Hulu scores a very special hit with IN & OF ITSELF

Just don't call it a "magic special"

It’s Tuesday, January 26, and here’s where we are…

Can Netflix establish itself as a genuine animation brand?

So far, it has not happened. Netflix, the larger brand, is so big and so voracious that it has a hard time establishing a strong identity in any one particular area. They have bought and produced some worthwhile animation so far. Klaus is solid, and I thought The Willoughbys was an oddball delight as well. They certainly seem like they’re committed to spending money on a wide range of animated projects from recognized names, including a new film from Henry Selick, Guillermo Del Toro’s Pinocchio with Mark Gustafson co-directing, and a recent release by Glen Keane, but they can’t just spend their way into a recognizable brand.

image courtesy of Netflix

They just announced that they’re going to be releasing The Mitchells vs The Machines, which they picked up from Sony, another animation division desperately searching for an identity. I’m certainly curious about this animated comedy. Anything from Phil Lord and Chris Miller is automatically interesting to me. But part of the problem with so many of these companies is that they are all making films that feel interchangeable, all of them chasing the same narrow demographic, the same sliver of the audience, because all of them play the same game regarding animation. It’s all for kids, and that’s all there is to it.

One of the ways Netflix is starting to distinguish itself is by dabbling in adult animation, and I’ve been saying for 30 years now that any company that fully and wholeheartedly supports animation that is aimed at adults is going to ultimately win by creating a whole new market in the United States. You can’t beat Disney and Pixar at being Disney and Pixar. Period. You’re never going to take the market away from them. Not now. There was a point, certainly, where Disney animation was vulnerable, and not just during the nadir of the mid-‘80s when they released The Black Cauldron. I would argue that there have been several points that the company seemed to be rudderless. Home on the Range is no more beloved or remembered than The Black Cauldron. It’s just less notable as a disaster.

These days, Disney is all about careful, cautious brand management, and there is no brand more important to them than the animation. Not Marvel. Not Star Wars. Nothing. Animation is what built the company and animation remains the cornerstone of their legacy. You look at the trailer for their latest, and it looks carefully calibrated to be an international hit with the broadest possible demographic appeal…

… and I get it. That’s the bread and butter for the company. Pixar may stand separate in terms of creative leadership, but Pixar’s glory is Disney’s glory, and between WDFA and Pixar, there is no studio that has had bigger cultural hits more consistently over a longer period of time in animation. There’s nothing that’s even close. Even my beloved Studio Ghibli is more of a personal expression than an ongoing franchise concern. Disney knows that the thing that makes them special, different than any other company in Hollywood, is their ownership of that family space. Dreamworks probably made the best overall run at denting that market share, but when you go in fighting over the same scrap of meat, there’s always going to be someone who ends up hungry.

Netflix has dabbled with animation for adults. Love Death + Robots was a very cool anthology of science-fiction and fantasy stories and there’s a second season on the way at some point. Tim Miller’s committed to adult animation and he’s working on another anthology show right now as well, but obviously, he can’t do it alone. I Lost My Body was a smart and surprisingly emotional movie that didn’t play by any of the conventional rules of what an animated film is “supposed to be,” but that got overlooked largely because it wasn’t in English. When you look at the Netflix animation site, they are definitely pushing the idea that they are a home for creators, touting their deals with people like Jorge Gutierrez, Craig McCracken, Megan Dong, Chris Williams, and Shion Takeuchi. Right now, though, they’re still largely defined by pick-ups, and it’s going to be interesting to see how some of the films they’re fully producing end up playing. I’m dying to see Wendell and Wild, the new Henry Selick film that was written by Jordan Peele and Keegan-Michael Key, which they’re also starring in, but I would imagine they’re still aiming at a crossover family audience. I’m equally interested in Guillermo Del Toro’s Pinocchio, and I presume he’ll make something that doesn’t look like the conventional take on things, but there’s no way Netflix won’t try to sell that one to families as well.

