Back when I wrote my rather anti-nostalgic review of The Land Before Time, I admitted that I've never been a great admirer of Don Bluth and tossed in a couple of pointed barbs at All Dogs Go To Heaven in particular. Truth is that I've been feeling a tad uneasy about that ever since. It's not that I feel that my criticisms of the film were necessarily invalid, but it would only be fair for me to explain that a lot of my vitriol toward Dogs is rooted the thoroughly unhappy experience I had trying to watch it as a six year old. Back then, my family were in the habit of making weekly visits to our local VHS rental store, where my brother and I each got to pick out a title and we would alternate each week on who go to watch their respective choice first. One week, being a naive nipper who was easily swayed by box art featuring colourful cartoon animals, I chose All Dogs Go To Heaven while my brother went straight for the hot new release, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. And unlucky me, that week it happened to be my brother's turn to watch his pick first. I sat through that tedious, 143-minute long Kevin Costner vehicle, anxious for the end-credits to start rolling so that I could finally get to the film that I wanted to see. After what felt like an eternity, Kevin Costner and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio were kissing, a nice friendly "The End" title card popped up and Bryan Adams started screeching his heart out about his all-encompassing altruism, at which point I jumped up, punched the air with enthusiasm and hollered for Dogs. And then...I was in for just about the most curiously unengaging viewing experience I think I'd ever had within those first six years of life. Suddenly, the Kevin Costner vehicle seemed like a positive lark.
At age six, I'm not sure if I could articulate, even to myself, exactly what it was that I didn't like about this film. I doubt it was the trauma of seeing a cartoon German Shepherd get pulverized by a runaway cab - I saw Benji The Hunted at the same age, after all, and my horror at that film wound up becoming the stuff of affection (not to mention, the title always made it blindingly obvious that there was going to be a sprinkling of canine carnage therein). I think I just found the film's tone in general to be incredibly alienating. In fact, I suspect that the seeds of my lifelong enmity toward Don Bluth may well have been sown on that very afternoon. I was left so bewildered that years later, when when my love of animation progressed from merely renting VHS cassettes to taking an active interest in the history of the industry, I felt a strange pang of schadenfreude upon learning that Dogs had not been a particularly well-received film (once again, I tip my hat to the ultra-concise review of Halliwell's Film Guide: "Skillful animation goes to waste in a confused and confusing narrative") and had marked a downward turning point in Bluth's career. There was a time when pretty much everything I reference I came across to this film was positively scathing. Nowadays, its reputation seems to have improved somewhat, with a lot of people championing Dogs as Bluth's last genuinely good film before he went on to make this phenomenal piece of mind-fuckery about a rooster who goes to an unspecified US city to make a career as an Elvis impersonator (note: Rock-a-Doodle has been earmarked for a future VHS Verve, if only because I am really intent on digging up all of my childhood demons here). The churlish part of my psyche would like to attribute this to the kids who grew up with the film giving it a free pass because of nostalgia - and nostalgia, as we know, can do funny things to a person's brain (heck, Space Jam and Pokemon: The First Movie are now fondly-regarded nostalgic classics despite enduring a merciless drubbing from everyone older than twelve upon release). Nevertheless, I became deeply conscious of the fact that I'd never actually sat down with Dogs and given it a second chance - oh, I'd seen bits and pieces of it over the years, but never once tried to watch the film in its entirety again - and my current opinion on the film was still strongly informed by my impressions as a six year old. Perhaps the older me could appreciate it on levels that six-year-old me simply couldn't? Could it be that Bluth and I had simply gotten off on the wrong foot?
In the end I resolved to get hold of a copy of the VHS and give it another watch, largely to test if my vitriol would still endure after all these years. I tried to approach it with an open mind, despite my issues with Bluth in general, so what follows is a 100% honest overview of my updated opinions on All Dogs Go To Heaven.
