Movie Review: Fievel Goes West

The best sequel ever, "Fievel Goes West" follows the sappier and Somewhere-Out-There'd "An American Tail" and includes a list of star voices unimaginable in a Disney movie. (According to IMDB, John Cleese turned down the part of Cogsworth in "Beauty and the Beast" to be Cat R. Waul in FGW.)

It was produced by Steven Spielberg (like the first Fievel movie), and features the voices of John Cleese, Dom DeLuise and Jimmy Stewart -- in fact, it's Stewart's last performance. Ever.

James Horner did the music.

And it's hilarious.

If you don't like the contrivance of the Mousekewitz family heading further west thanks to the grunginess and lack of opportunity in NYC (a contrivance that appeals to me a great deal), dancing buffalo bones in the desert (funniest moment in the whole movie), the rousing chorus to "The Girl You Left Behind," or the fake-romantic moment when Cat R. Waul uses his hand to fake-dance with Tanya, or the idea of a cat learning to act like a dog, or the "laaaaaaaazzzyyy eeeyyyyyyye" or the "flying aaahghgh" ("Ooh, I love the flying aaahghgh"), you'll probably still find something to laugh at in this movie.

But if you don't love any of those things, I don't see how we can still be friends.

There are frustrating points in FGW. Sherriff Wylie Burp (Jimmy Stewart) is slow-talking and slow, at first, to agree to train Tiger the cat (Dom DeLuise) to stand up to the other cats -- who are waiting to eat the mice they've lured to the West. Since we know he'll eventually give in and train Tiger, these scenes feel like playing hard-to-get more than like a real tension.

There's a Freudian preoccupation with breasts (and smothering), as in "The Last Unicorn" or the original "Neverending Story." The excessively-endowed woman doesn't even have a face in FGW; she is only a giant pair of breasts and an annoying, whiny voice saying "Ooh, kitty! Kitty-poo!" (See how annoying it is even to read?)

Too much time is spent on the Tiger-is-believed-to-be-a-god portion of the story -- but this is forgivable, since it ends with one of the best scenes in the movie as a transition: a version of "Rawhide" over a traveling montage that includes sets of animals singing directly into the "camera."

If you're a long-time friend, short-time reader, you probably suspected I'd write about this movie eventually. You probably suspected this because I've been forcing friends to watch it for at least seven years, now -- and if you still own a VCR, I've probably tried to gift you a copy.

But there's not much more that can be said in a review of a cartoon movie that does what it's supposed to do -- makes you laugh more than think -- so I'll just make the plug official here:

See this movie. See it with friends. See it with popcorn. See it expecting to laugh. See it now.

Amen.