Disneyology

Robin Hood (1973)

I’ve mentioned before that Disney movies can generally be split into two categories: storybook movies (including fairy tale movies) and talking animal movies. Robin Hood is the one place where these two strands of Disney movies combined into a sort of Super-Disney movie. Like most of the fairy tale movies the film opens with a live action book being opened on a table and the story more or less plays out exactly as it would if it were a straightforward adaptation of the old late-medival folk tale, but all the characters are bipedal anthropomorphic animals. I think they went the talking animal route with this one because, unlike earlier fairy tale adaptations they did, Disney had to contend with a number of previous Robin Hood adaptations starring the likes of Errol Flynn and Douglas Fairbanks which were already classics in their own rights and they needed something to make this stand out given that it is more or less a standard re-telling of the most common Robin Hood story. The selection of animals to characters is interesting in that most of the “commoners” are European woodland creatures while most of the villains are African jungle animals, possibly to reflect that they were stand-ins for Noman rulers rather than the native brits that the “common” characters represent. Deciding to make Robin Hood a fox was certainly a smart choice and there is a certain logic in making Prince John a rather weak looking lion (especially giving his brother’s nickname).

Disney does not really have the easiest job in trying to get this story into a short 83 minute timespan. The movie starts really abruptly more or less right in the middle of the story and has to establish the historical context through dialog later in the film. The film also ends rather abruptly, with King Richard swooping in and Deus Ex Machinaing Prince John into jail. This happy ending is totally historically inaccurate BTW, Richard spent about six months of his life in England and shortly after his return from the Crusades was killed violently during a siege (as depicted in the opening scene of the 2010 Ridley Scott Robin hood) and Prince John would be his successor, but I digress. In many ways the film suffers from the same problem as Peter Pan in that it makes its villain such a source of comedy and its hero such a hyper-competent swashbuckler that there really isn’t that much suspense about how things will end up and whenever Robin Hood does make a mistake (like, provoking Prince John into punitively taxing his subjects in retaliation for Robin Hood’s blustery stunts) the film never really explores it. There is a little bit of progress though in that they seem to be giving the film a hint of an edge by making the protagonist an outlaw. The whole “rob from the rich, give to the poor” thing is a degree of moral relativism that I don’t know would have been present under Walt Disney’s squeaky clean standards. The movie also has some very slightly bawdy (by family movie standards) jokes here and there involving boobs.

In general the visual design and animation in the movie is pretty decent. It’s kind of the opposite of the last couple of movies in that the characters and objects look pretty decent but the backgrounds look really weak and washed out. The film’s voice cast is also kind of odd. Half the voice actors a British but half of them seem to be very noticeably American, including Phil Harris, who has been brought back for the third straight movie and has lazily been cast once again as an easygoing bear. The whole film has a kind of strange sense of culture, emblemized by the decision to score the movie with bluegrass music performed by an omniscient minstrel voiced by country singer Roger Miller which seems really bizarre in this context. There are a lot of strange choices here really and some of just don’t work at all and others they kind of get away with. In general this movie seems to have a rather mixed reputation today, some people view it as one more step towards an era of irrelevance at Disney, but others seem to have fond memories of it and view it as one last gasp of greatness from the old Disney. I sit somewhere in the middle on this, I think the movie has a lot of weaknesses but it is a little better to me than some of the studios worst efforts.

