Swiss Family Robinson 1960
I remember seing parts of this movie (or maybe the 1975 TV show) and then visiting the Swiss Family Treehouse at Disneyworld as a kid and liking all of the labor saving contraptions they made. With most of the backlog of Disney movies now available on Disney Plus, I started watching this movie, but there are hardly any contraptions in the movie. Instead there are a whole bunch of adventure vignettes where the family faces off with sharks, a snake, a tiger, etc. The big conflict is with Asian pirates, which I didn’t recall at all. While the movie just jumps from one setup to the next, it is still kind of interesting to see all of the different animals and challenges. There is no mistaking this for great cinema, and it is too much of one happy scene after another, even when they are fighting for their lives and killing pirates. Parts of the movie are just painfully bad and I feel sorry for a lot of the animals, even how they are depicted: find a baby elephant in the woods, now it belongs to a 10 year old; a teenager rides an ostrich that looks like it can barely support the weight. The Asian pirates depiction hasn’t aged well, but they also missed an opportunity when Roberta turns out to be a great shot but in the big battle she just passes guns to the boys to shoot. It is a pretty bad movie, but still is kind of neat to watch.
Written: 08 May 2020