First, though, some context. As I noted in my review of The Land Before Time, Bluth wasn't exactly wild about the constraints placed on him while working with the big boys, Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, at Amblin Entertainment (even if they did bring him some of the greatest box office returns of his career), and Dogs was supposed to an attempt to get back to making films his way, without the interference of pesky studio executives. Bluth's production house, Sullivan Bluth Studios, had recently relocated to Ireland and were able to secure a three-film deal with UK indie company Goldcrest Films. Despite Bluth's intentions of attaining greater creative control over his films, it appears that Dogs, much like Land Before Time, was subjected to some post-production tampering in order to excise a few scenes that might be too scary for the little 'uns. Odds of a director's cut ever happening are also extremely low, because somebody stole Bluth's personal copy of the uncut film (I hope that the lucky thief wasn't too disturbed by what they found). Also like Land Before Time, Dogs found itself in direct competition with Disney's offering for that year, opening on 17th November 1989, the same day as The Little Mermaid. Anyway, you know how this story ends. The Little Mermaid was Disney's major comeback film (following the modest success of Oliver and Company the previous year) and loudly announced the beginning of the company's Renaissance era. Dogs...well, it died a dog's death by comparison. It took the greater commercial failure of Rock-a-Doodle for it to really crunch, but this is where it all started to go to pieces for Bluth.
Strangely enough, even though it flopped at the box office and ended Bluth's run as a viable Disney competitor, All Dogs Go To Heaven may well be the Bluth film to most successfully permeate popular culture, if all on account of its striking and unusual title. You will find shout-outs to it in various places, including The Rugrats Movie (1998) and episodes of King of The Hill and Family Guy (there's also a pretty head-scratching reference to the film in one of Balto's DTV sequels). People still remember that title, even if I'll wager that the vast majority couldn't tell you a single thing about the film's plot (other than what the title itself implies). The idea behind the title, as explained in the film's dialogue, is that all dogs are guaranteed a place in Heaven because, unlike people, dogs are naturally good, loyal and kind. Well, that's what the Whippet Angel (Melba Moore) tells us when our protagonist, Charlie B. Barkin (Burt Reynolds), meets her at the pearly gates, and I don't know if Bluth genuinely believes that dogs are that wonderful or if he's attempting some form of ironic humour, but it's absolutely not borne out by anything we witness down in the land of the living. Dogs, as this film would have it, are absolute dickwads. They're sleazy and selfish, they exploit and abuse other animals for profit and amusement, they're mean-spirited and revenge-driven and they'll think nothing of falsely imprisoning a little lost orphaned child if there are a few handy betting tips to be mined from her. The only adult dog we ever meet who's a paragon of virtue is a female collie (Loni Anderson) who runs what appears to be an orphanage for unwanted puppies. The rest are, at best, seedy gamblers and, at worst, murderers and child abusers. Bluth's representation of canine culture is the very epitome of cruelty and vice and it's clear that rats, horses, even gators are much nicer, gentler souls.
Actually, that may well have been the reason why this film left me so cold as a six-year-old. The world of Dogs is dank, desolate and thoroughly uncongenial, and Charlie B. Barkin is such a mean-faced prick that it's difficult to care terribly whether he has his retribution on his killers or not. Right from the start, I think we're supposed to view Charlie as more a lovable con man than a cold-hearted thug, although the best you can really say about him is that he's blatantly the lesser of two evils compared to his back-stabbing business partner, a cigar-chomping pit bull terrier named Carface (Vic Tayback). We're a long way into the film before Charlie shows any hint of redemption, prior to which there's very little to make him sympathetic, engaging or even likeable in an anti-hero sense. Obviously, Dogs was designed to be Bluth's tribute to the gangster films of the 1930s, with a plot that draws particularly heavily from the Shirley Temple vehicle Little Miss Marker (1934), and fans of the man who see him as the anti-Disney will no doubt revel in the film's dour tone and its decidedly un-kid friendly (at least from a modern perspective) depictions of smoking, gambling and other such vices. Nevertheless, the film's vision of an old timey canine underworld is sorely lacking in charm, inventiveness and intrigue, and as per usual with Bluth, I find the so-called edginess (which is superficial at best) to be a thin veneer concealing what is, when all is said and done, an unholy mess of a plot. I will give Dogs this much - it's an oddball film, and there's certainly nothing else quite like it (for better or for worse). Like a number of Bluth's post-Amblin pictures, there's a definite "scribblings on a cocktail napkin" feel to the premise; a novel idea which no doubt sounded promisingly quirky at its moment of conception but couldn't withstand the drudgery of the story development process. In my Land Before Time review, the specific criticism I leveled at Dogs had regarded its "all-out narrative messiness", a gripe which, on reevaluating the film, I find remains very much intact.
