? Xenia Onatopp (or whoever plays his wife) is okay. The camera operator appears to think I really want to see down her dress. Unfortunately he is correct.

The rest of the actors are bland. You will not remember their names. If you deign insert them into your memory, it will be as Reporter Bitch, Camera Bitch, Eyebrows Man, Glasses Man, and Black Man in a Horror Movie (he actually lives to the end. They should award him the Purple Heart for that. He gets characterized as a professional basketball player…one of those NBA pros who’s 1.78m tall, I guess.) Holy boring. Where do they find these people? Were they shipped to the film studio in a packing crate from Boring Actors Inc? They should have ripped the crate apart, painted terrified faces on the wooden planks themselves, and used those in the movie instead. It would have afforded us the illusion of more lively and charismatic actors.

Overall, there’s a lot of great moments here to offset the 90s cheese. I was surprised by how well the film held up.

I did notice some thematic elements that sailed over my head when I was 12, like the Scientology angle. It’s one of the most cartoonishly anti-psychiatry horror movies I’ve ever seen (“Electroshock therapy. Dr Vanacutt liked to zap his patients in multiples of eighteen. More energy efficient.”). Or the moment when Evelyn says (referring to her husband) “His initials are S.P.”

That might also explain this lengthy monologue by Ali Larter’s character, when she attempts to defeat the Darkness using the science of Dianetics.

I think it’s a privilege to call yourself a Scientologist and it is something that you have to earn. Being a Scientologist, you look at somebody and you know absolutely that you can help them. Being a Scientologist, when you drive past an accident, it’s not like anyone else. As you drive past, you know you have to do something about it, because you know you’re the only one that can really help. That’s…that’s what drives me, is that I know we have an opportunity, and uh, to really help for the first time effectively change people’s lives, and uh, I’m dedicated to that. I’m gonna, I’m absolutely, uncompromisingly dedicated to that. We are the authorities in getting people off drugs. We are the authorities on the mind.

I found that a little heavy-handed, but your mileage may vary.

Also, I am pretty sure I reviewed this movie already. Oops.

Are they leaning into the “Pixar mom” meme at this point? I only ask because Little Bo Peep has a dump truck four times as big as the rest of her body.

Anyway, it’s another Pixar movie starring toys and crap. All your favorites are here, and they’ve never looked better. The animation is just stupendous. Look at that god damn rain at the beginning—relax, guys. I kind of feel like you’re showing off at this point. The human characters look great, full of warmth and personality and emotion. The biggest weakness of the Toy Story franchise was how the people tended to resemble plastic toys themselves, and that’s no longer the case.

But I think I’m over Toy Story. Let’s face it, there’s exactly three stories you can get out of this concept—toys lose their owners; toys are no longer wanted; toys confront an existential crisis—and after four movies, Pixar has explored them all. Everything on the screen provoked a reaction of “yep, seen that before.” It’s well-animated and as sharp and funny as ever, but it’s all getting a bit too comfy at this point.

There’s only one truly original idea: the fork. Woody’s new owner Bonnie makes a weird misshapen figure out of a plastic fork, a popsicle stick, and a pipecleaner, writes her name on its feet, and it comes to life. Which pokes at a neat idea: what makes a toy a toy? Woody and Buzz are expensive branded products, but really, all that separates a “toy” from anything else is a child’s belief. Forky is made of random junk, but Bonnie has decided that he will be a toy. However, the resulting character makes no sense: changing from a near-silent lobotomy victim to wisecracking comic relief as the movie progresses. (There’s a sequence where Forky, believing himself to be trash, keeps trying to throw himself away. Randy Newman, tasked with writing music for this, screwed up his brow in concentration, came up with a song called “I Can’t Let You Throw Yourself Away” and then patted himself on the back for a hard day’s work.) Sadly, Forky ends up becoming yet more clutter in a movie that’s already overstuffed with characters, most of whom wrapped up their arcs several movies ago and have no reason to be there.

