TOMORROWLAND - The Movie...My thoughts

Hello!  Been a while since I posted anything here, let alone something related to Disney.  Here are my thoughts on the recent film TOMORROWLAND...

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Having read quite a bit about Walt Disney, I may be seeing this recent Disney film with tinted glasses.  I remember being inspired by the stories that Disney put on film and on TV in a myriad of ways back in the 1960’s, when I was inspired by the stories and the music to write my own stories and to learn to play the songs.  I didn’t take my inspiration for my love of science from Disney (directly); it was the space program that grabbed me and made me want to learn.  Yeah, I was one of those kids who wanted to be an astronaut.  I dreamed about traveling to the Moon or to Mars, or to even more distant places.  My interest was fed by writers like Asimov and Heinlein and Clarke (the so-called Big Three) and by Charlton Heston movies like THE OMEGA MAN and PLANET OF THE APES.

It wasn’t till I started to study Disney that I realized how interested he was in the space program himself — and in scientific advancement!  He made promotional films for NASA to help generate popular support for the project to put a man on the Moon, and in his parks was this area he called “Tomorrowland.”  Tomorrowland celebrated the future by promoting the achievements of corporations in that direction.  It had exhibits like “The House of Tomorrow”, a futuristic “People Mover” and its retrospective tribute to technology, “Carousel of Progress.”  I didn’t know about these things till relatively recently because I didn’t go to Disney World until 1975, and then as a member of my high school band who was less concerned with appreciating what I was seeing than with the existence of high school girls from other band programs in other parts of the country.

So what’s all that have to do with TOMORROWLAND, the movie?  I believe there is something of Walt Disney’s persona in this film.  And that something is “Optimism.”  Walt Disney was a futurist, according to Ray Bradbury.  A forward-thinking man who had his eyes on solving the problems of the world with technology, through corporations.

The movie isn’t as focused on corporations as agents for positive change, but it has the same optimism about the future that Walt had.  If I understood correctly, the story is that scientists figured out how to access an alternate dimension of reality and then proceeded to create a world where science was king — where just about anything was possible.  (Sort of goes with Walt’s old “If you can dream it, you can do it” mentality.)  In fact, the film starts with a boy inventor traveling to the World’s Fair that Disney used as a testing ground for so many things that found themselves into his parks, including the aforementioned Carousel of Progress and the “it’s a small world” attraction.  (At that fair, for the Illinois exhibit, Walt and company built an audio-animatronic Lincoln that people reported rose and stepped into the audience, shaking people’s hands – of course it did no such thing but, well, that’s how imagination works I guess.)  He makes his way to Tomorrowland with the help of a pretty young girl and a pin that she gives him.

Cut to the future – our future – where our space program is being dismantled and where pessimism reigns.  What’s the best an intelligent young man or woman can hope for in this world?  It certainly isn’t the Moon, or Mars.

In the film’s case, the intelligent young person is a high school girl who becomes intrigued by a pin she finds among her belongings after she is released from jail — she was arrested for sabotaging the machines that are destroying the launch platforms at Cape Canaveral.  The pin shows her a shining land of science and technology that is beyond her wildest dreams, and she must find it.

The straightforward adventure story that follows is competently written and it plays out in an entertaining manner.  But it was the concept behind that adventure — the idea that you can make a difference, that your brain is more powerful than anything else, and that amazing things can be accomplished if our best and brightest put their minds to it — that intrigued me.

And it wasn’t just me.  My kids were intrigued by the ideas, by the inspiration that they were able to take from the story.  I have smart kids, and we’ve always talked about accomplishing big things through intellect (not in those words, obviously), and they saw in this film something more than an unrealistic adventure story.  It’s the same sort of feeling we have when we leave EPCOT or Tomorrowland at the Magic Kingdom.  There’s an enthusiasm after those visits, a feeling that anything IS possible, in fact.

I found a review on a sometimes-Disney site called FutureProbe and I’m going to just quote the end of it:

The lesson our characters should have learned is that Tomorrowland isn’t a place you escape to, it’s something you make wherever you happen to be. The movie shouldn’t have ended with a bunch of robot children setting out to bring people to Tomorrowland, but with them setting out to bring Tomorrowland to the people.

