A Look Over the Brink of Oblivion
Let’s face it, life, no matter how blessed, is hard. It’s a seemingly endless series of challenges punctuated by a series of all too few whimsically wonderful flashes. Is it any wonder, then, that humanity has sought so many ways of escaping the reality of day-to-day living?
My own personal, favorite form of escape has always been to lose myself in storytelling. I love telling stories and hearing and seeing other tales well told. With such a focus on the works of the Walt Disney Company, my obvious preference would appear to be fantasy. However, my devotion to Disney has left me with a passion and unyielding respect for great storytelling regardless of genre.
Last year, perhaps no dramatic story was better told through cinema than director Julian Schnabel’s interpretation of Jean-Dominique Bauby’s remarkable journey of self-discovery The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.
At the age of 42, the free living and loving Bauby, writer and managing editor of the French edition of Elle, was stricken with a massive cerebral hemorrhage, which resulted in a rare case of what’s known as “locked in syndrome.”
While Bauby’s mind was fully conscious and aware, he was virtually a prisoner of his own body, nearly totally paralyzed, unable to move anything except his left eye and eyelid.
Remarkably, Bauby was able to use that eye to dictate a memoir to his dedicated speech therapist—one letter at time. Director Julian Schnabel, screenwriter Ronald Harwood, and cinematographer Janusz Kaminski have translated Bauby’s work and extraordinary inner life into a visually astonishing and emotionally wrenching saga in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. Bauby’s interior chronicle—his memories, fantasies, pain, and spiritual triumph—are brilliantly and beautifully brought to life in this truly remarkable film.
Anne Cosigny is Claude, Jean-Dominique Bauby's transcriber, showing Bauby (Mathieu Amalric) his finished work in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.
Image copyright© Walt Disney Home Entertainment. All rights reserved.
While an American production, the dialogue of this quintessentially French story is entirely in French with English subtitles. Do not let this deter you from experiencing this wonderful film, with exceptional performances by Mathieu Almaric (as Bauby), Emmanuelle Seigner (Celine, mother of Bauby’s children), Marie-Josée Croze (as Bauby’s speech therapist, Henriette), Anne Cosigny (as Claude, who translates Bauby’s blinks and transcribes them into his remarkable memoir), and Max Von Sydow (as Bauby’s 92-year-old father).
Bonus features include the featurettes, Submerged: A look insideThe Diving Bell and the Butterfly, and A Cinematic Vision and an interview by PBS talk show host Charlie Rose with Director Julian Schnabel. Additionally there is a commentary track with Julian Schnabel.
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
Film: A+
Bonus Features: B
Buy or Rent: An excellent buy; cinephiles may want to wait for a deluxe edition release.
Suggested retail price: DVD-US $29.99
Not available in Blu-ray Disc.
Feature run time: 112 Minutes
Rated: “PG” (Sexual Content, Language, Nudity)
Aspect ratio: Widescreen (1.85:1)
Sound: DVD- 5.1 Dolby Digital Surround Sound
Languages: English, French, Spanish, and English SDH
Subtitles: English and Spanish
Miramax Films, Walt Disney Home Entertainment, and Touchstone Home Entertainment are distributed by Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainment, Inc.
And Now for Something Completely Different
One of the single largest events in the history of Walt Disney Productions, the forerunner of today’s Walt Disney Company, was the cartoonist strike of 1941. Tempers flared, relationships crumbled, and the course of animation as a cinematic art form was forever changed.
Things got so tense around the Disney Studio that, depending on which version of studio history you subscribe to, Roy Disney was desperate to get his increasingly angry and depressed brother as far away from his own shop as he could.
While the strike ground on, the senior Disney had been working with the U.S. government’s Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs, the brainchild of oil heir Nelson Rockefeller. So, when the opportunity to have the U.S. government pick up the tab for Walt, his wife Lillian, and a group of the studio’s remaining animators to make a goodwill tour of South America, Roy jumped at it and all but shoved his brother out the door and on to the plane.