The film opens in New Orleans, 1939, where we find Charlie escaping a high-security dog pound with help from his sidekick, a neurotic dachshund named Itchy (Dom DeLuise). The two of them return in triumph to the derelict casino that Charlie co-owns with Carface, unaware that the scheming pit bull has been wanting rid of him for ages. Carface orchestrates a plan to stealthily bump off Charlie by getting him intoxicated and then sending an unmanned vehicle hurtling in his direction; Charlie subsequently awakens to find himself in the afterlife but is able to cheat the system and return to his corporeal existence through a method so simple that I'm surprised the angelic whippet apparently doesn't see it coming. Hungry for vengeance, Charlie snoops on Carface and discovers the secret to his solo success: a lonely orphaned girl named Anne-Marie (Judith Barsi), who has a Dr. Dolittle-esque knack for conversing with animals, and is being held captive within the deep dark depths of Carface's casino so that he can use her insights into the private lives of racing rodents to rig the odds on the casino's rat race tracks. Charlie proceeds to abduct Anne-Marie and coaxes her into joining forces with him, promising to find her a family in exchange for her services in picking out winners at various animal-related sporting events (initially, it's established that animals do not speak a universal tongue and dogs are restricted to communicating only with other dogs - a rule that gets completely tossed out as we near the end of the film). It isn't long before Charlie has her roped into a life of petty thievery, helping him to pick the pockets of the well-dressed middle classes she longs to be a part of one day. As Charlie reaps the rewards of his child exploitation, Anne-Marie grows increasingly dissatisfied with the arrangement, and starts to question if Charlie actually intends to make good on his promise. Meanwhile, Carface gets wind of the fact that Charlie is not only alive but has stolen his precious commodity, and hatches up a dastardly new scheme to pick off the slippery German shepherd with a high-tech laser gun (wait, are we still in 1939 here? Oh, whatever).
It's here that I hope to appease Judith Barsi fans for giving her performance as Ducky in The Land Before Time such a drubbing (as a Kiki's Delivery Service fan, I'm all-too aware of how sensitive people can be when it comes to appraising the final works of a deceased cast member, particularly one who died in horrifically tragic circumstances), because I actually think she's pretty good as Anne-Marie. It's a much more restrained performance than she gave in TLBT, one that relies less on overt cutesiness than on understated longing and forlornness, and she imbues the character with such convincing vulnerability that it honestly sent shivers down my spine in contemplating what Barsi was having to contend with in her personal life at the time. The developing bond between Charlie and Anne-Marie forms the emotional thread of the story, and thankfully it does offer genuine resonance. As hard as it is to get invested in the whole business with these miscreant mutts and their infatuation with gambling and casinos, we truly do care that sweet Anne-Marie ends up loved and well. I cannot overstate just how important this is, as it would have been all-too easy to make a character of Anne-Marie's archetype insufferably saccharine (characters who pile on the cuteness to an intolerable degree are no strangers to Bluth's filmography - just look at Fievel and Ducky - but for some reason he got it right on this occasion). There's only one sequence involving the character which skirts dangerously close to being overly cloying - a scene where Charlie and Anne-Marie are spending the night together in an abandoned car and Anne-Marie pesters Charlie with her drawn-out bedtime routine. It goes on for far too long and there are points therein where Anne-Marie seems vomitously reminiscent of Penny, the ghastly little cipher from The Rescuers (1977) - a film which, incidentally, was one of the defining projects of Bluth's career as a Disney animator. Other than that, she's a well-implemented character.
