Lost (and Not So Lost) Causes: “Newsies”

 When a musical called Newsies was released by Disney in 1992, it was a box office bomb. This despite the presence in the cast of a sexy Ann-Margret, an earnest Bill Pullman, an oily Robert Duvall (playing newspaper tycoon Joseph Pulitzer), and—in a bravura role—a very young and dashing Christian Bale. The story was a good one, drawn from an 1899 strike by New York City newsboys furious that the city’s newspaper publishers were trying to bolster their own profits by increasing the sum they charged these scruffy street kids for the privilege of hawking their papers. Kenny Ortega, well known for choreographing such popular films as Dirty Dancing, signed on to make his directing debut. Alan Menken, who contributed memorable tunes to Disney hits like The Little Mermaid and Aladdin, came aboard to write the score.

 hat the Disney folks had in mind was a sort of nineteenth-century West Side Story, with ragtag youngsters expressing their social angst by singing and dancing through the streets of Manhattan. A good idea, perhaps, but in its execution not terribly convincing. Though the story of the strike is a real one, the production here seems clearly to belong to the backlot of a movie studio. This despite the fact that the dance moves, in particular, are thrilling, especially in a rousing number called “Seize the Day.” (I’m not sure these street urchins would know the English-language translation of the Latin “carpe diem,” but never mind.)  Perhaps this should have been a Broadway show from the beginning: when a revised version did open on the Great White Way in 2011, it ran for three years, racking up numerous nominations and awards.

 I caught Newsies on a Disney-issued DVD from 2002, courtesy of my local library. (Public libraries, as I hope everyone knows, are a great source of DVDs as well as books.). In the usual manner of DVDs issued by movie studios, the feature film I watched was preceded by enthusiastic promos for other movies that were, we were told, coming soon. What caught my attention was that each of the promos preceding Newsies was for a Disney animated feature that was a follow-up to a classic Disney hit. I was urged to see such movies as a Peter Pan sequel, Cinderella 2, and 101 Dalmatians II. Every single one of these breathlessly-hyped flicks was, I noted, apparently hand-drawn, in the traditional Disney way. No computer-generated animation here!

 Which made it seem that Disney—seven years after Pixar debuted Toy Story, the world’s first fully computer-animated feature film—was still trying to deny that the computer had changed animation forever. Clearly, this attempt at denial didn’t work. I doubt any of the sequels promoted on this DVD made the company much money. Four years later, in 2006, the Disney folks announced that they were buying Pixar, and folding it into the Disney universe, while also experimenting with ways to use computers on their own in-house projects.

 Personally, I love the look of hand-drawn animation (though I’m hardly opposed to the use of computers to simplify the animator’s job). But on the Newsies 2002 DVD, Disney seems to be stuck in the past, both in terms of technique and subject matter. The contents of the DVD imply that Disney wants to turn back the clock to a time that once was (or, perhaps, never really was). A time when animators drew by hand, and when big splashy musicals that aimed to be a cross between West Side Story and Oliver! were big hits at your local movie house.