image courtesy of Netflix

The Midnight Gospel might be my favorite attempt from the network so far to expand the definition of what an animated show can be, and I would encourage them to push even further. Horror is a genre that has been sadly unexplored in animation, but it seems like there are so many horror stories that would benefit from being made this way, whether we’re talking about something like Lovecraft (maybe after he’s done with Pinocchio, Netflix can get Guillermo to finally make his wonderful In The Mountains of Madness) or the kind of crazy body horror that Cronenberg and Carpenter have done in live-action pushed to extremes we’ve never imagined. Science-fiction and the scale of some of the classics of the genre would also seem like a natural fit for animation, and there’s a part of me that wonders what would have happened to American animation if MGM had decided to let Bob Clampett make the John Carter of Mars animated films that he proposed in 1936. MGM was making good money with the Tarzan series in live-action and Clampett was a rising star at Warner Bros as an animator, but he got the itch to turn the other great series by Tarzan creator into an animated project, seeing that as the perfect way to bring all of the most outrageous elements to life. He worked directly with Burrough’s son to create a short test that the studio was initially very excited about:

MGM blamed international markets for their reluctance to move forward, and the studio leaned into funny talking animals like everyone else in animation at the time. Warner kept both Clampett and Tex Avery, who most likely would have left with him, and leaned into the short film format as well, and while I adore the output of Termite Terrace over the years, it still feels to me like we missed an opportunity at something else, something richer. And while I’m glad to see the latest Miller/Lord animated comedy land somewhere, I don’t think it gets us any closer to a rethinking of the animation market in America or to Netflix Animation truly staking out a space of their own.

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CHONK VS MONK

That Godzilla vs Kong trailer is a big bowl of ice cream and I couldn’t be happier about it.

I remember moderating a panel at Comic-Con years ago about indie horror, and by “indie,” I mean “cost $35 and a plate of sandwiches.” One of the guys on that panel was Adam Wingard, who was there to talk about his film Pop Skull, the story of a kid who is having disturbing visions because of his cough syrup habit. Seeing Wingard direct something like Godzilla vs Kong is flat-out amazing, and based on the reaction of my fifteen-year-old son, it looks like he knows exactly what this audience wants.

It’s pretty rare that you have a “vs” movie like this where the two opponents remain opponents for the entire film, and it’s funny how quickly people took this trailer apart to figure out the nature of the “real” threat that Godzilla and Kong will eventually team up to tackle. Both Mike Dougherty and Adam Wingard are real-deal old-school giant monster movie fans, and it shows. Their movies are filled with things they’ve clearly wanted to see their entire lives, and it’s fascinating to see these characters brought to life in a way that goes so far beyond what Toho could do with them originally. I’m not saying it’s better that they’re rendered digitally, but it certainly creates opportunities you can never have when you’re making a classic “man in suit” movie.

When this is released at the end of March, I suspect this will be the first moment that the loss of the theatrical experience really hits me hard. I’ve managed to do well with it since March, but the idea that I won’t see this one for the first time sitting in an IMAX theater, surrounded by my sons and my girlfriend, is depressing. This is one of those experiences that I feel was genuinely stolen from us by this rotten, endless pandemic, and it’s a bitter pill to swallow as I watch California continue to make mistakes that are going to cost us another six months of no theaters at the bare minimum.

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EMPATHETIC MAGIC

Have you seen Derek DelGaudio’s In and Of Itself on Hulu yet?

If not, you should stop reading immediately and just go check it out. It is a filmed version of a live magic show that ran for over 500 performances on Broadway. There are two moments in the show that I find completely baffling in the best possible way, and it is an uncommonly emotional experience. It’s not like any other magic show I’ve seen, and in standing apart from what is typical, it asks some questions about the purpose of a show like this.

image courtesy of Hulu

I understand the immediate visceral charge of seeing live magic, and I’ve certainly enjoyed plenty of that over the years. It’s a very particular art form, and often, there’s a rigidity to the way things are staged and performed. It’s rarely the bits between the magic that keep me interested, but DelGaudio’s show, directed for the stage and screen by the legendary Frank Oz, is intensely personal, and the magic almost seems incidental to the overall impact of the piece.