Buzz is the prime example. It’s honestly funny how the writers have zero idea of what to do with him and basically write him out of the movie. I mean, his arc is resolved. His whole deal in Toy Story (1995) was that he was delusional and actually thought he was a space ranger. He is no longer delusional, no longer thinks he’s a space ranger, so what are we doing here? Buzz Lightyear is a character past his sell-by date, the equivalent of when you tell a funny story to someone, and instead of laughing they ask “…and then what happened?”

There’s also the issue of what’s not in the movie: a compelling villain.

Sid was great in the first movie, and I have a soft spot for Al McWhiggin. By contrast, Gabby Gabby doesn’t do the business. There’s an idea there (soft-spoken madness), but they don’t push it as far as they need to. The dial’s stuck on 2. They end up giving her a cloying, overly sympathetic backstory (to the point where she basically is forced to become a good guy), leading to the most obnoxious and unearned heel-face turn since Cletus “Gator Molester” Shithat betrayed his best friend Billie-Bob Grunklefuck in the Floribama Swamp-Ass Grand Wrasslin’ Championship of 1993 (classic match, I’m sure you remember it) and becoming a good character. If the first Toy Story had been written this way, we’d get a 20 minute flashback showing how Sid is secretly a nice child who gets yelled at by his dad. Can this studio grow some balls and write a proper villain again? The glory days of Hopper and Syndrome seem far behind us.

Toy Story 4 is not a bad movie. It is a deeply pointless one, however, which may be worse—I love many bad movies, but cannot love a waste of time. I’ve long felt that Pixar is a rat in a Skinner box that pressed a button a few times, received massive amounts of food, and now they’re just senselessly hammering that button forever, regardless of whether food is coming out.

Now they’re making a Toy Story 5. Okay. I have some creative story ideas they could use:

