Seen: June 30th, 2007
Format: DVD
Rating: 3
Man, I feel like Scrooge. This film is the last project, the final hurrah, from a dying man. To top it off, it's also the final effort from his wife, who followed him into the beyond a few years later, and never saw its release. It would be a fairy tale feel good moment if I could tell you that it was a fitting memoriam to two wonderful people.
But I can't.
This film has very few redeeming qualities. I'll try to concentrate on those for a moment.
It has a strong sense of family. It is adulant in its reverence for baseball. It has good voice talent. The animation is good and fits the picture.
Beyond this I cannot go. The rest of this film is simply a mess.
It can't decide what age it want to play to. The gags and physical humor seem designed for the 4-6 crowd. There are adult pop culture references, which hardly jive with the period-ness of the piece. The family-centric message seems aimed at older children. It seems like a piece where someone decided to put everything that they like about movies, that's not offensive to someone, and put it all in one big film. It doesn't work.
The film is saccharine beyond compare. Even when it make fun of itself for that fact, it still can't shake the sticky-sweet story. This isn't just a case or poor writing, the entire story is just too darn ... I want to say "Disney", but it goes beyond even that. There's nothing wrong with hard, unambiguous lines in films, especially kids films, but this goes past that into the land of cliche and caricature.
I had a very hard time figuring out what baseball represented in this film. While the Yankees and Tigers are goodness and light, the Cubs' management and pitcher is evil incarnate. Are we to infer that baseball isn't entirely wholesome, or perhaps that Chicago is full of corruption?
There are a host of other problems. The songs are simply banal. They're just filler over parts with no dialogue. They may true to convey or carry the story at times, but are so vacant that they fail entirely. Other portions of the film are mysteriously silent.
Character design is plain and uninteresting. Characters have little individuality. Where they are distinguishable, their defining features are broad and singular, again mostly caricature. Babe Ruth is rendered well, but even so, come across awfully plain for a man of such well documented character.
There's a strange race card being played here too. The inclusion of players and teams from the Negro league is appreciated. Their contribution to the sport has been long downplayed and overlooked. Why then are they relegated to some sort of traveling minstrel show on the bus trip, complete with Harlem Globetrotter style antics? This is a thoroughly undignified representation of these athletes in my opinion.
In the spirit of full disclosure, I couldn't ever get behind a character who is so rampantly a Yankees fan, regardless of how endearing their tale might be. But this film has much larger issues to overcome.
The Good: Family feel-good fare
The Bad: Saccharine and cliche ridden
The Ugly: Baseball minstrels
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