The 90s on Netflix: Stuart Little (1999)
Review Overview
Fantasy
7Reality
4Mouse privilege?
5.5Mark Harrison | On 01, Oct 2023
Director: Rob Minkoff
Cast: Michael J Fox, Nathan Lane, Geena Davis, Hugh Laurie, Jonathan Lipinicki
Certificate: U
Do you remember the 1990s? Mark does. On Fridays, he flashes back to the golden decade of our childhood. From family-friendly films to blockbusters we shouldn’t have been watching, get ready for a monthly dose of nostalgia, as we put down our VHS tapes and find out whether the 90s on Netflix are still Live & Kicking.
Coming to write about 1999’s Stuart Little, this writer realised with a shiver that it hits the upper boundary for the 90s on Netflix. Originally released in US cinemas on 17th December 1999 but – not in the UK until July 2000 – this is effectively the very last family movie of the 1990s. If this were a 1980s cop movie column, it would be like reviewing Tango and Cash.
Based on EB White’s 1945 novel about a boy who happens to look like a mouse, the movie makes Stuart (voiced by Michael J Fox) a literal mouse. Initially shunned by his big brother, George (Jonathan Lipinicki), and house cat Snowball (voiced by Nathan Lane), this precocious new arrival finds himself on a series of adventures that challenge his idea of where he truly belongs in the world.
If you’re not extremely online, the common bugbear about the movie goes like this – how do Mr and Mrs Little (Hugh Laurie and Geena Davis) have the audacity to go to an orphanage and insist on adopting a mouse instead of a human child that would better fit the oversized upper-middle-class lifestyle they give to him?
With nostalgic appeal that spans both the youngest millennials and the oldest Zoomers, this is almost unique in the decade, but it speaks to a divide in the style of family films in the 90s and the 2000s and a difference in perspective between those who grew up with the Disney Renaissance versus those who grew up with the Shrek films.
Reversing the usual setup for this kind of domestic upset, the gag is that all the adults in the story – from Mr and Mrs Little to the extended Little family (led by Estelle Getty, in her final film role, and Jeffrey Jones) – instantly take Stuart at face value and the scepticism falls to the kids and the other animal characters. Like many of the family movies in the following decade, it winks in a way that simultaneously acknowledges the smarts of the target audience, but that also undercuts the tone it’s going for.
Director Rob Minkoff almost essays something like a proto-Paddington, even if it’s once or twice removed in its execution. Perhaps inevitably for a movie that cost more than $100m to make, it strafes the more fantastical stuff in the source material and rushes to more generic ground. It always seems as though the fun and games of the first half have been ruthlessly pared down to a sequence of sketches to get to the more knowing and bottom-heavy second half, with its gangster-coded cats and assorted plot twists.
Speaking of twists, we know we’ve done this rug-pull in the column before, but like She’s All That) and The Sixth Sense, this is another 1999 script written by M. Night Shyamalan (along with Greg Brooker). This time, though, it’s only surprising that he wrote it until you go back and rewatch it – it’s full of the surreal deadpan whimsy that would only blow up in scale in his subsequent scripts. Julia Sweeney’s monologue about two mouse characters being crushed to death by canned goods wouldn’t have looked out of place in The Happening – “heavy soup”, indeed!
But the centre of the uncanniness is Stuart himself, a glaringly 1999 CG-creation that also has the voice of then-38-year-old Michael J Fox. While his performance is as charming as we’ve come to expect, it’s a tall order for this Little guy not to feel miscast, on top of the scattershot tone. The rest of the vocal cast – including Nathan Lane, Bruno Kirby, Jennifer Tilly, Steve Zahn and Chazz Palminteri – are more suited to their assorted grown-up stereotypes.
Released in the wake of Toy Story 2, the film held its own at the US box office throughout December and well into the New Year, eventually grossing a worldwide total of $300 million. Stuart Little 2 didn’t fare quite as well in summer 2002, and the third instalment was a fully animated feature that went straight to DVD in 2006. (More recently, Sony Pictures Animation has announced it’s developing a reboot in the hybrid live-action/animated style of the original.)
Stuart Little may be the last family movie of the 1990s, but it’s far from the first of the decade to try and normalise a heightened fantasy story in the screen adaptation and inadvertently create something far weirder instead. It’s not even the best movie in which Nathan Lane is furious with a mouse that we’ve covered in this column – that would be 1998’s Mouse Hunt). Still, it’s a gentle, mainstream oddity, which has charmed as many fond fans as it has apparently enraged class-conscious critics with its flagrant displays of mouse privilege.
Next time on the 90s on Netflix…
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