I agree with the sentiment, but I think it’s being nit-picky about the final message. So what if the robots are setting out to bring the best and brightest to Tomorrowland instead of rejoining the real world? In a sense, they are metaphorically doing exactly that – inspiring the young people to create the future instead of accepting it and “gaming the system” for their own benefit. Maybe “Tomorrowland” is MIT or Harvard or University of Illinois for some particular teenager, and maybe it’s going to work for an environmentally aware company. Maybe it’s just getting the best out of yourself instead of coasting.

In any case, I found a lot to like about this movie.  I’m not going to argue that it’s the greatest piece of filmmaking ever, but it’s more than an entertaining story, or at least it can be.

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(This is cross-posted from my "Scott Dyson" blog which is where I talk about my writing and my books. Stop by if you want to see what I've been up to with my self-publishing efforts.
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Preview for upcoming Disney film...

We went to see THE HOBBIT:  BATTLE OF THE FIVE ARMIES a week ago, and one of the previews that looked interesting to me was for an upcoming Disney flick.  I'll describe a bit of it, so it plays out at least a little bit like I experienced it.

A girl is getting out of prison.  I'm thinking BLUES BROTHERS where Jake goes up to the window to get his belongings from Frank Oz at the very beginning, because that's exactly what this girl was doing.  She starts sliding her stuff into her hand, and there's a pin there, can't see it real clearly.  The girl calls back in, says to the guard, "This pin isn't mine." 

Then she touches it. 

She flashes to a golden meadow, something that looks like wheat all around her.  She lets go of the pin, and she's back in the jail.  The pin is on the floor.  She stares at it, reaches for it, grabs it, and she's back in the field.  She looks around, and sees off in the distance...

A city.

Tomorrowland. 

What it's about, I don't know.  I just thought it looked pretty cool in the preview, and the way the preview was set up, I want to know what it's about. 

So...coming to a theater near you...TOMORROWLAND from Disney Studios.

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New short fiction from Scott Dyson!

Since I have nothing to say with respect to the actual topic that this blog is supposed to be dedicated to (ie, Disney), instead I will use this space to announce that I have released a 36,400 word collection of short fiction titled DIE 6 on the Amazon Kindle Store for $2.99.  Here are the titles:

• An Artificial Yearning
• Blood Ties
• The Fun House
• The Tooth Fairy
• Time Heals All Wounds
• The Ghost Train

Two science fiction tales, three horror/ghost stories, and one that I suppose is mostly fantasy (The Tooth Fairy).

You can buy it here at the Kindle Store!  Please!  Feel free to check it out, download a sample, see if it's the kind of thing you might enjoy reading!

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Thank you very much!

QUANTUM ZOO release date and website!

The anthology QUANTUM ZOO, which will contain my short story "Playing Man" among eleven other excellent offerings, will be released on June 17th, 2014!

The website can be found here:  QUANTUM ZOO

The website has information on the authors and short excerpts of each story!  Please check it out!

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In the meantime, feel free to check out my title , Doing Disney: How To Spend A Week At Disney's Florida Resort   It's available on Amazon for $2.99.

Thanks!

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Cover Art for QUANTUM ZOO!

Here is the cover of the short story anthology QUANTUM ZOO, which will be released in early June.  It will contain my story "Playing Man" along with eleven other tales.

Watch for release information!

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In the meantime, feel free to check out my title , Doing Disney: How To Spend A Week At Disney's Florida Resort   It's available on Amazon for $2.99.

Thanks!

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QUANTUM ZOO!

I just wanted to post a quick note (off-topic as usual) that my short story, "Playing Man", was accepted for publication in an anthology titled QUANTUM ZOO. 

Other authors in the collection include J.M. Ney-Grimm, D.J. Gelnar, Bridget McKenna, A.C. Smyth, R.S. McCoy and John Hindmarsh, to name just some of them. 

The stories were to start with the writing prompt, "Zoo".  I had a story that I had started probably 18-20 years ago, but had written probably just a bit over a page.  Then I lost direction on it.  I'd looked at it a time or two over the years, and when I read about this call for submissions, I immediately thought of that story. 

So I went and finished it, and ran it by first reader Steven M. Moore, an accomplished SF/thriller writer himself.  Then I submitted it, and it made the cut! 

There IS a cover, and there IS a tentative release date.  I'll post the cover soon here, and when the release date is firmed up, I will post it as well.  Tentatively it's scheduled for early June as an e-book and soon after for trade paperback.  I'm thrilled to be part of the book!

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In the meantime, feel free to check out my title , Doing Disney: How To Spend A Week At Disney's Florida Resort   It's available on Amazon for $2.99.