The single most admirable component of All Dogs Go To Heaven would, of course, be its wonderfully fluid and vibrant animation, which contains arguably some of the strongest character work of Bluth's career - Charlie may not be a particularly engaging character on the personality front, but he sure is a marvel to look at, the liveliness of his movements and mannerisms more than compensating for Reynolds' rather underwhelming vocal performance. Visually, it works a lot better than Disney's similarly canine-orientated Oliver and Company from the year before it, and even stacked up against the mighty mermaid it manages to hold up pretty well. Unfortunately, this is the only area in which Dogs can even vaguely withstand being measured up against what Bluth's old mates at Disney were up to at the time, although it certainly begs for such comparisons. Like An American Tail, Dogs is a musical in the traditional Disney mold, although compared to the bumper crop of excellent numbers put together by Howard Ashman and Alan Menken for The Little Mermaid, finds itself cursed with a decidedly runtier litter, with only one song, "Let Me Be Surprised", managing to sound half-way memorable or tuneful. As a musical, I like it better than An American Tail - certainly, there's nothing here to match the sheer tooth-rotting malevolence of "Somewhere Out There", the majority of songs being more-or-less harmless (assuming that you're not put out by Itchy's crude Asian caricature in the vaudeville-style "Can't Keep A Good Dog Down") but also weak and dispensable. Their slapdash placement adds to the uneven pacing of the story, at one point even requiring it to be put on hold so that Charlie can regale a rambunctious swarm of four-legged urchins with a song about the virtues of sharing (what this serves in narrative terms is beyond me, other than to hammer home the implication that deep down Charlie's a more virtuous soul than he lets on). This is immediately followed by another more functional, if no more memorable song about Anne-Marie's yearning for a family.
To my understanding, much of the cut material from Dogs pertains to a sequence where Charlie goes to sleep and has the canine equivalent of the Spooky Mormon Hell Dream (only considerably more dull - there's no coffee-induced dancing in this one). Personally, I don't recall being all that frightened by this portion of the movie as a child, possibly because I was certainly older than six when I learned of the concept of damnation (presumably from watching Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey), so to me this was nothing more than a random dream sequence (for the record, when the Whippet Angel tells Charlie that he can never come back I took that to mean that he'd be doomed to walk the Earth forever as an angry ghost). Rewatching it as an adult, I found the beginnings of this sequence, as Charlie grapples feebly against an electrical storm threatening to pull him into a monstrous abyss, to be genuinely quite unnerving, but the instant as he drops down into an entirely generic fire and brimstone Hell and comes face to face with an utterly risible-looking dog-faced Satan, the whole thing fell painfully flat to me. Nowadays, it's the film's vision of Heaven that strikes me as being oddly insidious; no dispute that it's a pretty-looking place, the sequences where Charlie and the Whippet Angel glide among the clouds above a nocturnal New Orleans being among the most visually arresting in the entire film, but with all its emphasis upon order, constancy and certainty it comes across as being eerily reminiscent of the old Twilight Zone episode, "A Nice Place To Visit" (and a twist along those lines honestly wouldn't have felt out of place here). Whatever else you can say about him, Charlie has a point when he complains that part of the pleasure of existing comes in not knowing what a new day might bring. It's an interesting philosophical quandary that's not exactly addressed by the film's resolution, where, having learned to care for Anne-Marie and sacrificed his life to save her, Charlie earns his right to return to Heaven (bet you didn't see that coming, huh?). That's all well and good, but has Charlie's outlook on dwelling in the realm of no surprises actually changed at all? Has learning to value something other than his own hedonistic urges caused him to accept that there are bigger things in this world and that he needs now to step aside, content in knowing that Anne-Marie will be living a full life in his stead? Or has he merely had fear of the alternative knocked in him by his brief encounter with the doggy devil? The ending doesn't specify. All that matters is that the hardest thing about letting go of his Earthly existence, this time, is having to part ways with Anne-Marie, and the film really latches on to this emotional hook, working hard to leave the viewer with such a teary final impression that they'll be willing to overlook the tumultuous mare's nest leading up to it.
