If
you’ve ever watched a Disney cartoon featuring Goofy, you know you’re in for
some slapstick humor. The world of “A Goofy Movie” is very similar to the
animated world of a classic Goofy cartoon. While the characters generally obey
basic laws of gravity, there are also a lot of things that the film gets away
with for the sake of humor. “A Goofy Movie” is about Goofy taking his teenage
son Max on a cross-country fishing trip to bond with him because Goofy fears
growing apart from his son. Thus begins this charming musical journey of a
father and son reconnecting, but since it’s a movie starring Goofy, it can’t be
too grounded in its physical realism.
As
all animation students know, the principle of “squash and stretch” is a very
necessary tool to prevent an animated piece from looking too stiff but while
retaining the volume of a character or object. In “A Goofy Movie” many objects
are stretched beyond their physical capacities, and in many instances, what
should have been a fatal accident is merely a humorous slapstick incident. At
the beginning of the film, Max oversleeps and is woken to his dad barging into
his room to vacuum. Goofy sees that Max’s room is a mess and starts to vacuum
up everything on the floor—this includes large objects like clothing that could
never fit through a vacuum nozzle. It all gets sucked up without an issue,
which couldn’t happen in our world, but works for comedic effect in animation.
Later in the film, when Goofy is pitching a tent he is interrupted by the
arrival of his neighbor Pete’s huge trailer. The trailer sets up its many
features as soon as it’s parked, which includes blades that shoot out to clear
trees out of the area, a deck that swings out with everything (including drinks,
chairs, and flower pots) all set up, an already filled hot tub which bursts out
of the side, a basketball court, a rooftop bowling alley, and an entire pool
which is also already filled. All of this is automatically set up in a matter
of seconds. Not only could most of the objects not fit inside a trailer, but
things like water would never stay contained in something like a hot tub or
pool when “folded” back up and not in use. It would be amazing if a trailer
like this could exist in our world, but it simply cannot.
At the end of the
film, when Max and Goofy return home, Max stops by his crush Roxanne’s house while
Goofy works on some car repairs. While Max and Roxanne are talking on the
porch, the car that Goofy is working on explodes, rocketing him into Roxanne’s
roof. Goofy is perfectly fine and he and Roxanne shake hands in greeting. If
this happened in our world, Goofy would never have survived that explosion or
the impact into the roof (he also likely would not have arced into the roof in
that manner)—it works for animated slapstick purposes. However, there is
another moment near the end of the film where Goofy almost goes down a
waterfall and he and Max react as though he is in real peril, which suggests
that despite all of the slapstick humor and “low-stakes” stunts in the film,
things such as terminal velocity still exist in this animated world.
There
are many cases in “A Goofy Movie” where characters defy gravity. Near the
beginning of the film, Max tries to impress Roxanne by dressing as their pop
idol Powerline and dancing to one of his hit songs. He swings from a rope at
one point, arcing over the heads of the student assembly, doing twists and even
dunking a basketball through a hoop. In our reality, his weight wouldn’t allow
him to do so many stunts, swing that distance, or arc in such a way.
During a
montage later in the film, Max and Goofy attend a ballgame and when Goofy tries
to catch a foul ball, he falls over the balcony, gets caught on a wire, and is
dragged down to the dugout where he has time to get a player to sign the foul
ball, before rocketing back up to Max safely. Were this to happen in real life,
it would likely be fatal and Goofy certainly wouldn’t have enough time to have
a baseball signed. Because this is a light-hearted montage, we believe that
Goofy will be okay and survive these incidents, which is much different than
the emotional high stakes near the end of the film. At one point in the movie,
Goofy and Max get into a fight over map directions and while they’re out of the
car arguing, their car starts to roll down the winding road around the Grand
Canyon. This leads to many antics of the two characters trying to catch up to
their car including opening doors as it moves, Max riding his skateboard under
the car to get to the open door on the other side, the car itself running off
the road onto an unfolding thin steel road barrier and then bouncing from rock
to rock until it arcs into the river below with Max and Goofy on top of it. If
this were to happen in our reality, Max and Goofy would never have caught up to
their car and if they did, they would not have survived the journey down into
the river below. Since the car followed the cartoony rules of “squash and
stretch” it also wasn’t crushed on the rocks during its descent, and the animators
changed how it fell into a more pleasing arc for the audience to watch. Realistically,
this would have ended with the car smashing into one rock and then tumbling
into the waters below, instead of bouncing from boulder to boulder before
arcing from a boulder into the river. Despite these crazier moments of the film
disobeying the laws of gravity and the correct weight of objects, there are
moments in the film where weight does work correctly. For example, when Max and
Goofy enter one of their motel rooms, they jump onto the water beds which could
have been really over-exaggerated in the animation, but the way the beds shift
underneath them is actually pretty believable.
Finally,
there is Goofy’s “perfect cast”, which is demonstrated a couple times during
the film and deserves to be examined in its own section. Goofy first shows Max
how to do the “perfect cast” at a lake while camping. Goofy does a lot of
spinning in the air with the fishing line twirling around him—it does not
tangle at all, which it would in real life. When Goofy finally arcs the pole
backwards, the line flies all the way from the lakebed to Pete’s grill where it
snags a steak. It is somehow able to be arced back in a similar fashion but
with the heavy weight of the steak now attached to the line, which wouldn’t
happen in our world. The line flies back over Goofy’s head all the way to the
other side of the lake and lands with the steak still on the hook. The other
performance of the “perfect cast” happens in the dramatic scene near the end of
the film when Goofy is truly in peril. Max and Goofy were drifting in the river
on their trashed car when the water starts rushing as they approached a
waterfall. Goofy finds safety on a log by the river and snags the car with Max
still on top of it with his fishing line. When this inevitably doesn’t hold,
Max is saved by the fabric on the underside of the car becoming a makeshift
parachute (which certainly wouldn’t hold his weight in a non-animated world).
Goofy, trying to rescue Max, ends up back in the river and he goes over the
falls. Max then has to make the “perfect cast” in order to save his falling
dad. Not only does he have time to cast it (along with all the necessary spins)
but the line doesn’t tangle, the line somehow reaches all the way down the
falls to catch Goofy, the fishing line doesn’t break, and the makeshift parachute
is able to hold both Max and Goofy’s weight. Needless to say, neither one of
them could have survived this situation in real life and the “perfect cast” is
more like the “impossible cast”, but in this animated world it made for a very
emotional and tense scene.
“A
Goofy Movie” has many impossible moments in it, but it makes good use of its
slap-stick animated world. It does not follow many laws of physics, especially
when it comes to gravitational forces affecting certain weights and terminal velocity
(except when it was a real threat during the dramatic climax of the film), but
these laws are broken for a purpose. The creators intentionally broke them to
add to the comedic value of the film and to support the “goofy” world that
these characters exist in. I am incredibly charmed by this movie, and I was delighted
to examine its improbable physics.
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