Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 #178 Arthur and the Invisibles (2006)

Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.

Or you can be like three kind patrons and use this column to commission a series of pieces about a filmmaker or actor. I’m deep into a project on the films of the late, great, fervently mourned David Bowie and I have now watched and written about every movie Sam Peckinpah made over the course of his tumultuous, wildly melodramatic psychodrama of a life and career.  

This generous patron is now paying for me to watch and write about the cult animated show Batman Beyond and I also recently began even more screamingly essential deep dives into the complete filmographies of troubled video vixen Tawny Kitaen and troubled former Noxzema pitch-woman Rebecca Gayheart. I also recently began a series chronicling the films of bad boy auteur Oliver Stone.

I’ve written about some of David Bowie’s biggest and most important films and performances for this column but I’ve gravitated towards oddball projects even hardcore fans probably don’t know exist, obscurities like B.U.S.T.E.D, Just a Gigolo, Bandslam, The Hunger TV show and August. 

I may not know how to drive a car. I may not know how to tie a tie. I may not know how to get a job but I know a fuck-ton about crazy-ass movies. That’s kind of my thing. It’s my area of expertise, I suppose you could say. 

Yet until this morning I was only vaguely aware of the existence of 2006’s batshit crazy Arthur and the Invisibles, a racially problematic Luc Besson live action/CGI animation hybrid featuring a stomach-churning romance between a fantastical creature voiced by a very grown-up Madonna and a small child played by Freddie Highmore and a supporting cast that includes Robert freaking De Niro, Harvey Keitel, Snoop Dogg, Madonna, Jason Bateman, Jimmy Fallon and David Bowie as the much-hated, much-feared Emperor Maltazard. 

Casting Bowie as a larger-than-life bad guy is one of the many ways that the film limply rips off The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth, Jim Henson’s legendarily dark and disturbing Reagan-era exercises in puppetry and mind fuckery. 

Imagine the offspring that would ensue if the puppets from Labyrinth and The Dark Crystal procreated randomly with Trolls and the monstrosities of Foodfight! during a week-long psychedelic mushroom-fueled orgy and you have a sense of the film’s character design. The animation can more succinctly be described as hideously ugly.

Arthur and the Invisibles opens with twenty five minutes of live action footage involving Arthur Montgomery (Freddie Highmore), a big-eyed little boy obsessed with his missing engineer grandfather’s adventures in faraway Africa that are so syrupy and maudlin that they inspire false confidence that the movie can’t help but improve once it shifts from live-action to animation. 

Then Arthur enters the fantastical animated world of the Minimoys, tiny creatures in a magical land and I experienced intense instant nostalgia for the comparatively sublime live-action opening where Arthur is an obnoxiously precocious little human boy and not some weird Minimoy hybrid. 

As a filmmaker Besson does not trust his audience. So he has narrator David Suchet over-explain, in the most literal possible fashion, a plot that is already almost insultingly simple, a lazy hodgepodge of characters and themes from better children’s films. He then slathers on the sugary strings to further drive home that we are truly in magical realm of fantasy and wonder whether we like it or not. 

A big old meanie is going to foreclose on Arthur’s grandmother’s house unless he’s able to find a bag of rubies an African tribe gave his grandfather in appreciation for the incredible gifts he has given them through his western knowledge. 

The many, many bizarrely problematic racial elements in Arthur and the Invisibles would be more understandable if it were an adaptation of a children’s book from an earlier era, before we realized that, actually, colonialism is bad. 

But nope, Arthur and the Invisibles is an adaptation of a new children’s book Besson himself wrote a few years before he adapted it for film, which makes many of its choices even more bewildering. 

For example the African tribe that the missing grandpa helped, almost as if he were some manner of “White Savior” is treated as only slightly less otherworldly and fantastical than the Minimoys, a people it has a powerful spiritual connection with. 

The African tribesmen are unmistakable others, magical black men who appear mysteriously at Arthur’s home and tell him of his destiny to save the Minimoys by venturing into their world so that he might defeat the villainous Emperor Maltazard and retrieve the bag of rubies that he can use to keep his grandma’s home from being foreclosed. 