Thanks!

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Old WALL-E review/commentary

I don't usually do this, but I was scanning back-posts at my Journalscape blog and found this long-ish review of the Pixar movie WALL-E that I wrote on July 9, 2008 and thought I'd repost it here in its entirety.  So go ahead and read on if you're interested in my take on that movie back when it came out...

I took my two boys to see the newest Disney-Pixar movie, WALL-E, yesterday afternoon. I was expecting to be as charmed by it as I have been by most of the previous Pixar films, including such offerings as CARS, FINDING NEMO, TOY STORY (1 and 2), and RATATOUILLE.

And I think WALL-E was as good as those movies (and maybe better in a lot of ways), but not nearly as charming. I don't know how to explain it...I think those other stories all take the Disney formula (if you don't know that formula, no sense in trying to explain it) and used it with their own unique twists. And they've worked, so much so that they are really the class of Disney animation currently, and have been for a long time, since the days of BEAUTY AND THE BEAST and ALADDIN.

But - it's a much more complicated story than any of those. It's FAR less happy than any of them, far less funny, and more touching in a lot of ways. It's also more of a dystopian SF adventure than anything I've seen previously done by Disney. (I wonder what that will mean to repeat business for this film - while I liked it, I can't see going back to the theater to see it with the kids like we have done for other Pixar films...)

(THIS SYNOPSIS LIKELY CONTAINS SPOILERS - READ AT YOUR OWN RISK...)

In case you don't know, Wall-E is a little robot whose name is an acronym (exactly for what, I can't remember-waste allocation something something - Earth). He's the last one of his kind to still be operational, to still be functioning in his task to clean up the waste and garbage left on the planet by humans as they've abandoned their planet for a life in space. He's a fairly low-tech looking thing, yet he has intelligence and self-awareness. He is lonely, as you might expect, with only a cockroach as company for who knows how many of the last 700 years. Yet he goes about his tasks diligently, compacting and stacking trash into skyscraper sized piles all around the city.

Into this world comes EVE, a sleek "female" robot whose "directive" is classified. Fortunately for Wall-E, she doesn't vaporize him immediately (I wondered about her defensive responses - was she programmed to find monsters on Earth? Why is she so quick to shoot first at anything that moves?) and after he follows her around for a long time, the pair of robots fall in "love", or something like love at least.

When Wall-E is showing her his treasures, artifacts from humanity's past that he's collected in his day to day toils, he presents her with something different - something he hasn't come across in a long time. A small living plant. EVE's response is dramatic. She seizes the small plant, places it inside of her metallic body, and goes into a sort of catatonia. On her body a green leaf flashes over and over. And sure enough, soon the ship that left her comes to collect her, and she is being delivered to wherever she came from originally. And of course, Wall-E can't let her go like that; he chases her down and ends up going on a trip through outer space to her final destination: the star cruiser Axiom with its cargo of humanity.

And herein lies more dystopian elements. Humanity has changed - low gravity and a life of leisure has turned them into a bunch of lazy blobs who are content to be waited on hand and foot by their robot tenders and don't even think about life or interaction with each other. Their captain is a pleasant but seemingly not too "bright" blob voiced by John Goodman. (John Ratzenberger makes his usual appearance as a passenger who is forced to interact with others by Wall-E's intrusion into their daily existence.) The Buy-N-Large Corporation is the benefactor in all of this - the corporation is the entity that built the robots, that sent humans into space to live while Earth is supposedly being cleaned up, and that promoted this lifestyle in the first place - a sort of bad guy who isn't really even there anymore.

Of course, Wall-E and EVE save the day, getting the plant to the proper place which results in the ship returning to Earth, against heavy resistance from the robots who now seem to embody the Corporation. It's a touching conclusion at times, watching the humans get back on their feet, literally and figuratively, and relearn the joys of living, as the captain watches Wall-E and EVE dance through the space around the ship, and as the passengers are forced to interact with each other and simply act to save themselves. The captain outwits his robot overseer in the end, and humans return to Earth, which is not really "ready" to receive them but which needs their attention to be reborn. All very optimistic, at the end, and positive.

It's a cautionary tale, however, warning against a lot of things - not the least of which is excessive consumption, corporate greed and a trend toward indoor (computers, video games, big screen tvs, etc.) entertainment vs outdoor activity. It seems to warn against technological achievement just for the sake of achievement, with no attention to the good or bad results of such achievement. Maybe most of all it warns against the current trend of not looking beyond tomorrow. I think there are some heavy social and political themes buried in the cartoon medium within which director Andrew Stanton and Pixar work best. Probably a lot more of them than I'm getting to here...I think someone could expand on a lot of these things and dig far deeper into this story than I've done.