**1/2 out of Five


Collecting some thoughts

The usual narrative around Disney is that they totally dropped the ball shortly after Walt died and slowly ran the studio into the ground during the 70s and 80s before they were saved by the “Disney Renaissance” but it seems to me that they were already clearly slipping before then. In fact, if it wasn’t for The Jungle Book this whole era would be entirely lackluster. I started this out by asking if Wolfgang Reitherman’s hand would be noticeable and the answer is… not really. It’s obvious that something shifted during this era but that seemed to have more to do with technological and budgetary change mixed with a sort of dearth of creativity from the team, I don’t think old Woolie is really the one to blame and despite what the credits say I don’t think he had more of a singular influence over any of these movies than the parade of co-directors we saw on the earlier movies. To be fair to all involved, I don’t know that the 70s were ever going to be kind to Disney. In the film world the 70s were a very “adult” decade and one of the often unexplored reasons for this was a demographic reason. Everyone knows that the late 40s saw a “baby boom” in America and around the world and it probably isn’t a coincidence that the height of Disney’s profitability occurred during the 50s right when all those baby boomers were right in their demo, but by the late 60s and 70s those kids were grown and more interested in things like acid using motorcyclists, morose gangsters, and demonic possession. With less of a possible audience base comes less resources and lesser ambitions and the sudden dip in Disney’s output at this stage starts to make at least a little sense.

It was on TV a lot - almost always watched it. That and Robin Hood: Men in Tights.

I watched it a bunch too. I think if I watched it again I would also put it at around 2 1/2 stars which isn't a crime against humanity like Drac's Peter Pan rating.

You won't be, I'm skipping that one.  It's a short film compilation.

Tim Burton did character designs for that movie. They should get him for the live-action movie. They talked him into fucking Dumbo. They could do this.

Entering stage four of the series...

This is the installment of this series that I’ve been weary of but also morbidly curious about. The period of Disney’s history between 1974 and 1988 are infamous. They were considered a clear low point for the venerable studio (at least until they hit a new low in the 2000s) and are now largely seen as a dark age that the studio needed in order to bounce back with their famous “Disney Renaissance” in the 90s. This was caused by a number of factors: a general decline in standards that began after Sleeping Beauty underperformed, a lack of direction from a strong figure like Walt Disney, a whole lot of artistic and business infighting, a generally less hospitable environment for family movies, the list goes on and the result was a number of very bad years for the studio which nearly killed off their feature animation studio (for neither the first nor the last time) and for a brief moment saw them playing second fiddle to a rival. But were these movies really as bad as they’re made out to be? I do have some reason to suspect that they have at least a little more going for them than their reputations would suggest, or at the very least I have reason to be curious about some of them.

The Rescuers (1977)



The Rescuers is notable for being the one and only Disney movie to ever get a theatrical sequel, which is really kind of amazing for a number of reasons. Today we live in a world where sequelization is the norm rather than an exception but it’s still something Disney has avoided this trend almost entirely, at least outside of their direct to video business (which is lame but which has had the unintended benefit of preventing real sequels). That sequel actually took a full 13 years to come to fruition, to the point where it actually came out in my lifetime while the original feels like ancient history by comparison. This isn’t to say I was actually all that familiar with The Rescuers Down Under but I do vaguely remember seeing parts of it when I was a kid (there’s an eagle in it, right?). By contrast I knew almost nothing about original aside from the fact that it was about mice that presumably rescue things and was actually rather surprised to see just how much older the film was than the sequel. So of all their movies, why was this the one that got the sequel treatment? Well, to my amazement, my research tells me that this was actually a huge hit in 1977… like, to the point of being one of their biggest hits ever up to that point. It was also an especially big hit overseas for some reason and actually managed to outgross Star Wars in France. Who knew?

This amazing financial success feels strange to me mainly because it just seems like a wildly mediocre movie to me. Its basic concept just seems really lame. Mice who are in some sort of club that… rescues people for some reason? That seems less like the premise for a movie and more like a premise for a Saturday morning cartoon… in fact Disney more or less went and did that with Chip and Dale. So who are these mice rescuing? An orphan girl with seemingly no personality or character traits beyond being cute and helpless who has been kidnapped for reasons that are loopy even by the standards of Disney villain schemes. We have a villainess named Ms. Medusa who is plainly a rip-off of Cruella De Ville (and actually was Cruella De Ville in early drafts of the script) who has kidnapped this orphan and moved her across the country to what appears to be the Louisiana Bayou so she can be lowered into a cave to retrieve a large diamond that has somehow been placed into this inaccessible cave by pirates. I would think it would have been a lot easier to just pay a midget to go into the cave, but what do I know? Anyway, the mice arrive on the scene, defeat the villains with relatively little trouble and everyone lives happily ever after… and that’s it. Our heroes don’t really develop much and there’s no real allegory or moral, it’s pretty much a pure adventure story but without particularly memorable set-pieces.