• Woody gets washed out into the Pacific Garbage Patch. Alone and isolated, he goes mad under the hot alien sun, worshipping a god sculpted from plastic drinking straws. At night, he dreams of high-density polyethylene pellets melting and sliding down the stark walls of the sky, like the pale sperm of some celestial progenitor. He starts laughing dementedly, realizing that nature is a powerless fraud, and the world is controlled by the forces of manufacture and industry. In the final scene, he dives suicidally into the ocean, deliberately choking an endangered dolphin with his body while praying to return to the necrotic plastic heart that beats at the planet’s core.
• Woody’s voice-box begins to break. When he pulls the string, the words slur and distort. There’s a sneak in my boot! Someone poisoned the warble-hole! The speech swiftly becomes incomprehensible, melting into a garbled wreckage of sounds, but sometimes, almost-audible messages can be heard, as though something with a thousand tongues is trying to communicate through him. One day, his voice box crackles to life on its own. “Don’t look for it in the garden.” What could this mean? When the toys explore the garden, Hamm finds a single tiny black flower growing beneath a canopy of wisteria and bougainvillea . The toys uproot the flower and dig a hole straight down: two feet under, there is a small, unmarked wooden box with a lock on it. They take the box inside, and Slinky Dog, working alone for several days straight, manages to pick the lock. “What did you see in the box?” Woody asks. “Nothing,” Slinky Dog says, glancing nervously at the ground. “The box was empty.” Immediately, he runs out of the house and out onto the road, where a car smashes him to pieces. The horrified survivors take no more chances with the box. They slam it shut (taking care not to look inside), re-lock it, carry it back to the garden, and bury it again. They promise each other that they’ll forget the incident. But one day, Woody pulls his voice-box string, and hears a distorted recording of Slinky Dog…
• A weird change overcomes the toys. They fall into bestial rages. They are consumed by a hunger that only warm, living flesh can satisfy. Jessie is shown eating a dead bird with her teeth. Mr Potato Head’s hollow shell starts filling up with bloody mouse bones. They start communicating through glottal grunts and roars. Only Rex is unaffected. Researching the problem, he realizes that all of the toys are made of plastic, which is made of petrochemicals, which come from petroleum, which comes from ancient decayed biomass that includes dinosaurs. Essentially, the toys are now possessed by the souls of dead dinosaurs, and Rex is immune because he’s already a dinosaur. He doesn’t know what to do, and lifts up his arms in comical horror as the dinosaur-possessed toys assemble around him—blood dripping from their plastic mouths and hands—and kneel, awaiting his command.
• Bonnie grows to adulthood. Puberty runs her down like an 18-wheeler truck. Confused and impressionable, she makes some friends online, and them some other friends. They introduce her to right and wrong. She cuts her hair, and dyes the remnants in variegated colors. She manufactures an edgy online persona, given to ranty, sweary, pop-feminist dialectic. By age 17, her Twitter pfp shows her with one eyebrow quirkily raised, sipping from a mug with “MALE TEARS” on it. But smugness gives way to guilt. She is a white-presenting person living in the wealthiest nation on Earth, and she feels absolutely horrible about. She was born in sin. Her parents were manspreaders, whitesplainers, and possibly even misgenderers. She seeks to escape who she is. She changes pronouns six times. Her mastectomy is booked for July. Maybe if she destroys the guilty girl, piece by piece, she’ll escape the sense that she’s evil and corrupt. She remains fond of her childhood toys, but realizes that she cannot go on owning Woody—he’s modeled after a Wild West sheriff, and 👏 we! 👏 don’t! 👏 do! 👏 that! 👏 anymore! The final straw comes when she watches the Woody’s Roundup puppet show. Not once does Woody acknowledge that he’s living on Chiricahua Apache land! Horrified, she burns Woody on an open fire, hoping to purge her sins. Woody screams as his face melts. He screams and screams.
• A new toy joins the gang: Murdilator the Deathslayer. He’s pretty cool, particularly his brain-vivisector attachment. But beneath the MADE IN CHINA sticker on his foot there’s a compartment, and inside the compartment, Buzz finds a rolled up scrap of paper. It’s a handwritten Mandarin message. 救命啊！我被困在玩具厂里了！“HELP! I AM TRAPPED IN A TOY FACTORY!” Murdilator consents to have his brain-vivisector attachment damaged on purpose, so that Bonnie’s mom will return him to the story, which will then ship him back to China. The toys sneak into the return-parcel, and one week later, they’re being unpacked at a factory at Shenzhen, Guangdong Province. They want to find the imprisoned man and save him, but they’re in for a shock: all the workers at the factory are that man! They have arrived at a dismal Dickensian sweatshop. Thousands of dead-eyed contract workers sit in rows, performing Q&A inspections of worthless plastic dreck for brutal hours and starvation wages. Even death is not an escape. The factory doors are locked, and anti-suicide nets are strung under every window. An overseer walks up and down the benches like a slave-driver at a galley, and snatches up the damaged Murdilator from the packaging. With vindictive swiftness, he identifies the worker who signed off on this particular toy, and docks him a week’s salary. The man starts weeping. He has a family. The toys are left heartsick by what they’ve done: they haven’t helped the man, they’ve made his lot in life even worse! The rest of the movie is Murdilator the Deathslayer sitting on a therapist’s chair with Hamm, trying to overcome his guilt. Eventually, he has a breakthrough. He leaps into the air and cheers, and we end on a blissful reprise of “You Got A Friend in Me”.
• Bo Peep is sold to a new owner. Unfortunately he’s an anime fan. The camera’s focus tightens around her terrified face, like an ensnaring net. From somewhere out of frame, we hear heavy breathing, and the sound of pants unzipping. The camera goes mercifully black.
• A crossover, where Bob the Tomato and Larry the Cucumber explain Christianity to the gang. Who’s mightier, God or the Boogie-Man? Does the Bible really tell us to forgive our enemies?
• Really, they should probably just not make the movie at all. Enough’s enough.

Only when you drink from the river of silence shall you indeed sing.
And when you have reached the mountain top, then you shall begin to climb.
And when the earth shall claim your limbs, then shall you truly dance.

— Kahlil Gibran

Ringing Bell (released in Japan asチリンの鈴, or Chirin no Suzu) is an anime film from 1978. As we would expect from the studio that created Hello Kitty, it’s like falling down a pit with walls made of severed fingers and writhing snakes. It’s dark. I knew its reputation and it still surprised me with its offhand brutality: certain scenes hit like a loaded body bag dropped from twenty feet. It’s unusually thought-provoking. Usually, “adult anime” means Genocyber or MD Geist: tits and gore plus a childish concept (hey, I watch that stuff). Ringing Bell is different: it uses the vocabulary of childhood nostalgia to tell a mature and sophisticated story about existentialism, injustice, transformation and other topics usually left for incel 19th century philosophers.