The by-product of that trip was a series of live action and animated short films joined together under the title Saludos Amigos, which was followed the next year by another group of shorts, The Three Caballeros, loosely tied together by the idea of Donald Duck receiving a series of lively birthday gifts from his Latin American pals, the brassy and sassy Jose or Joe Carioca and bandolier clad bantam rooster Panchito.
Both films are now available on DVD from Walt Disney Home Entertainment under the title The Classic Caballeros Collection: Saludos Amigos and The Three Caballeros.
Largely dismissed for many years, because of the government funding involved, as little more than WWII-era propaganda Saludos and Caballeros are nevertheless noteworthy, for both their place in Disney history as well as their contributions to moving the art of animation forward.
The Three Caballeros is especially remarkable for Ub Iwerks—Disney’s resident technical genius—use of Optical Printer #2, which made it possible to seamlessly blend animation and live action into a single piece of film. In the film, Donald, Joe, and Panchito so realistically interact with the film’s live action characters—they even cast transparent shadows over live action scenes—that it would be another five decades before similar effects could be equally well rendered by computer technology.
So authentic were Donald’s—by today’s standards—chauvinistic antics that Caballeros managed to raise the moral hackles of no less a venerated publication than The New Yorker, which found the two-foot tall duck’s slapstick pursuit of beautiful women in questionable taste at best:
It might even be said that a sequence involving the duck, the young lady, and a long alley of animated cactus plants would probably be considered suggestive in a less innocent medium.
This two-film, single-disc release is not available as a Blu-ray Disc release, and it has not received the full computer-enhanced restoration that the Platinum series classic Disney animated features get. They are excellent prints that provide a look back into the days of cell animation, complete with the problem of dust specs invading various shots.
Goofy is also featured on The Classic Caballeros Collection.
The special features include the featurette South of the Border with Disney, the best parts of which are excerpted in Saludos Amigos. The film itself comes from an old 16mm print and is of relatively poor quality. There is also a brief excerpt of a Canadian Television interview with Walt Disney and two additional animated short films.
The Classic Caballeros Collection: Saludos Amigos and The Three Caballeros
Film: Saludos AmigosB, The Three Caballeros A-
Bonus Features: C-
Buy or Rent: A good buy, especially for animation and Disney history buffs.
Suggested retail price: DVD-US $19.99, Canada $24.99
Not available in Blu-ray Disc.
Feature run time: 113 Minutes combined
Rated: “G” for The Three Caballeros, Not Rated for Saludos Amigos (Bonus material not rated.)
Aspect ratio: Widescreen (1.33:1)
Sound: DVD- 5.1 Dolby Digital Surround Sound
Languages: English, French, and Spanish
The Long Awaited Return
This Friday, Walt Disney Pictures will release the highly anticipated second installment of its filmed version of C. S. Lewis’ classic series of children’s books The Chronicles of Narnia Prince Caspian. For those of you who just can’t wait for the “making of” featurettes that will undoubtedly accompany the DVD release of this film, there’s The Official Illustrated Movie Companion to The Chronicles of Narnia, Prince Caspian by Ernie Malik.
As the visual companion to the making of the second film in C.S. Lewis's beloved Narnia series, the book is rich with lavish photos and behind-the-scenes stories that give you a front-row seat, from a publicist’s point of view, for how the magical tale of the Pevensie children’s return to Narnia was brought to the screen.
Malik has meticulously documented virtually ever facet of the filmmaking process, from how the screenplay adaptors and storyboard artists brought C.S. Lewis's story to graphic life, to how director Andrew Adamson's screenplay differs from Lewis' original story, and even to the debate over the preferred sequence for reading and adapting the seven Narnia books.
Additionally, there are profiles of the new cast, including Ben Barnes who plays Prince Caspian, along with chapters that provide details of the mind-boggling special effects, costumes, intricate weaponry, and incredible makeup artistry that lift the story and Lewis’ characters off the page and on to the screen.
On the set of The Chronicles of Narnia Prince Caspian with its young stars.
Author Ernie Malik was the unit publicist for both Narnia films and has worked in motion picture marketing for over two decades.
The Official Illustrated Movie Companion to The Chronicles of Narnia, Prince Caspian, B