So what does work here? Well, our two mice heroes are pretty likable. Eva Gabor’s is a nicely spunky heroine who exudes confidence and Bob Newhart’s Bernard makes for a nice foil to her with his general nervousness. Also, the movie is pretty decent in setting its atmosphere and creating interesting locations out of New York and the Bayou even if the animation is as muted and dull as most Disney movies from this era. I suppose the songs by Shelby Flint (which are played in the background rather than sung by characters on screen) are decent if not overly memorable. Beyond all that though, I don’t know, it certainly isn’t gratingly annoying but it doesn’t have much going for it either. As for its box office success and critical reception, I’m going to have to chalk that up to a general lack of competition. There just weren’t that many movies being made for children in the late 70s, animated or otherwise, and people looking for that sort of thing kind of had to take what they could get. In retrospect it feels like a pretty transitional film. Wolfgang Reitherman is on board as a co-director but clearly had less influence over it and there would be some turnover before their next project.

**1/2 out of Five

I remember preferring The Rescuers Down Under.

Rescuers Down Under gets lost in the shuffle, but it stood out at the time. Little Mermaid gets credit for launching the Renaissance, but really, it was Rescuers Down Under that ended Disney's late-80's period and opened the door for that streak of hit films in the 90's. The script, if I recall, wasn't anything special, but the animation was groundbreaking and signaled the direction Disney was headed in.

If you wanna get technical about it, The Rescuers is the last Disney movie by the "old guard." The Fox and the Hound was largely animated by Brad Bird, Tim Burton, John Lasseter and the Disney Renaissance team.

Burton and Lasseter, believe it or not, were fired by Disney only a few years later. Brad Bird, I think, just quit. Burton hired him to direct Family Dog for Steven Spielberg's Amazing Stories and he followed that with The Simpsons. The Disney Renaissance team were just lucky enough to stick around till Jeffrey Katzenberg took over.

You're thinking of The Black Cauldron. Most of Tim Burton's work on that movie was rejected. But he was an actual animator on The Fox and the Hound. When Don Bluth and his team left in 1979, Disney just hired the students from their training program to take over. That included Burton, who by all accounts had the best portfolio, Brad Bird, John Lasseter and the Disney Renaissance team. They had no creative control cause they were all rookies, but they're the reason the movie was completed and released on time.

In this case, I think it does matter.

The Fox and the Hound wasn't a great experience for all these rookies. At the training program, their teachers were the animators who worked with Walt Disney on all the classic films. Then, unexpectedly, they get key jobs on the latest movie and hate every second of it. The dark age of Disney is really a term they came up with since, as you noted, Disney was still releasing hits at the time. It's just that the quality of the work declined and they wanted to rectify it.

Tim Burton, somehow, talked Disney into letting him make Vincent, Frankenweenie and Hansel & Gretel. They hated it. And when he pitched The Nightmare Before Christmas, they just fired him.

John Lasseter tried to make The Brave Little Toaster the first CGI animated film and Disney fired him after seeing the test footage. They hated the project so much they gave the rights away.

And the Disney Renaissance happened because when Jeffrey Katzenberg took over, he hated The Black Cauldron so much he put the new kids in charge. The Great Mouse Detective and Oliver & Company were live-and-learn experiences and then The Little Mermaid was made.

By the time The Little Mermaid was released, Tim Burton had made Batman, John Lasseter was an Academy Award winning director for Pixar and Brad Bird was working on The Simpsons.

All this happened cause everyone hated working on The Fox and the Hound.

Yeah, it certainly matters as far as understanding Disney and Hollywood history goes.  What I meant when I called it the last hurrah for the old guard was that it was the last time they got their way and it worked out well for them.