And that, by itself, is very unusual for a Disney or a Pixar type story. So, while WALL-E is not nearly as charming or uplifting as other Disney fare, it is certainly deeper and more socially aware than almost anything they've done in this medium to date.

I probably won't see it again in the theater, but will likely buy it when it finally comes out on DVD, and I'm thinking I'll enjoy it then, too. Meanwhile...I'll just have to content myself with playing the Wall-E video game with my sons...;-)

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Please take a look at my book DOING DISNEY, available for Amazon Kindle at $2.99.  Thanks!

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Movie Review: ENDER'S GAME

I hadn't read ENDER'S GAME in a LOOOONG time.  It wasn't new when I first read the book, but it wasn't terribly old - there were no sequels at that time.  Later came SPEAKER FOR THE DEAD, XENOCIDE, and CHILDREN OF THE MIND, and there were the spin-offs and now there are prequels as well.  Back when I was a conference coordinator/moderator at the Book and Candle Pub on the old Delphi Internet Services, we had Mr. Card as a guest - he still was small enough that he did things like that - but most of our conversations concerned other works of his, like his Alvin Maker series and his Homecoming series.  He was an interesting and insightful guest and I enjoyed interacting with him at the time.  But even back then, 20+ years ago, he was talking about the movie version of ENDER'S GAME.

It was neat to see that my boys, aged 13 and 11, liked the book as much as I did (though I was older when I read it).  And finally there IS a movie!  Cool, huh?  We were finally gonna get to see the "Buggers" and watch Ender go through Battle School.

Overall, it was a very well done movie, in my view.  The story came through loud and clear, not subordinated to the special effects scenes.  I felt there was some depth to this story, with exploration of issues like child abuse in a subtle manner.  The special effects were not crazy good nor were they crazy over-the-top.  They served the story without becoming intrusive.

I love science fiction, and I'd probably go see this one again.  Or get it on DVD or Blu-ray.  For what it's worth, I give it a thumbs up.  Probably grade it out to about a B+ or even an A-.  It was worth the long wait for it to finally appear on the big screen.  I hope it's a big success.

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If you get a chance, please take a look at my latest offering, 14 Dark Windows, on Amazon for Kindle.  It's a collection of short stories, some horror, some milder with supernatural or horrific elements, some just nice stories, available in ebook form for $2.99!  Thank you!

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Disney Film - JOHN CARTER

A long time ago (it seems) I wrote a couple posts (edit:  it was only one post, located here) on the theatrical release of John Carter, the big budget Disney SF fantasy adapted from the Edgar Rice Burroughs novel A Princess of Mars.  In the first, if I recall correctly, I commented that it wasn't a movie I had much interest in seeing, nor did my boys.  Our initial reaction was due to the television advertising for the movie.  It just didn't look that good.  It didn't make me want to see it.

In another post (actually, in edits to that first and only post) I suggested that maybe that initial impression was mistaken, since I had read numerous commentaries on blogs stating that it was in fact quite good.  And those reviews were enough to inspire me to buy the Blu-Ray/DVD release when it came out.

But then we never watched it.  Until last Friday night.

We had a rare "boy's night" with me and my sons having the evening to ourselves, and I decided that *I* was going to pick out a movie to watch.  Going through the stack of unviewed movies, I came across John Carter and thought, What better time to watch this one?  It is not one my wife would want to see AT ALL, so it was a perfect time to pop it in and watch.

So the verdict is in.  We all liked it quite a bit!  Was it great?  No, maybe not great.  But it was very good and told a good story (albeit a story that's been covered before) and had very good effects and settings and the acting was decent.  (I noted that the director was Andrew Stanton, I believe...)  I wouldn't mind seeing it again sometime, and I would be interested in seeing a sequel.

I know, because it didn't do well at the box office, that a sequel is very unlikely.  Too bad Disney flubbed the marketing of this movie.  Because they had something pretty good and didn't get the promotion right.

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Frontiers...

