This year, The Walt Disney Company turns 100 years old. For good or ill, no other company has been more influential in the history of film. Walt Disney’s Century is a monthly feature in which Ken Lowe revisits the landmark entries in Disney’s filmography to reflect on what they meant for the Mouse House—and how they changed cinema. You can read all the entries here.
The Walt Disney Company’s films have gone through several different eras, and in writing about their century of cinema, I’ve tried to pick movies that are representative of those eras, in all their bygone glory, through decisions prescient and questionable. Since we’re through the animated film drought of the 1970s and ‘80s, you’d reasonably think that I would pick a Disney Renaissance film from the ‘90s—Beauty and the Beast was the first feature-length animated film ever nominated for a Best Picture Academy Award! The Little Mermaid (which I’ve written about) was the studio’s triumphant return to form!
The truth is, while Aladdin would be fun to watch again, there’s nothing interesting about why it or Beauty and the Beast or The Lion King define what Mouse House historians call the Disney Renaissance. They were gorgeously animated and had rippin’ songs! Case closed! Far more interesting is how that era came to an end or where it stumbled. By the time The Hunchback of Notre Dame, one of the most bizarre entries in the Disney animated canon, had premiered, Pixar had kicked in the doors of the animated film industry with Toy Story, heralding the true beginning of 3D feature-length animation (and, like 2D animation, irrevocably placing it in the realm of kid stuff, where it remains to this day).
Before Disney had pulled out its wallet to buy Pixar, though, they still had a bunch of 2D animated musicals left in them. The back half of the Renaissance—the movies from Hercules to The Emperor’s New Groove, before the studio pivoted to straight up pulp sci-fi misfires that all but mark the end of their 2D feature-length animation—are some of the company’s most breathtaking animation. At the same time, they feature some of its most questionable creative decisions. There’s the sense that the animation studio was mad with its own success: Why not rewrite the history of the Powhatan? Why can’t we make Greek mythology family-friendly?? Who says you can’t give a Victor Hugo novel a happy ending???
This era of Disney movies was a mess, but what a beautiful mess it was. The Hunchback of Notre Dame—a movie that inspires raised eyebrows from the generation that’s been born after it came out, yet which utterly captivated Roger Ebert at the time—might be the very messiest one of all.
If you don’t believe in the sanctity of an original work when you adapt it, it’s not the end of the world. Sometimes it’s a freakin’ miracle. Something of the original work should survive, though. Victor Hugo’s novel, which is just titled Notre-Dame de Paris after the cathedral itself, is a capital-R Romantic story of lurid thrills, shocking betrayals and absurd tragedy. It’s hard to imagine why Disney settled on this to adapt. (As I watched this again, I found myself wondering what it would’ve looked like for them to adapt other Hugo works that are no less gruesome.)
I never caught this one in theaters at the time, so I don’t know how shocked audiences were at that opening sequence, which is simultaneously one of the most incredible-looking animation sequences Disney has ever produced and one of the most shockingly dark.
In 15th century Paris, a group of Roma sneak into a city that persecutes their people. (The movie calls them by another name, 25 whole years after the Roma collectively voted to reject all such names. The movie says it a lot.) The refugees are discovered by Frollo (the late, mighty Tony Jay), who has them arrested on sight. But one of them, a mother with a small child, flees in desperation. On the steps of Notre-Dame, Frollo wrenches her swaddling cloth away from her and she falls dead. Recoiling from the child’s appearance, he prepares to end its life before he’s stopped by the archdeacon, who puts the literal fear of God and French architecture into Frollo. To make amends for his gruesome crime, says the archdeacon, he must raise the boy he orphaned as his own. (In the original novel, Frollo is not an officer of the law, but an archdeacon himself. Why else would the boy, Quasimodo, live in the cathedral?)
This would be dark even for a Don Bluth film. Disney’s kiddie fare usually obscures the death of a parent somehow: Bambi’s mother simply failing to follow him into the thicket, Mufasa falling into the dust of the stampede. In this scene, Quasimodo’s mother just takes a spill, hits her head and dies right in front of us.
It just so happens that this is set to some of the best music any of the Disney animated films have ever featured, too. That’s the paradox here: The prospect of a Hunchback of Notre Dame musical is ridiculous on its face, and yet this is one of the strongest books of any musical Disney has ever made (if you cut out the stupid gargoyles). I don’t think another Disney cartoon has felt more like its songs were written like a stage musical—for humans—until Moana. It’s some of Alan Menken’s best work for Disney.