Dr. Seuss' The Sneetches (Netflix)

The question I have is "How hard do I hit that?" It's a dumb kiddie cartoon. Do I even need to bother?

I'm going double-barrel against that. Just because I can, and because I think I can find interesting ways to destroy that. We are looking at a Matt "Why You Suck" Review rather than a Matt "Terrible. Moving on," review. We're going to do a little introspection for this one. Maybe we'll even learn something. If we do, it will have to be independent of the film. Kids would learn nothing from it.

We'll start off on a tangent. I couldn't finish the Mike Myers Cat In The Hat film. It was so terrible it was legit upsetting. The Cat is making these gross sex double-entendres while winking to the camera in front of VERY little kids. That was the movie where I found out that Mike Myers isn't actually funny. Any credit he was given for that was due to the fact that the early 1990's era of SNL unleashed Adam Sandler, Chris Farley, and Rob Schneider onto the world and he simply stood next to them and and benefited from simply not being as bad. The 1980's and 1990's both being comedy black holes was a VERY good development for the career of Mike Myers (Zucker / Abrahams / Zucker too, as long as I'm being brutally honest). Also Myers always had a creative streak with his Austin Powers stuff. But he was never actually funny, and The Cat In The Hat was the thing that proved it. And face it, his career never recovered from that (and it never deserved to).

Myers' live-action trainwreck of The Cat In The Hat, which for some reason seemed to be winkingly targeted at pedophiles, is the only Dr. Seuss adaptation I have ever seen worse than Netflix's The Sneetches. To be fair, it's MUCH worse, but that ain't no fucking bar this movie needs to brag about clearing.

I very much remembered my review of "The Twits" last week. That was a bad movie too. Not AS bad, but I believe it was made for the same reasons this was. Netflix signed a contract to do Roald Dahl Adaptations and then were going through the catalogue of shit that hasn't been done yet (in a rather perfunctory manner).

The movie is also made solely due to contractual obligations, and because Netflix is randomly sifting through the Dr. Seuss canon. I think one of the reasons this is worse than "The Twits" is because even though "The Twits" book sucked, the truth is, one could usually make a decent film from a Roald Dahl book. Dr. Seuss? MUCH harder to pull off, and I would argue there has yet to be a Dr. Seuss book that has EVER made a good movie.

Good adaptations of Seuss stuff is not unheard of. Chuck Jones' "How The Grinch Stole Christmas" is arguably one of the first great cartoons EVER produced for television, if not THE first. Ralph Bakshi's "The Butter Battle Book" is the most faithful Seuss adaptation of all time, and therefore has an edge to it none of the other animated stuff ever does. And the first season of Green Eggs And Hams was phenomenal. I will totally concede the second season of that show sucked ass, but the first was great, and the show ending up a let-down was not evident at the time the first season aired. I was as shocked that show fell apart as anyone.

Why don't Dr. Seuss stories make good movies or TV shows in general? The short length certainly forces the adaptation to pad the work and add characters and premises not only not in the original book, but stuff that actually seems neither here nor there to the work itself. Worse, because movies are an investment on a studios' end, a LOT of Seuss' ballsy political morals have to be Nerfed. I understand WHY The Lorax decided to tack on an unearned happy ending instead of the bleak dystopian nightmare the book ended in. But the story doesn't have the same impact, or even mean the same thing. There is no "There is only one planet so you'd better take care of it" moral if cleaning it up is not only possible, but as easy as the movie showed.

The most successful adaptations of Seuss books were the TV specials from the 1970's and 1980's. And let me be brutally honest. Most of those specials (including for The Sneetches) were cruddy. The animation was poor, the voice acting stilted, the music unmemorable, and just the entire thing always wound up feeling muddy and dreary. But they tended to be faithful to the books at least.

While Netflix is going through the Dr. Seuss catalogue with a pen and checklist in hand, it NEVER occurs to them that The Sneetches isn't just the wrong project for a movie adaptation, it the wrong one for a movie aimed at small children.

Dr. Seuss often ended his books on unhappy endings. Not always, but just enough to know none of those should probably ever be reworked into Hollywood endings. "The Butter Battle Book" is the best example (and Bakshi famously nailed it for refusing to water anything down), as are Yertle The Turtle, and The Lorax. But The Sneetches' might have the hardest edge to it than any other Seuss book because the ending isn't just cynical, it's cruel on some level. And the edge exists because Seuss is more interested in the moral he's preaching against bigotry and racism than he is in the characters, or even the story.

This films waters down and Nerfs all of those morals just to have kid protagonists and cute animal sidekicks.

One of the reasons The Sneetches landed so hard is the messaging was very similar to Star Trek's "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield". The difference is Star Trek shockingly kept the actual reason for the oppression a secret until midway through the episode when the show basically said to every racist watching "This is how dumb and arbitrary your idiot beliefs are, and how decent people see them and you." And Bele and Lokai were Star Trek's receipts at how fucking WEIRD racism and oppression actually are. Pointless too.

