Movies about animals are legally required to have a pun in the title, and An American Tail walked so that Dog With A Blog and Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked could run.
It’s one of the grim, high-concept films Don Bluth made after he left Disney. Secret of NIMH, An American Tail, and The Land Before Time are famed for their craftsmanship, but they’re tough sledding, darker than any Disney film except for The Black Cauldron. A lot of people remember these films as classics. A lot of them have forgotten that these films made them very scared or sad.
The setting is 19th century Russia. Fievel Mousekewitz’s family lives in a mousehole under a shtel, but then Cossacks burn down the shtel, while a gang of cats destroy their home. Tail is obviously an antisemitism parable, with mice representing (Jews and cats goyim). It’s setting is generations earlier than Maus, but it was still close enough for Art Spiegelman to ominously rumble about a lawsuit.
The opening scene is hilarious, with mice being chased around by fez wearing, black-mustached cats roughly the size of Shetland ponies. Their growls have been pitch-shifted down to half-terrifying, half-comical gurgles. If cats breathed radioactive fire, this would be a kaiju film.
The displaced Mousekewitzes board a steamer bound for America, where (they have been told) there are no cats. Fievel unwisely ascends to the fore-deck during a storm, is blown overboard, and eventually washes ashore on New York in a bottle. The rest of the film involves him looking for his family, along with some other complications.
Tail’s plotting is less surefooted than NIMH’s or Time’s. After the main drama is established (“Fievel has lost his family”), a huge number of supporting characters are dumped into the story – a friendly pigeon, a streetwise Italian mouse, a rabble-rousing agitator, a rich lady mouse, a back-slapping politician type, a helpful vegetarian cat, and more – turning the film into a top-heavy mass of character right when it needs to be racing into the third act.
I remember being confused when I first saw it. I couldn’t follow the story: it just became a series of events. Although the final showdown is impressive and memorable, the villain was so forgettable that I did exactly that.
And although the animation has the Bluth soul, it looks visually dull next to his other films. Secret of NIMH sparkled and twinkled, as if the cel sheets were studded with jewels. The Land Before Time was imbued with the hot, ferocious glow of the old world. Tail is just plain colorless. Dark seas. Sewers. City streets blanketed in smog. Average out all the pixels in the film and you’d get a muddy green-gray.
But it’s heartfelt, for all that. And again, the final showdown is both exciting and clever in how it pays off IOUs incurred at the start of the movie.
Roger Ebert criticized the film for being about anti-Semitism while not explaining this in a way that children can understanding.
One of the central curiosities of “An American Tail” is that it tells a specifically Jewish experience but does not attempt to inform its young viewers that the characters are Jewish or that the house burning was anti-Semitic. I suppose that would be a downer for the little tykes in the theater, but what do they think while watching the present version? That houses are likely to be burned down at random?
I understand his point, but children can hear music without understanding the words. Bigotry’s not a complicated concept, and you don’t have to be up to speed on the cultural milieau of 1880s Russia to have encountered smaller versions of it, like playground bullies who pick on you because you look different or talk weird.
We’re not meant to sense any difference between the cossacks and cats: they attack at the same time, like they’re part of the same collective evil. Additionally, the Mousekewitzes are clearly different from the others in a way that transcends species. One of Fievel’s problems in America is that everyone think his name sounds silly, so he changes it to a more goyische Phil. This is matched by a shot of a human Jew likewise changing his name. It’s pretty well done and I had no problems understanding it.
In short, a messy but compelling picture. It’s not true that Don Bluth could do no wrong, but he was doing very little of it the 80s.
Disney’s The Great Mouse Detective came out the same year, with nearly the same concept (a society of mice running parallel to ours). An American Tail is a worthy example of an animated twin film, along with Aladdin and The Princess and the Cobbler in 1992-3, Antz and A Bug’s Life in 1998, The Road to El Dorado and The Emperor’s New Groove in 2000, Treasure Planet and Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas in 2002/3, etc. How to explain this? Animated films typically take years to make, which prohibits quick imitations and knockoffs.
