Belated film reviews: Gotta Kick It Up!

Despite not having access to Disney Channel when I was a kid, I managed to grow up on various programs and films from the network, but, unsurprisingly, the best-known ones. At this stage in my life, I have seen High School Musical and Camp Rock at least ten times, as they were always broadcast several times around Christmas time, and I couldn't help but sit down and watch them almost every time. I have always loved The Lizzie McGuire Movie, as I have been a Hilary Duff fan since my teenage years. In France, we used to have a program called KD2A, which was on air on Wednesday and Saturday mornings as well as every day during the holidays, and they would play various teenage-orientated TV shows, including some Disney Channel ones, such as That's So Raven, Lizzie McGuire, Phil Of The Future, or Even Stevens, which I watched religiously.

I was still in the dark when it came to the material that hadn't reached France at a time when I had the cable (until 2002) or at all, and it was one of my main reasons behind getting a Disney+ subscription. Times were hard, hard, lemon hard, and I wanted to catch up on all things Disney Channel.

The latest installment in my various lists and catching up was Gotta Kick It Up!, which has weirdly been translated into Cadence in French. (Since I currently am in the country of the baguette, my Disney+ is translated into French, so I have to research every title beforehand because typing in the original title leads you absolutely nowhere.)

The plot is quite simple, and at the same time, right up my alley. In a high school in California, the dance team coach retires, leaving the group without an activity. They then work at convincing their new biology teacher, who they found out attended the legendary Juilliard school, to become their coach. That's the premise, and as I love nothing more than a story of an underdog rising to the top, I was on board.

Let's set the scene. Somewhere in California, in their school, girls are dancing in the courtyard, in class, quite literally everywhere. See, if anyone had started randomly dancing in my cafeteria when I was in high school, they'd probably have had food thrown at their person, but because this is a Disney Channel movie about talented dancers, everyone is fine with it, encourages the girl, and claps along. One thing I truly loved was that the large majority of the characters in the film were of Latin descent, pretty much everyone except the biology teacher and some people dancing in other teams. For all its flaws and all the not-so-great material Disney Channel has released over the years, they have always been at the very least decent about representing minorities, and Gotta Kick! It Up and its diverse cast are a great proof of that. Also, one of the stars of the movie is America Ferrara, who I mostly know for being Carmen in The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants series.

Quite early on, the girls from the dance team find out their coach has retired, and there is no one to take the spot, as it is a voluntary activity outside of one's working hours. I didn't know what to expect when they said dance team, as the only other Disney Channel film I saw with a dance team was Zapped, starring Zendaya, which is one of the single most bizarre things I have ever seen with my own two eyes, so I didn't exactly register the dancing abilities of anyone involved. Considering the clothing on the film pictures, I thought it would be something similar to cheerleading, which I guess it is. I mean, pompoms and chants are involved. In the meantime, Mrs. Bartlett, a woman who used to work in an Internet company, which, as the film came out in 2002, was a bit of a novelty, ends up a biology teacher who struggles with her authority, amongst other things.

One of the girls in the team, Esmeralda, while being an office aide, finds out that Mrs. Bartlett used to attend Juilliard School, in New York City, and, at this point, anyone who's ever heard about the performing arts industry in the United States, theatre, or has seen about six seconds of any given Glee episode knows that going to Juilliard is one hell of a big deal. The girls share the info and resolve to convince their teacher to join, and, after much effort, she does. She tries to hold auditions in the gym, but it clashes with the basketball team practicing, and they end up in shop class, using the car radios to play the CDs while the girls dance. Is shop class truly a thing? Because I remember it existing in One Tree Hill, too. Do many high schools have the option for you to learn how to be a mechanic? Is it that widely available?

As soon as the team starts practicing and rehearsing, you can tell there is a conflict bubbling between Mrs. Bartlett and the girls. The girls are very obviously not used to such structure when it comes to their dancing, and the team has the reputation for never winning anything at all. On her side, Mrs. Bartlett comes across as serious and slightly uptight. Also, she shows up to dance rehearsals in jeans a lot. The team struggles to listen to each other and come up with a routine, but when they do, they head to a local competition that goes south. After that, Mrs. Bartlett closes up, bottles up her feelings, and refuses to go to any other competition until the girls are ready.

While we are mostly shown the girls as a team and as a community who works together to spice up the old school costumes their principal has finally found, the clear shining star of the group is Daisy. Daisy ends up in the dance team to avoid the month-long detention she got for talking back to a teacher and is the one that clashes the most with Mrs. Bartlett. You can tell she adores to dance, but never thought she could do anything substantial with it, never thought it could be more than a hobby for the courtyard in between classes. At one point in the film, the girls, after failing at convincing Mrs. Bartlett to sign them up for a competition, go behind her back and attend without her. They get third place and also in quite a lot of trouble, but most importantly, the representative of a local performing arts school contacts Daisy and tells her she's got potential, which becomes a major plot point in the film. See, I love the story of an underdog rising to the top, and Gotta Kick It Up! gives me a lot of that. None of the girls in the school are from a well-off environment. Their school doesn't have the budget for many things, and they have to raise money by washing cars and selling food. The costumes are outdated, even by 2002 standards. The girls' proficiency in using a sewing machine when they are all teenagers may imply that they have come from families where it was normal to fix clothes instead of buying new ones. And Daisy is the perfect example of that. While we never see her family in the film, we know she thinks she cannot get into the dance school because her parents can't afford it. Her boyfriend Chuy, who is worryingly older than her, has dropped out of school to work in a garage, and it is presented as totally normal until Mrs. Bartlett questions it.

In the meantime, an old colleague of Mrs. Bartlett's visits her and offers her a job interview for a new internet-based website destined for teenage girls, and implies that she would be paid a lot more there than she is as a teacher. You can see her hesitating, but in true Disney Channel Original fashion, she goes to the interview, turns the job down, and supports the girl into going to the next competition. We also see her sharing her experience about her time at Juilliard, where she left after two weeks because she didn't think she could measure up, and she was broken up about it, wondering every day what could have happened if she had stayed, which comes back when Daisy argues with her boyfriend, who thinks dancing and competitions is taking too much of her time, and she yells "I don't want to wonder, Chuy, I want to know!"

And I'm an adult, and probably not the target audience for Disney Channel flicks about teenage girls participating in dance competitions, but it feels refreshing, in this day and age, to watch something, and the takeaway of it is "what matters is not being the best, but your best," and watching the main character choose herself over the boyfriend until the boyfriend cleans up his act and supports her.

Disney Channel Original Movies rule (for the most part.)