Magic is about tricking the audience, and there’s a two-way agreement there. The audience agrees to get tricked, and the magician agrees to let the audience try to figure out how they’re being tricked. Live magic is different from filmed magic because you can’t play it back. You can’t analyze it the same way. When you’re standing face-to-face with someone, that moment is transitive and that’s part of the power. By the time you realize what’s being done, it’s happened. Oz doesn’t give up any of DelGaudio’s secrets here, even when he gets in close and shoots in close-up. If anything, the way Oz shoots one of the sections of the show involving DelGaudio’s mastery of close-up card work is more astonishing than if he tried to obscure things. DelGaudio can shuffle in ways that are no doubt illegal anywhere money’s on the line, and he pulls off one particular deal that is jaw-on-the-floor amazing, but he almost throws all of this away in the middle of the show, using it as part of a larger conversation rather than building his act around it.

Overall, what I found so striking about the experience is how fundamentally different DelGaudio’s onstage persona is from the typical magician. Because the magician is tricking you, there’s an implication that he’s smarter than you, and when I talk to people who really don’t like magic, it’s because it strikes them as smug or because they feel like they’re being duped in some way. There’s also a cheese factor that has been part of televised magic as long as I’ve been alive, and as much as guys like Kriss Angel or David Blaine tried to push back against the conventions, it always seemed to me like they were just playing into them, underlining them.

DelGaudio tells a story midway through this special that is ostensibly about his mother, but which ultimately becomes a story about himself and his own failings. It is a brutally unflattering story. He is not the hero of the story. By the time it’s done, the audience is disarmed because it’s clear that he’s not looking to make himself superior. He’s revealed something human and vulnerable about himself, something painful, and when he asks the audience to make themselves vulnerable in the sequences that follow it, it feels like he’s doing so as an equal. In DelGaudio’s show, empathy appears to be the glue holding all of this magic together, and there are two big set pieces in the show that make this point most strongly.

I won’t break them down completely here, because I do feel strongly that you should go in as cold as possible. I’ll just say that one of them involves letters and the other involves the name cards that each audience member selects when they enter the theater. In one of them, a single audience member is invited up on stage and there’s a participatory moment that is very direct and very personal. Oz shoots a montage of people reacting to this moment, and it is a powerful illustration of just how well-built this “trick” is. I hate that word in this context because DelGaudio calls the shot before he does it, telling the audience explicitly that he’s going to do something. He does it, and then it lands just as hard despite you knowing what he’s doing. It lands because the person on stage with him is having a very real, very powerful experience, no matter what the mechanism that triggers that reaction.

In the other, DelGaudio involves the entire audience, one by one, and it turns into a one-of-a-kind exhibition in which he gives each person there something personal, a moment in which they feel truly seen for who they are. Again… you can call this a trick, but that doesn’t seem like the right word for what he does. Everyone there knows that there must be a method to this amazing thing he does, and so what? It’s not about how. It’s about what it does for each of those people. If you were to ask me what the primary purpose of the Internet is, I would say it originally was communication, but more often now, it feels like it’s a place for people to say “Look at me.” Good, bad, whatever. Just look at me. Observe me. Behold me in all of my me-hood. DelGaudio’s show is about that impulse, and about how hard it can be to define that “me” that we want other people to see. It is not a show that professes to offer you answers to the questions it raises. Just seeing a show that is ostensibly built around a series of illusions, card shuffles, and mentalist tricks that reduces a room full of people to tears 500-plus nights in a row seems like genuine magic, and I am so glad Frank Oz was the one who directed the film. In his hands, this is both a recording of an event and a carefully constructed emotional experience in its own right, and it should be considered one of the great filmed records of a live performance ever.

It is currently available to stream on Hulu.

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Thanks for reading, everyone. It seems like there are a few more of you every day, and tomorrow, I’ll have the latest installment in the new Star Wars column I’m doing here. I’ve got more entries in The Library coming as well, and on February 1st, I’ll have my finalized list of 20 Reasons 2020 Didn’t Totally Suck. All of that is only for subscribers, though, so if you’re not already on board, now’s the time!

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