(I got Mandela effect’d. I distinctly remember that Fievel sees whales when on the ship. On the rewatch I conducted for this review: nope, no whales. His father describes “fish as big as this boat”, and we hear mournful whalesong, and a later Don Bluth film – The Pebble and the Penguin – features whales, so maybe my brain made mistaken connections. Another example of how movies in memories are not real movies.)
Mick Norman (the pen name of Laurence James) wrote four Angels from Hell novels in the 1970s, and this 1994 collection from Creation rescues them from out-of-printness.
The rescue effort was worth it: they’re fast, brutal, addictive novels about biker gangs, set in a dystopian 1990s Britain. Petrocarbons are burned, laws are broken, women are deflowered. The novels are short and were clearly quickly written (why didn’t Creation fix the copy errors?), but they’re loaded with energy, heart, and humor, and the only parts that have dated are the parts that don’t matter. There are read-in-one-go books; this is practically a read-in-one-go series.
Disillusioned vet Gerald Vinson becomes a patched-in member of the Last Heroes chapter of the Hells Angels, where his intelligence, training, and leadership abilities soon see him in command of the charter. But when you ride a tiger you can’t ever get off, and Gerry is enmeshed in Forever Wars against rival chapters, switchblade-wielding football hooligans, crooked journalists, and a fascistic British government that seeks to destroy the Angels (given the hundreds of homicides the Angels are involved in over the course of the series, one sees their point).
The main character, of course, is almost the bikes themselves. They serve the same function as horses do in Westerns – both a method of transportation (you can go almost anywhere on a bike, and very quickly) and symbol of masculinity. One way to know shit’s about to go down in the books is that a biker has his “hog” sabotaged or destroyed.
The political incorrectness is high. Mick Norman doesn’t seem to like homosexuals: his villains are flamboyantly gay far more frequently than chance would predict. I also don’t believe there’s one female character who isn’t killed, raped, threatened with rape, beaten to a pulp, or some combination of the previous – aside from the old lady at the start of Guardian Angels, who merely has a severed head flung through her car’s front windshield. There’s one British-African character that I can recall. He provides help to Gerry, and he and his family get burned to death by Gerry’s enemies for their trouble.
If I had a complaint, the books get smaller in scope as they progress, instead of bigger. The first one (Angels from Hell) is Gerry vs the government. The second (Angel Challenge) is Gerry vs a rival chapter. The third (Guardian Angels) is Gerry vs a couple of hoodlums. The fourth (Angels on my Mind) is Gerry vs a single psychotic cop, who (in a scenario reminiscent of Stephen King’s Misery, which it precedes by fifteen years) has illegally detained him in a basement, where his even more batshit psychologist wife seeks to “study” him.
They’re fine tales, but the first has an exhilarating sense of “us against the world” that is never quite recaptured, replaced instead by weary Ballardian nihilism.
The bikers = cowboys metaphor I posited above breaks down quickly. Cowboys in the paperback Westerns always had pro-social goals – saving towns from bandits and cattle rustlers is a noble deed. But none of Gerry’s men and women are good people. Their world has no use for good people. Nice guys don’t just finish last, they finish in body bags. But they also don’t have any long-term goals; everyone seems to be staring into the same black pit. Their battles and rides lead to more battles and rides. What’s the point? But then, what’s the point of a biker gang in real life? To have brothers? A brother that’s going to squeal on you at the first scent of a plea bargain?
How do you write a novel about a bad person and persuade the reader to care? Typically, by making the other characters even worse – gangster films traditionally pit “good” criminals (honorable men, bound by loyalty and brotherhood) against “bad” criminals (unprincipled lunatics). It’s sort of like making your worst-smelling clothes smell good by rubbing your nose in shit. Norman’s approach is different: he makes the “straights” equally bad, just in a different way. One of the books ends with an open-ended question: who is to blame for the Angels? They didn’t fall out of the sky. Our society made them. Our society will make more of them.
