02.06
“Classic Review?” “Rewind Review?” Well, whatever title we decide on, just know that every now and then, we’ll be dusting off the ol’ delorean to go back in time and review some of the animated works from back in the day that stood out to us. So without further ado…
Instead of having bedtime stories told to me when I was younger, I was raised watching videos before going to bed. My video collection, while not as gigantic as my current DVD collection, was large enough to make up for at least a month’s worth of one hour viewing before bedtime. Looking back, the tapes were your basic lineup of what you would expect from your normal prepubescent kid, mainly being composed of Disney movies from as old school as the original “Fantasia” to the first “Toy Story.” Out of all those movies, though, only one of them stands out to me today:
Yep, that’s right. “Fievel Goes West.” I remember nights just staring at the TV thinking how awesome it would be to be Fievel with his pop pistols and his reversible hat and having to escape from clothed felines and a creepy as all heck spider with a gold tooth and cigar. The reversible hat, especially. Seriously, how awesome would it be to be able to switch from a normal hat to a cowboy hat just like that?
To this day, I’ve yet to see the first “American Tail” movie or any of the straight to home video releases following the sequel and I don’t really feel the need to. Unlike other movies and their sequels, I never saw “Fievel Goes West” as part of a series of movies and always thought it stood well as a stand-alone.
Having been made during the “Tiny Toons” era of his career, it makes complete sense for producer Steven Spielberg to have made this sequel when he did. “Fievel Goes West” was incredibly similar to “Tiny Toons” in that while the overall plot may not be something to write home about, every musical piece in the movie was memorable.
The plot’s basic enough… er, at least as basic as a children’s movie made in the early nineties could be. Fievel Mousekewitz and the rest of his family are immigrant mice who have moved to New York in an attempt to escape the persecution of their “people” from the cats in the area. Realizing that life in the states is just as difficult as life back home, the family decides to move with the rest of the mice to the West where stories tell of mice and cats living together in peace. Or at least that’s the story given by the red top-hatted and monocled Cat R. Waul. Being separated from his parents and the rest of the mice on the trek West and finding out Waul’s evil plan of initially befriending the mice only to eat them later, Fievel must go West by himself and warn his fellow mice before it’s too late.
Wow, typing that up really put in perspective what I was talking about.
Okay, so the plot may not be Emmy winning gold, but that was never what defined the movie for me. What I really enjoyed about the movie, both then and now, was the music. In a time when Disney movies were absolutely pwning their competition, Fievel’s music is able to hold its own. Okay, sure, it was completely destroyed by “Beauty and the Beast” which was released in theaters the same day, in the box office, but that doesn’t mean its music doesn’t hold up just as well. Really.
Having recently watched the movie again after so many years was like listening to a song you haven’t heard in a while. Or I guess in this case, a couple songs you haven’t heard in a while. From “Dreams to Dream” to “The Girl You Left Behind” to everything in between, Fievel really delivers when it comes to being a musical. I mean, just listen to this:
So while it may not have the most ingenious of plots, “An American Tale: Fievel Goes West” really stands out in being one of the few animated movies at the time to even dare stand up to the Leviathan that was Disney movies during their golden age and succeed… even if it took a couple years to do so to build up the nostalgia factor.
~~~
… And on a completely random side note, what’s the deal with the movie’s aspect ratio? Checking both amazon and amazon.ca, the only version of the movie I’ve been able to find on DVD is only out in fullscreen. But based on the above video as well as some screencaps on the movie’s Wiki page, it looks like the movie was done in widescreen. Just to make sure, I double checked the Wiki screencaps with some I took from my copy of the movie:
So what’s the difference and why should you care? Well in short, the film was originally animated to fit the widescreen format and in some cases makes full use of that space. Having the image cut to fullscreen size means cutting off bits of the sides and maybe even contorting the image itself a bit, like what I figured had to be done with the first comparison image above. In short, watching fullscreen footage from something that was originally made in widescreen means messing with the original footage to some degree.
I’d rant on, but I’m straying further from the point. Just check out Wiki’s page on aspect ratio if you understood and are interested in anything I brought up just now. And (in an attempt to bring everything together) make an attempt to pick up “Fievel Goes West” in its widescreen version if you can, though that may be easier said than done considering I’ve yet to even find a listing for it in that format.
Weird.
Originally posted on Thursday, March 26, 2009.