It seems when one reads the various blogs about Disney, there is a lot of commentary on two places: EPCOT and Tomorrowland in the Magic Kingdom or Disneyland. I would say this is probably because these are the areas that inspire - they are perhaps the best examples of the high-level imagineering that goes on when developing a theme park. When you talk to a Disney fan, it seems that often they came by their passion by visiting EPCOT as a child or a teen. Before that, it was probably one of the Tomorrowlands that inspired fans.

I've read a lot of "armchair imagineering" that reimagines the futuristic elements of Disney's park offerings, and it seems a common complaint is that they've become somewhat stale in their treatment of the futuristic themes. Or watered down, often, with attractions that are more for thrills or for character tie-ins than for any link to the future. I've done a bit of armchair imagineering myself back when I started this blog.

Anyway, it got me thinking. The future is about exploring new frontiers. Whether we humans are actually getting anywhere is debatable, but we certainly spend enough imagination thinking about the future. So what are those frontiers now?

Space, of course, remains a major frontier, one we've just barely touched on exploring. EPCOT touches on this frontier with the MISSION: SPACE attraction, and Tomorrowland is supposed to be all about a future where space travel is commonplace. It's a theme that is rich with possibilities. Science fiction writers still use human expansion into space as a major theme for their works.

Less popular, perhaps, but still a mystery to much of humanity, the oceans are another frontier. This environment offers challenges almost as harsh as exploration of space offers, and we know little about some parts of the deep oceans, including what sorts of creatures live there. When I think of the oceans, I always think of James Cameron's movie THE ABYSS. Other movies and books have dealt with the oceans as a frontier for our exploration also, but that's the one that jumps out at me.

A third frontier is the area under our feet. JOURNEY TO THE CENTER OF THE EARTH is of course the book and movie that jumps out at me. The world of caves and subterranean environment is a fascinating milieu, and we humans have often looked downward in our expansion efforts. Subways, basements, defensive installations, cave exploration and catacombs and graves are all ways we expand and utilize the underground frontier.

Does anyone have any other frontiers?

Do any of these frontiers excite you more than another?

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Science Fiction Pessimism and Tomorrowland

A while back I was doing some internet searches when I happened upon a blog called Re-Imagineering, which is mostly a series of short essays about the problems with Disney as it exists today and what could be done to solve some of them. One of the discussions (about Epcot) was talking about exhibits people would like to see, and what sorts of things they might try to freshen it up, make it less corporate in feel. It was also talking about Tomorrowland and its original optimism about our future.

But that discussion shifted to some comments about the science fiction, especially in film, of today. It seems that most of today's SF is dystopian, and that most of the film projects outside of stuff like STAR TREK and STAR WARS (not really SF in any classic sense) are very dark visions of the future. They named Blade Runner, Minority Report, AI, and The Matrix. (I'd say that Vanilla Sky, Dark City, and I, Robot are also fairly dystopian, along with stuff like Final Fantasy, Waterworld, all of the Terminators, The Postman, Battlefield Earth, and maybe even The Day After Tomorrow (though the last is not far in the future at all).)

As I think about the SF I've read recently, first, there isn't a whole lot of it. ALTERED CARBON was a good book but pretty dark, as was the later book in the series I read, titled THIRTEEN. Dan Simmons' HYPERION series and his latest pair, ILIUM and OLYMPOS, are not exactly happy fantasies of the future. MANIFOLD: TIME and MANIFOLD: SPACE by Stephen Baxter are a little brighter; suggesting that human ingenuity will win out over politics. Kim Stanley Robinson's trilogy about the near future and environmental catastrophe (which starts with 40 SIGNS OF RAIN) takes the readers to a optimistic outlook at the end, but with a rough path to get there.

As I think about it, my question is, is there a story in a utopian future? Is it a story I want to read about? Novels are about resolving problems. In some ways it seems to me that any story is essentially a mystery. If there is a mystery, there is a problem to be discovered and sorted through. If there are no problems to resolve, if everything is hunky dory, it might make for a nice pretty painting but is there any story? I don't know. I was thinking about something like Asimov's Empire series, and while there is a lot of optimism there with the direction of humanity, when the story takes place, things are not so good. Heinlein's juveniles are more adventure story set in a fairly positively imagined future, but some of his adult works are a lot darker.

I see where they're coming from with respect to Tomorrowland, they don't want pessimism at Disney World, nor does it have a place. But I don't see a story in a future where everyone is happy as clams. Those Morlocks in HG Wells' novel weren't all that happy, and the surface beings couldn't have been thrilled with the status quo either. But THE TIME MACHINE wouldn't make for a very good Disney ride.