Chirin is a lamb. He frolicks in a field of butterflies and small animals. His mother warns him to stay away from a nearby mountain, where a wolf lives.

Disney cliches are piling up fast, and we assume the rest of the movie will be “Chirin disobeys his mother, visits the wolf, suboptimal events occur, and Chirin learns a lesson about the importance of obeying your parents (et cetera)”. But the movie doesn’t go down that road. Chirin is well-behaved lamb, who (aside from one early mistake) obeys his mother. It is emphasized that Chirin does everything right and it doesn’t help in the end.

The wolf invades the farm, because that’s a thing it can do. It slaughters the sheep, because that’s a thing it can do. They die without resisting, because that’s a thing they can’t do. Chirin survives the massacre, but only because his mother leaps upon his body and dies in his stead. In one of the movie’s greatest shots, the wolf lunges, and the (hypothetical) camera zooms in on a scar on its eye. The scar seems to elongate through the black fur, like tear ripped in paper, revealing a slash of orange, which soon darkens to red, and then the red fragments into isolated twists of smoke, as though it wasn’t gore but fire. This is great filmmaking. Director Masami Hata found a way to imply flesh tearing and blood spurting, while displaying no on-screen violence whatsoever.

When Chirin recovers, he sees his mother dead, and the wolf gone. He does not understand. Why does he deserve this? He stands at the cusp of the movie’s central insight: it was not unjust. He is a sheep, and this is what being a sheep means. Millions of lambs have stood in his place. He is not special.

When a movie is about animals, it’s usually for a reason. One of three reasons, actually. The first is that the filmmakers had no choice. Maybe they’re adapting a children’s book written by a laudanum-addicted Victorian pederast called Archibald Featherwyckbottom III and that book has animals. Or they have some suit breathing down their neck, saying “We need to sell eleventy billion plushie dolls this quarter, so make the characters cute animals. We need the furries on our side here, so make them fuckable.”

The second is that it distances the setting from the human world, allowing access to the grand and mythic. It is difficult to tell a yearning, primal story about a character that has to pay rent and file TPS reports. Civilization is an anchor slung around your neck: it keeps you stable, but does no favors if you want to fly. A book like Life of Pi or Lord of the Flies has to forcibly extract its character(s) from the human world before the story can begin. An animal tale like Watership Down can simply get on and tell the story.

The third and most important reason is that animals have characterization built-in. Owls are wise. Lions are regal. Sharks are predatory. Dogs are loyal. Cats are devious, solitary, and sour. Foxes are devious, solitary, and cheerful. Eagles are libertarians. Hamsters are alt-right shitpoasters. Goldfish are effete limousine-liberal crypto-Kautskyites whose commitment to The Struggle is frankly more show than substance. We all know these tropes, and when there’s an animal in a movie, we understand its character before it even says or does anything.

With that in mind, what is the identity of a sheep?

Passivity. As a sheep, you are an object. You get herded around by slow but smart apes and fast but less-smart canines. You graze stupidly and endlessly, mulching grass through four successive stomachs before excreting it into pellets so uselessly precise they look like they came from an injection mold. Even your shit looks domesticated. Such is your life, a hollow tube that grass flows through, until the day the shepherd separates you from the flock, a high-velocity slug engraves death into your skull and the world spins on without you. Nobody asks your permission. Things are done to you, and done to you, and then finally you are done.

(I actually own sheep, and they’re not as domesticated as their rep suggests. They can be very stubborn and aggressive, particularly in breeding season. Males will headbutt you hard enough to leave bruises through thick jackets. I’m sure a nonzero number of people get killed by sheep each year.)

