There’s a movie from the 90s that’s really popular; it’s a roadtrip movie about a dad and his son. The dad is worried about his teenage son growing distant and plans a cross-country roadtrip, culminating on a campout on a fishing site that he had been on with his father years ago. He’s extremely affectionate towards his son, but painfully unaware that his son is growing up and that that paradoxically means he needs his own space to grow into his own person. Meanwhile, the son is a little shit; he is deeply embarrassed by his father, and wants as little to do with him as possible. In fact, the movie starts with a (pretty terrifying) nightmare of the kid turning into his own dad. Far from a fishing trip, he wants to go to a concert so he can show off to a girl he likes. So he changes the trip route behind his father’s back to avoid the kitschy tourist traps his father wants to visit. Along the way, the father and son realize that they *have* grown apart with each other, but they’ve also got plenty to love each other over; the father comes to respect his son’s growth, and the son learns to not be a little shit to his adoring father.
Because anyone reading this that isn’t me is Like That, you know I’m talking about A Goofy Movie.
Let’s ignore for a minute that I hold stuff from Disney in contempt, because that’s neither here nor there–and besides, to this movie’s credit, the basic idea is solid. This is treated as an underloved classic by most people, and the plot alone is reason enough. Kids young enough to have seen A Goofy Movie when it was new have grown up enough to appreciate what it was like for their parents when their kids reached That Age. Also, Goofy is a Good Dad™. The worst thing about him is that he’s painfully unaware of Max’s hobbies, and that’s mostly because… well, it’s Goofy.
But that’s the point I wanna lead into; as good as the basic plot is, I, as the kids say, can’t take A Goofy Movie “seriously”–because this movie wants me to empathize towards Goofy.
Again, ignoring that Goofy is a Disney Character™, trying to tell a dramatic story about him is like trying to make a clowncar wreck serious. To me, it just feels cloying. You’re using a character whose entire shtick is “deeply unintelligent”. Any pathos attempted feels extremely unearned. It’s like making Grave of the Fireflies sexy.
But bear with me, because I’m not here to take a dump on people that like A Goofy Movie. A lot of the stuff I like is usually on the receiving end of this. Y’know, like Kamen Rider.
The first time I introduced a friend to Kamen Rider, it was with Kamen Rider OOO (read “ohs”). By coincidence, it was the only Rider of whom I could readily find footage on Youtube. And the person I showed it to couldn’t stand it. This was a person fairly used to the idea of tokusatsu; they’d grown up with Power Rangers after all. But OOO’s transformation and costume just ruined any kind of attempt at him “taking it seriously”.
Suspension of disbelief is one of those really hard things to pull off, and Japanese media in particular has a higher cliff to scale, I’ve noticed. It’s been pretty bewildering to me for a long time that Goofy is allowed a very personal story about paternal love but, y’know, people ugly-crying in One Piece is weird.
And like, I get it. Some stuff in Japanese pop culture can be weird. Like, take the Nopons for example.
Xenogears/Xenosaga/Xenoblade-creator Tetsuya Takahashi really likes making a) complicated stories about religion, politics, and personal morals and b) putting weird, tiny fluffballs with speech impediments into these stories as significant characters. Xenoblade Chronicles 2 has the Nopon, a species of puffball-people who speak in broken English and have the general intelligence of toddlers. A current plot I’ve encountered in my playthrough of XC2 involves Tora, a Nopon who built his own Blade-companion (as opposed to summoning one from a Crystal, like other people). It turns out Tora’s Blade, Poppy, was based off of his grandfather’s (”Granpypon”) design. His father (”Daddypon”) and grandfather aren’t around to see Poppy activated, and we soon learn why: a masked Nopon and a troop of gunmen shot the Nopon scientists dead while they worked on Poppy’s prototype.
Silly? Oh yeah. The sight of a rotund, two-foot-high puffball in a lab coat and evil-looking mask holding a flintlock pistol is some goofy-ass anime bullshit. But can we really call it sillier than Goofy getting mad at Max after Max’s lie is revealed?
Stories hinge on us being able to suspend disbelief. And I’ve spent a long time why it is much of Western pop culture has a hard time suspending disbelief when it comes to Japanese media. I never struggled with that, and I’m not entirely sure it’s because I started watching anime at a young age. I met plenty of kids who had no patience for Digimon, after all.
What is it that makes us want to buy into a story? It can’t be characters alone, because frankly I’m not a tremendous fan of the Nopon in Xenoblade. And writing isn’t enough, else I wouldn’t care that Goofy’s emotional breakdown in his car after he sees Max changed the route on his map feels plain wrong because it’s Goofy. But I’m not sure this is entirely a voluntary thing, either; I don’t want to buy into a story about a rotund mammal investigating his father’s death, but the story has won me over by virtue of its sincerity. A Goofy Movie can’t quite do that with me, even though it’s no less sincere than Tora’s search for familial justice.
I definitely feel like people who watch anime or consume Japanese media in some capacity have an easier time buying into weirder concepts, partly because so much anime has bizarre concepts from the get-go. But having written stuff myself, it’s my belief that when an author writes something it’s because they meant something. There was something they wanted to say to the world. That their mouthpiece wound up being Goofy probably shouldn’t take away from that.
A Goofy Movie is still a good movie, even if I can’t take it seriously. I’m not sure how people buy into it so willingly, given what it is and what it does, but I guess that’s something to be admired on their end. I appreciate that of them.
This all feeds into a weird thing about media, and it’s that at the end of the day a lot of what we consume has everything to do with whether or not it resonates with us. A lot of media discussion feels like a competition at times, but it’s ultimately important to remember that not everything is going to echo in someone’s heart the same way. We can’t really expect that of people or works, especially when so many different people make such different things.
So maybe the lesson here is, there’s more to something than “being able to take it seriously”. Maybe that phrase is one of those stopgap solutions people use to verbalize a much bigger feeling towards something that we otherwise can’t quite express–which, I think, is totally fair.
It’s okay if you can’t take Kamen Rider seriously. I have a hard time taking A Goofy Movie seriously.