The messaging of The Sneetches is similarly arbitrary, but one of the biggest differences is the reader understands it's bullshit for the entire book, and there is absolutely NO rug-pull or twist involved there. The Sneetches simply suck, and do no matter if they have stars on their bellies or not.

But the reason The Sneetches mattered, is because while a lot of kid lit and kiddie TV and movies tackle racism and bigotry using allegory, the bit of the Salesman who invents a machine to add and remove stars to bellies, and sells to it both groups is WHY that story is so fucking hard-edged and TRUTHFUL. It suggests whatever biases people might already have will be further exploited by Big Business and the powerful to line their own pockets, even if it means the destruction of society. The Sneetches was prescient that way, and its message is more timely than ever. It's the first and thus far only kiddie project to not just suggest racism was wrong and unkind, but to suggest people helping it along might have their own nefarious purposes for it, and not remotely believe in the cause a jot. Them causing you that specific distress is the thing getting them rich. Your oppression isn't due to whether the current trend is for Sneetches to have stars on their bellies on not. It's due to the guy escalating the conflict for his own ends while claiming to each side that he's simply leveling the playing field. But it's not the playing field being leveled. It's society itself.

Yeah, not a good choice for a TV-Y7 movie.

The movie doesn't just Nerf the message. It misses the point entirely. "Racism is wrong" is only PART of the message. What is getting lost is that racism is damaging AND entrenched and not easily defeated. Worse, here both the Star-Bellied Sneetches and the Moon-Bellied Sneetches are shown to be equally foolish about this, so there is no real oppression involved, which is kind of racism's entire reason for being. Everyone is just misguided and can learn the correct lesson upon a couple of tween girls' say-so.

Seuss' cynicism might have upset some younger readers. But the modern era tells me his take is the actual truth about how this shit works, and how unfixable it is with the current people in power making sure that the people they are fucking over never realize it's THEM fucking them over, rather than the feared minority they have gotten their dumb marks to believe is powerful enough to destroy their lives, when the only person truly capable of doing that owns Fox News and the star adding / removing machines.

If I had seen this movie in the 1980's I would have been very impressed. And I STILL think it's a shit movie even knowing that about myself.

The problem with 1980's animation was there were absolutely NO standards. Not only was almost all of it awful. But it was worse than any animation that came before or since. In the years since, the baseline for animation has improved, so there are almost NO current projects as awful as the stuff from Filmation and Hanna-Barbera from the 1970's and 80's.

But just because the baseline is no longer at zero percent, it doesn't make a grade of 55% acceptable. The dialogue doesn't SEEM as outwardly terrible and stupid as an 80's cartoon. But the thing it shares with 1980's cartoons is the absolute refusal to elevate the material on any level, because it believes (not unreasonably, mind) that kids are stupid and will never demand any better from their entertainment.

A famous question I heard an adult ask about cartoons from the 1980's back then was the parent demanding to know why cartoons were NEVER as good as the ones they grew up with themselves. It's because cartoons in the 1980's were designed to sell toys. They didn't NEED to be good to do that. So they weren't.

The lack of effort in this film feels very familiar. No, somebody putting this up against the original Scooby Doo, Transformers, or The Smurfs can see the film is superior to each of those projects in every way. But that's because NOTHING is that bad anymore. The film takes no creative chances, has nothing new to say about the subject of racism, and in fact is a poor adaptation of one of Seuss' most important and moral books.

Back when CGI TV shows were in their infancy, the CGI always looked funky at the time, but it now looks so ugly to modern audiences it makes you want to puke just to look at it. I keep hearing what a great show Transformers: Beast Wars actually turned out to be. I'll never know because the thing is an ugly visual headache I could never sit through, and thus the show is currently unwatchable. I'll take your word for it the stories were tight. But that doesn't even matter if you can't even LOOK at the show. Someday somebody ought to redo that entire show using the same voice and music tracks and just utterly new animation. Fuck, it wouldn't even need to be CGI. But I've always been curious and I'd like to someday watch it without fear of nausea and motion sickness.

The animation here isn't THAT bad, but it's closer to that than acceptable CGI TV animation. It's chintzy, with very little detail to either the characters or the backgrounds.

One good thing about the film is that I found the songs acceptable. Not memorable or anything, but for a LOT of musical cartoons, the songs are actually awful. The melodies to all the songs in this one were passable. That's not nothing.

But really, the movie otherwise is. It's a movie that believes racism is a mushy topic that can be bothsidesed and that it's all down to a simple misunderstanding. For the Sneetches in the book, the racism and oppression is quite deliberate and cruel, the way it actually is in real life. The happy ending here will comfort four years olds, but if talking about racism is something making a person feel comfortable, somebody is doing it wrong. And that should go without saying.

Long review. Awful movie. Do not recommend it. 0.