Being a sheep places Chirin in a role of servitude. If he was a man, he would be a helot in 500BC Sparta, a black person in 19th century Louisiana, or a contemporary person who doesn’t find Jacqueline Novak’s stand-up very funny. He is an oppressed minority, living in a cruel and gray world that hates him, and his life is a living hell. He makes an audacious decision: I will not be a sheep any longer. But does that even make sense? A sheep is defined by not having a choice. You can’t choose not to be a sheep, any more than a tongueless man can talk or a legless man walk. (Conspiracists deride normies as “sheeple”…but if we’re truly sheep, we have no choice but to be fooled by the conspiracy. It’s pointless to even complain about. )

So if you could decide to not be a sheep…wouldn’t that mean you never were a sheep to begin with? And thus your mother’s death was a cosmic injustice, and thus his desire to become a wolf is also unjustified? It seems paradoxical. There is comfort in believing the world is neutral of morality, and a different sort of comfort in believing in right or wrong, but you have to pick a lane. However paradoxical the desire, Chirin decides to stop being a sheep.

He tracks the wolf down, and demands that the wolf fight him. The wolf ignores him: denying him even the respect of an enemy. But then Chirin starts demanding that the wolf teach him wolfish ways. The wolf responds with mockery, yet curiously, he does not kill Chirin. It might be that he’s already begun testing Chirin (if you’re truly a wolf, you’ll not be deterred by “you can’t do it”)

Chirin stays by the wolf’s side, and learns the way of the fang and claw. They go on adventures together. The movie drags a bit here, falling into master-and-apprentice martial arts cliches. There’s a cheesy reprise of the theme song, with goofy rock guitar licks dubbed over the top. Ringing Bell can be a somewhat “broad” movie at times. Particularly the music, which lyrically emphasises things we can already see on screen in a very heavyhanded and obvious way.

But then we arrive at the final act, where a movie that has been fairly fascinating becomes utterly engrossing. Chirin is given a choice by the wolf. It’s a brutal all-or-nothing decision, not just for his life, but for his soul. His reaction and what happens next is psychologically complex and fascinating.

Otherwise, it’s just a fairly well-made short film from 1978. The production studio, Sanrio, modeled itself after Disney. Except where Disney was an animation studio that branched out into merchandizing, Sanrio was a merchandizing company that branched out into animation. “Sanrio” is apparently meant to be a portmanteau of “San” (as in “San Francisco”) and “Rio” (as in “Rio Grande”), thus making the company’s name “Saint River”. Truly, they are the Sleve McDichael of the corporate world. Their artistic ouevre could be described as “diet Madhouse”, telling surprisingly deep and complicated (and weird) stories within the conventions of 70s anime. I assumed director Masami Hata later worked at Madhouse, but that seems to not be the case. He did later work on Little Nemo: Adventures in Slumberland. But every animator in history worked on that movie.

In many ways, Ringing Bell is a product of its time. The art style is very “70s anime”. Characters are designed with circles, where modern anime prefers triangles. There is a tragic dearth of sparkling magical schoolgirls and panty shots and oppai moments. A modern viewer would regard this as a relic of another age.

It is heavily influenced by Disney films—and both subverts those influences and plays them straight. Bambi is an obvious influence—it almost watches like a parody of that movie. The changing of the seasons, the death of a parent, the design of the adult Chirin. The marketing on the poster tries to play up this angle still further, prominently featuring furry critters and an owl who I don’t think gets one line of dialog in the actual movie.

But there’s also a Japanese character to the film which is deeply felt. The arrival of the wolf is an apocalypse, like a bomb falling on the sheep. We see it tearing them apart via silhouettes on the wall, which made me think of the permanent shadows of Hiroshima. It’s based on an anti-war manga. I was reminded of writer Kenzaburo Oe’s realization that the Showa emperor was in fact a mortal man. What better metaphor for a mother dying than that?

The truth is a gift, even when it hurts to hold. Chirin is granted a glimpse of the true reality of the world, one that most folks never get until they’re too old to change. He wishes he could return to the safety of his old life, but there never was any safety. He just had his eyes closed, and now they’re wide open. He lives in a world without justice and fairness. It has sheep and it has wolves. And it has Chirin, who is a sheep and a wolf.