The best book is Angel’s Challenge, which features an absurd premise that at least gives the story some anchoring: two biker gangs agree to a scavenger hunt across London, with the losers being forced to disband and burn their colors. But in the third book, an existential loneliness sets in. The fascistic government is out of power. There’s nothing left to do, and Gerry’s bikers end up working as roadies for rock bands (echoes of the legendary Altamont Free Concert in 1969, where a Hells Angels security detail ended up fracturing skulls and stabbing people). They are empty men inside. It’s a miracle that they don’t shatter like eggshells when they crash.
They have their freedom, at least. Freedom to do what?
A 1993 platform game programmed for DOS by Apogee’s Jim Norwood, who went on to develop Shadow Warriors, Heroes of Might and Magic V, and that cherished classic Third Example Goes Here. You control a porn-mustachio’d spec force operative named (I fear) Snake Logan, who has crash-landed in a mutant-infested city and must etc.
Platform games belong to either the “jump around and collect stars” Mario school or the “shoot guns and blow shit up” Contra school. Bio Menace is unapologetically the latter: it ranks as among the most violent Apogee titles, with monsters dying in explosions of pixelated blood and body parts. This clashes with their visual design, which is “Teletubby crossbred with Barney the Dinosaur”.
Bio Menace looks a lot older than it is. Slated for a 1991 release, it was delayed for two years due to engine modifications, and in 1993 it looked as dated as glam metal. The graphics are 16-color EGA, and the backgrounds don’t parallax-scroll. At least it ran smoothly. I recall being able to play it on Windows XP, although I don’t think it works on any 64-bit operating system.
The game was a competent blend of puzzle-solving (a laser forcefield blocks the way! Can you find the key to disable it?) and hallways filled with monsters to gun down. It had a nice sense of place – the first level in particular is a realistic urban environment littered with bodies and wrecked cars.
Bio Menace tries to create a believable world. Completing levels is just shorthand for “rescuing civilians”. Reaching high places means finding a ladder or riding an elevator, instead of jumping 30 feet. Health powerups and keys are usually found in places that make logical sense, like lockers and cabinets.
This part of Bio Menace hasn’t aged. In fact, it anticipates the future of gaming. The arcades were going away, and the industry was pupating into the next stage of its life: immersive experiences dependent on technology and sensory realism. Bio Menace, with its stupid monsters and EGA pixels, is far from immersive. But playing that first level, with its eerie post-apocalyptic vibe, you can see that the winds are starting to change. For better or worse, games would soon start trying to be movies.
There’s even an effort made at narrative. When you rescue a civilian, Snake Logan has a little tete-a-tete with them, with dialog as amazing as you’d expect (“I’m gonna dust that little dweeb! He can’t do this and escape!”)…hey, at least it’s only the second worst-written videogame about a spec forces operative called Snake, am I right ba-dum tisshhh hurr hurr.
It exemplifies Apogee’s approach: funnel out cheap (and cheaply made) games under a “shareware” business model. You got to play the first 30% of the game for free, and since that 30% typically contained 80% of the game’s actual worthwhile content, this was a pretty good deal. But it did lend itself to disposable experiences, and games that were copy-pastes of some other popular title.
Bio Menace is a minor game, without the arthouse pretensions of Eric Chahi’s Out of this World or the rotoscoped professionalism of Jordan Mechner’s Prince of Persia. It probably made some money, and even if it didn’t, it surely wasn’t a big red stain on Apogee’s balance sheets. Bio Menace is like throwing ten cents down on a roulette spin. Is it worth playing now? No, unless you’re a fan of “ARE YOU A BAD ENOUGH DUDE TO RESCUE THE PRESIDENT?”-style shlock.