As noted, the premise of Dogs is not especially well-developed, but it just about maintains momentum until the third act, at which point a singing, sewer-dwelling alligator voiced by Ken Page worms his way into the script and utterly savages whatever narrative coherence was still hanging on for dear life therein. In this one character we can observe everything that's hopelessly out of whack with Bluth's sense of story aesthetic - he's introduced out of nowhere, to the extent that our heroes have to take an awkward detour from the main narrative thread simply to encounter him, the film's internal logic is completely strangled the second that he enters (Charlie and the gator can clearly speak to one another, which disregards the all-important plot point that only Anne-Marie can communicate with animals outside of her own species - what makes this gator such an exception?) and he's shoehorned in for what have to be the cheapest story purposes imaginable. I'm aware, of course, that several years ago the character became the subject of a questionable internet meme; I've no idea how relevant that meme still is today, nor do I particularly want to go into it, other than to argue that the gator from Dogs was never a particularly apt representation of what the meme's creator intended it to signify. The problem with the alligator is not that he's a random bit of weirdness added in on the assumption that the audience appreciates the weird and the random for entirely its own sake (that I couldn't really voice much objection to - I've made it plain how much I love Tamatoa from Moana, and that's not an altogether inaccurate summary of his character's own raison d'etre). The real problem with the gator is that he's introduced very late in the game for no other reason than to serve as Charlie's Get Out of Jail Free card during the final showdown with Carface. Charlie has this random excursion down in the sewers of New Orleans and is befriended by this character for entirely arbitrary reasons, just so that he can later show up and rescue Charlie when Carface looks to have him licked. It's evident that Bluth had no idea how to end this story - other rather, that he knew how he wanted the story to end but fumbled when it came to connecting the crucial narrative dots - and there's a lot about the resolution in general that rings entirely hollow. For example, we have the implication that Anne-Marie, having found the loving adoptive parents she's always wanted, will also take in Itchy as her pet, despite she and Itchy never being shown to form any kind of meaningful bond over the course of the film; in fact, earlier that very evening Itchy was all for dumping Anne-Marie in an orphanage so that he and Charlie could focus on their own relationship (somehow, I have this uneasy feeling that Itchy isn't going to stick around and accept his appointed role as Anne-Marie's house pet). Similarly, Carface's own scrawny underling, Killer (Charles Nelson Reilly), undergoes a hasty last-minute redemption where he pushes an unconscious Anne-Marie to safety, having shown zero concern for her welfare at any other point in the film.
Really though, the biggest weakness that Dogs has, in narrative terms, is that it's just so sloppily edited, although not in the same manner as The Land Before Time, where it was evident that quite a lot of material had been excised. In Dogs' case, there's little attempt to have the film's assorted sequences transition cohesively into one another, with Bluth overwhelmingly opting to round off each individual scene with an awkward fade-out or iris shot, which has the effect of making the entire story appear disjointed and episodic, almost akin to watching several separate installments from a TV serial cobbled together haphazardly. It looks crude and amateurish as hell, and the impact on the overall flow of the narrative is disastrous, and yet Bluth clearly didn't see a thing wrong with the results, for he deployed the exact same approach when making Rock-a-Doodle.
What I DO like about the story is the cyclic nature of the ending, with Carface, freshly murdered by the Gator King and itching for vengeance, setting the wheels in motion for his own ill-gotten return to Earth and (Charlie assures the viewer) his own off-screen redemption story. The implication that even a dog as rotten to the core as Carface could make amends for his evil deeds is certainly an uplifting one. While I'm in a more complimentary frame of mind I'll also give props to the specific scene where Charlie returns from the dead and has an extended moment where he chokes incessantly, as if his body is having a hard time readjusting to life after lying motionless at the bottom of a lake for several minutes. It's a nice touch which makes his resurrection seem that bit more unnatural and freaky, and the build-up to the moment in question, which involves Charlie startling the wits from a mange-ridden cat, has a spooky, B movie horror-esque vibe which is pulled off fairly slickly. The film as a whole I still don't care much for, but I'll admit to really digging that one isolated scene.
The Verdict:
Revisiting All Dogs Go To Heaven, I feel as if an odd weight has been lifted from my shoulders, as though I've stared deep into the soul of something that bothered and bewildered the hell out of me as a child and realised that it was entirely silly and harmless all along. In a way, I can understand why people might be inclined to like this film, on the basis that it's so strange, random and confusingly plotted, but the argument that it's a misunderstood masterpiece that had the misfortune of going head-to-head with Disney's big comeback hit really doesn't hold weight. Ultimately, it's a heavily flawed film with ideas above its station, and Disney's own return to form merely accentuated why, though he was sufficiently gifted in the artistic department, Bluth's narrative-building was too disordered for him to be the true successor to the master storyteller Walt. Is there any lingering chance of a reconciliation between myself and Mr Bluth? Well, possibly, but I'll save that for my review of Rock-a-Doodle.
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