Cartoonish films need a bigger scope

By AL MARTINEZ

July 21, 2008 12 AM PT

There you’ve got your Hellboy who is red and there you’ve got your Incredible Hulk who is green and there you’ve got your robots who are in love and there you’ve got your panda who kung fus and there you’ve got an assemblage of cartoon characters the likes of which haven’t been seen since the last Mickey Mouse retrospective.

I paid eight bucks a ticket trying to figure out just what the hell the draw was for Angelenos of all ages to crowd into theaters throughout the city to see a series of animated or super-digitalized movies intended for both children and adults to enjoy, after which they could sit in their sandbox together and have a beer.

There was a time when cartoons were exclusively for kids, and adults favored movies that featured actual human beings in more mature roles. I lost interest in Donald Duck and the gang, for instance, after sneaking into a theater in San Francisco’s Mission District to see Hedy Lamarr swimming nude in the German film “Ecstasy.” A duck could never hold my attention after that.

But then lately I began hearing and reading positive reviews of features like “Wall-E” and “Hellboy II” and decided I ought to see for myself what was luring the masses to the make-believe offerings of America’s film factories.

When I began exploring the new movies it was, thank God, past the season of the big-screen obsession with penguins, so I would at least not be burdened by those floppy little animals waddling across the ice fields of Antarctica to mate or find fish before the killer whales found them. I see neither amusement nor scholarship in penguin movies, and I don’t much like monkeys either.

I place all those I saw in a cartoon category, but some are actually a mix of animation and non-animation in a process that includes the time Dick Van Dyke danced with cartoons in “Mary Poppins.” Many of today’s combinations are based on graphic novels, like the one that created Hellboy.

The title character in the current “Hellboy II: The Golden Army” is a creature from another dimension. He is large and red with sanded-down horns, an ogre who drinks beer, smokes cigars and generally comes across as a gruff, blue-collar monster, which is possibly why his appeal is so universal. Think Bruce Willis fathering Hulk Hogan.

Since story has very little to do with marketing today’s fantasy films, most lack any narrative worth repeating, but there is at least wry humor in “Hellboy.” In a scene that features other weird beings, one creature is seen apparently cuddling or nursing an infant. But when it is referred to as a baby, it turns suddenly to declare, “I’m not a baby. I’m a tumor.”

“Wall-E,” a sophisticated update of Karel Capek’s 1921 play “R.U.R.” (Rossum’s Universal Robots), similarly features androids in love with a larger theme of love conquering all in a post-apocalyptic world. It is accomplished with very little actual dialogue, a condition that could possibly be applied to many non-animated features whose scripts are so bad that the movies might be better off without them.

I mention these two films because they’re probably the best of those I saw, which also included “Kung Fu Panda,” “Iron Man,” “Wanted” and “Hancock.” There were others, but I have forgotten them completely, which may be God’s way of protecting the brain.

I do remember that the film version of the comic book series “Wanted” features a one-dimensional Angelina Jolie who seems to be in a state of pouty bewilderment most of the time, her enhanced lips dominating her face like some sort of natal disfigurement.

I’m no cultural anthropologist, but my theory regarding the sudden upswing in animated features seems an attempt to escape the dreary realities confronting us as we struggle to exist in a world in free fall. Horror movies like “Frankenstein,” “Dracula” and a bunch of others helped us through the Great Depression because it was a lot scarier out there than in a darkened theater.

Fantasy in its many forms has a way of transporting us beyond the haunting fears of Armageddon. To that extent, I guess, even penguins cracking adult jokes have a place in the pantheon of cultural therapy, although I would prefer the soothing tones of Charlize Theron crooning through the characterization of, say, a dove that everything is going to be OK.

Then I’ll relax for a while at least, even though I know in the darkest part of my brain that it really isn’t.

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