If you are looking to make me cry, simply play an excerpt of the song "Somewhere Out There" from the 1986 film, An American Tail. *Not* the Linda Ronstadt/James Ingram version, blech... No, the original version from the movie, the duet between little Fievel and his sister, who each believe they will never see each other again. The song is sung by the two child actors who voice the characters and their voices break as they reach the high notes. Devastating. I'm just typing about this song right now, and I've got tears in my eyes.
Though the song has stuck with me all these years, I also had some vague good memories of the movie, which I watched in After-Four club sometime in the late eighties. Yesterday, when I saw it was playing on cable and decided to watch it again.
Big mistake.
An American Tail is a harrowing, HARROWING, tale about anti-semitism, the false promises of immigration, and the fundamentally harsh nature of the world. At the end of this hour and a half of misery, they tack on a happy ending and send the children on their way, as though they haven't painted a bleak and ultimately unredeemable view of our modern world. My hope is that kids who saw this movie, like me, were too dumb and naive to truly understand the horror of what was unfolding before their eyes.
First, the evil cats that drive Fievel away from his home in 1885 Russia are clearly Cossacks leading pogroms against the Jewish mice (the Mousekewitzes aka Moskowitzes!). The killing does not happen off-screen either. The cats clearly kill mice during the pogrom and leave them for dead right there on screen. From that heart-warming start, the family, whose house has been burned down, begins its journey across the Atlantic to America, where they've been told there are no cats and the streets are paved with cheese! During a storm at sea, Fievel is swept away. His father tries to save him and fails. Little Fievel is presumed dead! DEAD! Papa Mousekewitz blames himself for the death of his son.
So the Mouskewitz family arrives in America, thinking their child has died, though Fievel, somehow, has made it to shore in a bottle. When he get there, he realises there *are* cats in America (also streets=not paved with cheese, which would be impractical, really). Said cats proceed to make Fievel's life miserable, even while he searches fruitlessly for his family, who, I repeat, believe he is dead. At one point, Fievel hears his father playing violin and runs towards the music. But no, it's not his dad, it's a gramophone playing a recording of violin music, so Fievel climbs into the gramophone to cry about how much he misses his family.
In the last five minutes, Fievel comes off with a scheme to send all the cats to Hong Kong (this part was confusing) and is reunited with his family. How this deus-ex-machina happy end is supposed to make up for the preceding 90 minutes, I'm not sure.
I recall shedding a few tears over the movie, and being very upset at the handful of close-calls Fievel and his family have, where they *almost* find each other. Mostly, though, I remembered the songs and "the streets are paved with cheese" bits. Actually, now that I think about it, this movie may be more appropriate for kids than it is for adults. For children too young to get it = *** For adults * 1/2
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