Arthur understandably asks if maybe one of the muscular, experienced, adult African tribesmen might be better suited to this kind of epic quest but they tell him no, obviously only an annoyingly precious little white boy has a heart pure enough for the job.  

Later Arthur and his band of adventurers encounter Max and Koolamassai, fantastical creatures voiced by Snoop Dogg and Anthony Anderson respectively that look disconcertingly like racist caricatures of Rastafarians and, for good measure, behave like racist caricatures of people from the Caribbean as well. 

Max.

Amazingly, in Besson’s original cut of Arthur and the Invisibles the characters are even more racist. Before the Weinstein Company cut nine minutes, Max smokes what sure looks like a blunt at one point and casually references his seven wives while dancing with the movie’s female lead.

Max operates a club where he gets patrons fucked up on mind-altering “Genie Soda” and a DJ spins “Staying Alive” and “You Never Can Tell” and, despite this movie TAKING PLACE IN 1960 and not HAVING A SINGLE OTHER POP CULTURE REFERENCE the Princess Madonna voices and her brother pay tribute to John Travolta’s cinematic legacy by imitating moves from Saturday Night Fever and Pulp Fiction because if you made a shitty kid’s movie in 2006 you were legally required to throw in some pandering pop culture references for the bored adults in the audience whether it makes sense to do so or not. 

It pains me deeply to write this, but the Weinstein edit makes a lot of sense. The nine minutes of cuts also eliminated much, if not all, of the exceedingly yucky, wildly inappropriate romance between Arthur, a small child, and Princess Selenia (Madonna), who is a thousand year olds in Minimoy but confusingly the same age as Arthur in human years. 

The ostensible advantage to hiring huge stars like Madonna, David Bowie, Jimmy Fallon and Robert De Niro for a film like this is that cheap but potent buzz of familiarity that comes with recognizing a voice that you know and love. 

The problem with Arthur and the Invisibles is that the characters are so generic and blandly conceived and the actors voicing them so insanely famous and iconic that it becomes impossible to buy them as the characters they’re voicing. 

For example Jimmy Fallon voices Prince Simono Matradoy de Betameche, Madonna’s brother and Robert De Niro’s son. In a possibly related development, Arthur and the Invisibles was briefly the most expensive French film of all time and that money sure didn’t go for the Foodfight!-level animation. 

When Betameche speaks I don’t hear or see an impish Minimoy with a flair for mischief and shenanigans: I see and hear Jimmy Fallon, popular, troubled host of The Tonight Show and former “Weekend Update” anchor. That’s all I see. I did not lose myself in the film’s fantasy world because, to borrow a phrase from our British friends, its fantasy world is a bit shite. 

The same is true of Madonna. When her character Princess Selena speaks I don’t see a fantasy princess: instead I see a middle-aged Madonna sitting in front of a microphone and nursing a cup of Starbuck’s while she bangs out her entire more or less lead performance in a matter of hours. 

Though his character is referenced throughout the first two acts of the film, always with a sense of both awe and terror, Bowie’s Emperor Maltazard isn’t introduced until the third act. 

He’s the big boss our tiny heroes must defeat in order to realize their heroic destiny and while Bowie lends the character a larger-than-life, theatrical menace not even he can do anything with a role that’s at once under-written and overwrought. 

Despite bombing in the States, Arthur and the Invisibles did well enough internationally to inspire two sequels. Bowie understandably did not return and was replaced, amusingly enough, by a figure who looms large in Bowie’s mythology: his friend and collaborator Lou Reed. Iggy Pop similarly scored a role in an Arthur and the Invisibles sequel and I like to think that if they make any more they’ll make sure to give Robert Fripp and Brian Eno both roles so they can get everyone from Bowie’s golden years.

Yes, Besson clearly wanted Arthur and the Invisibles to be his Labyrinth, complete with Bowie as the bad guy. Instead this misbegotten boondoggle reminds me of a much less auspicious, infinitely less beloved George Lucas production, the half-forgotten animated 2015 jukebox musical Strange Magic, which was as embarrassing in its own way as Jar Jar Binks and the Star Wars Holiday Special, if much less memorable and distinctive. 

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