Disney hit the home video market in a big way this week with two new releases — one recent theatrical film, Mars Needs Moms, and a double-feature of a classic animated tale and it’s direct-to-video sequel, The Fox and the Hound.
Mars Needs Moms was released to great fanfare earlier this year but for some reason, it has become one of the biggest box office failures of the year … surprising for a CGI animated film from Disney Studios (rather than Pixar). The story is fairly simple — a boy and his mom have the usual parent/child issues and after the boy, Milo, says he’d be better off without a mom then later regrets it, then discovers she’s being abducted by aliens. Accidentally drawn into the ship, Milo wakes up on Mars, discovers a Martian culture, finds another human who basically went through the same thing twenty years earlier, and learns that the Martians extract the mothering instinct from the kidnapped moms to program their Nanny-bots in what appears (at first) to be an all-female society. When Milo learns that his mom will also be destroyed in the process, he sets out with his new friend Gribble and a Martian ally to rescue his mom and restore order to Martian society.
I never saw the movie on the big screen, but the Blu-ray version of the film is simply spectacular to behold. The darkness of space is as black as can be, but scenes on Earth and Mars are saturated with color, or starkly white in certain locations. The image is sharp and the CGI motion-capture animation is beautifully realistic (look at the unfinished animated scene in the bonus section and compare those to the finished film). If you have a good home theater system, the DTS 7.1 audio roars to life during the rocket blast-off and features a lot of directional sound effects and a nice separation of dialog that is never overpowered by the score.
The cast includes Seth Green as Milo (with a voice digitally altered to sound like a child), Joan Cusack as his mom (I recognized her voice right away), Dan Fogler as Gribble, Elizabeth Harnois as Ki and Mindy Sterling as the Supervisor. All of the actors actually performed their roles for the motion capture process, and you can watch that along with the film (and listen to audio commentary from Green, Fogler and director Simon Wells) as a bonus. The disk also includes a short behind-the-scenes video of Green clowning around, a piece on developing the Martian language, and several deleted scenes featuring the unfinished animation. The deleted scenes, though, highlight my one major problem with the movie — the writers and director were just to over-enamoured with the character of Gribble. I found him to be extremely annoying for the first two-thirds of the movie, although by the end he did become a tiny bit endearing. For younger audiences, some of the humor will definitely go over their heads as Ki seems to have learned her english from watching 1970s sitcoms featuring hippies! Then Gribble makes a lot of 80s references and the kids this movie is intended for will be just as confused as Milo. The movie, while extremely breath-taking to look at, never grabbed my attention (I still blame Gribble), but the last few minutes really tugged my heartstrings to the point that I was nearly sobbing (what does Disney have against mothers?!?!). It may not be a great film, story-wise, but for the visuals and those last few minutes I’d say it’s worth a watch.
Also available on DVD and Blu-ray is the 30th anniversary edition of The Fox and the Hound and it’s sequel. I’ve never seen either movie, but I popped the disk in to give it a look for quality control purposes, and damn, if they didn’t pull another Bambi right at the beginning of the original movie! Seriously, Disney, why do you hate mothers??? (At least the sequel doesn’t start out as dark as the original.) As far as the technical specs, the original film looks beautiful with a rich color palette and a nice filmlike quality, while the sequel seems much brighter with obvious video generated titles but the animation is still much smoother than one would expect from a direct-to-video sequel. The only bonus on the disk is a look at different animals who are sterotypically thought of as enemies, but have actually become friends. The Fox and the Hound my not be one of the beloved Disney classics, but it’s nice to see them give it some special treatment for its 30th anniversary, and it probably should be considered for an addition to any collector’s library (just be prepared to explain what happened to the fox’s mom within the first five minutes).
Clacked by Chuck Duncan 
on Aug 08, 2011 @ 22:03 EST5EDT
. . . . .
I took the whole family to see Mars Needs Moms and I was thrilled with it overall. But I’m right there with you regarding Gribble. You hit the nail on the head in describing him: He was as annoying as all get out.
At Comic-Con last year, I was able to sit in on a panel discussion with Berkeley Breathed who wrote the book. (He is responsible for Outland, Bloom County, Opus, Bill The Cat, et al.) He noted quite a few tidbits of information about the then-upcoming film and I was on board at seeing it, having previously read the book.
The film itself was visually stunning and enjoyable. But that Gribble … what a pain. He was the biggest drawback. With all the energy he exuded, he still managed to drag the film into the ground whenever he was featured in scenes or had dialog.
Anyone who hasn’t seen this flick: I recommend it. Highly.
*POST AUTHOR*
Glad to know it wasn’t just me who found Gribble totally annoying!
Classic Disney move. They just hate parents.
To be fair, most of the first Disney films that focused on dead parents were based on stories that had orphaned children in it. Snow White, Cinderella, Bambi… while Pinocchio didn’t lose a parent, he always just had his papa. I think what happened was when they went to other fairy tales and original stories, they realized that the dead parents thing was a part of “their thing,” so they went along with what had made them money before… hence why the one no-mother-princess is a huge part of their format.
*POST AUTHOR*
The “princess” movie characters were already orphaned or alone in the world to begin with, but with Bambi, Dumbo, The Fox and the Hound and now Mars Needs Moms killing off the mothers (and to be fair, one mom does die a horrible death and the other only nearly dies a horrible death), it’s traumatic!
And don’t forget poor Nemo’s mother (Pixar but still Disney). That scene actually made me cry.