It’s fitting that the decade ends with the best year for movies of the decade, 1999. (And, thank God, nobody got around to slipping Prince’s “1999” into a movie. Not even End of Days, which was so low that such a cliché would’ve looked like a classy move.) This year, there are three animated movies alone that deserve to be on a top-10 list–South Park, The Iron Giant, and Toy Story 2. (And one other, Princess Mononoke, that has moments of epic grandeur and images so primal they could be lifted from a nightmare, or cause one.) Even the first 20 minutes or so of Tarzan, before Phil Collins started to resurrect songs that weren’t good enough for Michelob commercials, were impressive.
South Park is so good that the apparent problem, bringing the show’s limited stylization to the big screen–it’s like animation by Colorforms (which, I know, is the point)–was immediately solved. Some of its sequences bounce around in your head forever. Satan’s big number, a malicious piece of parody that’s one of the funniest movie moments of the year, is a power ballad for a Broadway crowd–imagine an Andrew Lloyd Webber number written for Meat Loaf or, worse, Michael Bolton. South Park is a reminder of the great moments from the old Henry Beard/Doug Kenny National Lampoon, where the audacity and smarts still leave you tearing up helplessly when you try to explain what you love about the work months later. And your friends roll their eyes at your lack of descriptive skills.
The last few years have been a struggle to put together a 10-best list, so when three cartoons make enough of an impact to each deserve a slot, you know things are looking up. Toy Story 2, like South Park, is thick with small jokes bordering the bigger jokes. It seems perfect for that genre that flowered in the ‘90s, the movie made for repeated home viewing so you can study it frame by frame, like the Zapruder film. (Or the president’s surly video apology, where you try to analyze the squint as he says, “I did not have sex with that woman … Miss Lewinsky.”) The end of the picture, a breather where Woody and Buzz take a moment to go over what has happened to them, feels like the end of a John Ford movie, and has a wonderful ease.
I saw Giant in the sub-basement of one of those I-don’t-wanna-be-here multiplexes, and watched the place light up with happy chatter from kids and parents, each group trying to explain their version of the movie to the other. Giant helped Warner Bros., which started the year so out of touch I thought it was stuck in the triangle section of the Jurassic Park Orchestra, bounce back. Three Kings and The Matrix, two of the year’s most propulsive pictures, were also part of the revivified Warner slate. Both movies have brains and velocity. Three Kings feels like it was fired from a gun, and The Matrix generates so much excitement that it’s like being caught in the crosshairs of one.
The only disappointment is that Warner wasn’t able to sell Kings and Giant to mainstream audiences. In the end, it probably does take an outfit like Disney to put out animation. (Warner did release Pokémon, though taking credit for its success is, to use an old Lorne Michaels line, like standing next to someone who got shot and getting a Purple Heart anyway.) Though a bigger disappointment is that they were able to put Wild, Wild West over, which is a bigger insult than the lazy samples Will Smith has turned into a pop career. (You can almost hear him going through his parents’ collection of vinyl from the Columbia Record Club.) Three Kings uses the mechanism of the action picture for its visceral power, and to make a point about the callousness of action movies, a programmer with a bit of The Third Man slipped in to make a point. It’s gotta be a great year for movies when one of the stars of Three Kings, Spike Jonze, who gives one of the best supporting performances of the year, also directs one of the best pictures: Being John Malkovich. It’s all about riches just for domestic movies.
