Don’t you want to PROTECT HIM?!
Photo: Universal Pictures

Bad‘s all-out attack on a marketing campaign would have you believe that the film is simply a female friendship story between a pink witch and a green witch, set at a girl-power Hogwarts, with ‘Defying Gravity’ and a few others , Also lesser known songs, all of which took place before The Wizard of Oz. What the marketing has largely, and perhaps cleverly, left out is that even though this is a musical film, an Ariana Grande film, and a magic film, it is a talking animal film. Bad is a very strange show. The first act of the show – what this entire first film is based on Part two coming next year – is driven by a plot about the changing legal status and persecution of animal citizens of Oz, who are being removed from as many corners of public life as possible in a Third Reich-coded plot masterminded byspoiler warning) the magician. The animals are scapegoats for populist unrest, and the travails of goat professor Dr. Dillamond urges protagonist Elphaba to travel to the Emerald City and rebel against the Wizard. This Zootopia-inflected plot Why she sings “Defying Gravity” in the First place; Instead of accepting a position in the Wizard’s Cabinet that would give her power and acceptance at the cost of her morals, her fear for the fate of the animals is so great that she vows to expose the Wizard as an impostor, jumps on a broom and battle cries make their way into the show’s intermission.

The show features Dillamond & Co. represented by human actors walking bipedally with headgear and prosthetics. They look like steampunk furries. The flying monkeys are their own category, their ape-ness represented more by acrobatics and Serkis-like body language than by appearance. It’s all a bit ugly and a bit unremarkable, nothing like the elaborate puppets of something like that The Lion King, so it’s easy to forget that this is all part of the show. Growing up, I saw it Bad once on stage, but listened to the original Broadway cast recording hundreds of times, almost always skipping track 5: “Something Bad.” The animal nonsense takes up a fair chunk of the show’s book, but “Something Bad” is the only song on the recording where any of it is mentioned at all, and the song itself is an exposition dump that itself is unpleasant to listen to to listen. music, so I was surprised when I revisited the show as an adult and saw that Dr. Dillamond actually controlled the A-plot. Early trailers for the film hid any mention of Dillamond altogether. How could this possibly translate to the screen?

The film’s most radical adjustment, as it turns out, is making Dr. Dillamond cute, thanks Oz! Bad: Part One is faithful to the musical’s first act, but it’s also a full hour longer, so the running time is padded with extra dialogue, jokes, and world-building. A lot of that world-building is just rendering a bunch of photorealistic CGI critters in clothes. They look like the creatures in one of those lame “live-action” Disney adaptations, only a little less taxidermy/soulless around the eyes and a lot cuter because they’re wearing clothes, and because they’re not using classic 2D. character designs and make them worse (they take ugly steampunk hairy character designs and make them better). There are a lot of crazy little details in the film that get the animals in their grip: the students sneak into a speakeasy where they dance to an animal band with a sugar glider on the drums. In the Emerald City scene, two chickens wearing top hats waddle through a crowd. Fiyero (Jonathan Bailey) rides one talking horse. Within the first ten minutes of the film we flash back to Elphaba’s difficult birth, where her being born green is seen as a big deal, but it’s completely normal that the midwives are a bear, voiced by esteemed actress Sharon D. Clarke and a wolf in a little doctor’s outfit. This is all pure fairy tale shit, and Bad only makes sense if it works with open recognition of its fairytale breadth. The talking animals indicate this Bad is, like The Wizard of Oz, a fable for children, and they remind us that we should judge it accordingly, rather than bullshit our way through enjoying it.

(Okay, a quick nitpick: the fact that the plight of the animals is openly depicted as a parallel to the slow creep of Nazism – with the normalization of prejudice against animals and animals who once held positions of power in higher education were excluded from teaching – makes Glinda’s whole deal very strange. By the time the film reaches the climactic moment of “Defying Gravity,” Glinda urges Elphaba to just stop. calm down, come along to measure to apologize to the wizard means that she says: ‘Elfie, just listen to me be racist!“)

Where the CGI animals come into their own is Dr. Dillamond, voiced by Peter Dinklage. All they had to do was Dr. Making Dillamond look like a real, cute goat wearing tiny glasses Banshees of Inisherin–worthy knitwear, and suddenly, for the first time in over twenty years, I loved it Bad, I actually didn’t care about the animal storyline at all. On stage, where Dr. Dillamond is just an actor with a goat face, the “animals are to be seen, not heard” plot is just a clumsy metaphor. But on screen you see Elphaba and Glinda’s history professor as one cute little goat caused the same reaction I get at movies where a dog is in danger; it raises the stakes and makes Elphaba’s crusade real click. There are many visually interesting things about the way Dr. Dillamond lives his life as a goat in a human world: he steps on a special lever to start the projector in his classroom, and in his cozy Hagrid’s Hut-style house he has a tilting teapot and a mug with a small groove for a hoof . His friends are a snow leopard with a big white mustache and a marmoset the size of a thimble Also has a large white mustache. It’s all extremely whimsical, but it also elevates the material. When he’s subjected to a hate crime, or dragged away by authorities, that’s it extra sad because he is only A sweet little goat! This is no longer the case only an inelegant metaphor for witch hunts (ohhh(I just got it) and identity-based persecution; are O Hasard Balthazar! It is, against all odds, the best improvement the movie makes on the show.

And yet, zero cute dr. Dillamond merchandise? An outrage!