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.
The story itself takes some characters and situations from the novel and changes them around: Here Phoebus (Kevin Kline) is a subordinate of Frollo’s, and Clopin (Paul Kandel) more a jester than the explicit leader of the city’s truants. It’s surprising how much the movie leaves in, even when it sometimes completely inverts the underlying meaning: Quasimodo is indeed crowned as king of the fools and is tormented by the crowd; he does mount a dramatic rescue of the woman who saved him, the condemned Esmeralda (Demi Moore); he does defend the cathedral with medieval-style anti-siege tactics; and the story does end with Frollo falling off the top of the cathedral (smote by God instead of murdered by a despondent Quasimodo, though).
Of course, the ending to The Hunchback of Notre Dame is nothing like the novel, in which Phoebus is a womanizing creep, Esmeralda is executed and her body is found in a charnel house with a hunchback’s bones embracing hers. Instead, Quasimodo and Phoebus set aside their rivalry for Esmeralda’s love and Quasimodo accepts that he’s just her friend. He puts their hands together in the end to signal that he is happy with his fate, as he is not pretty enough to date the hot girl. I hate this movie.
None of that is the centerpiece, though. “Hellfire,” Tony Jay’s big number, is.
This is a musical number in which the movie’s antagonist (who cops a feel on Esmeralda and sniffs her hair earlier in the film!) sings about how his pure lust for her is burning his soul to ashes as the ghostly apparitions of Catholic guilt judge him. This movie came to us a scant few years before the sex abuse scandals that rocked the Catholic church in 2001, and it’s impossible to imagine it coming out around that time.
Many wail and wring their hands about this scene, and the movie that surrounds it. How did this get into a Disney movie? Why did they think this was for kids?
I’m going to give my own humble opinion and judge the movie as a misfire for a completely different reason: It didn’t go far enough.
Imagine if you will, The Hunchback of Notre Dame with the same lavish animation, even the same propensity for its characters to break out in song, but with plots and characterizations faithful to the original movie: A murderous Quasimodo mistaking the truands storming the cathedral as wanting to kill Esmeralda rather than help her, so he kills Clopin in the confusion. The last scene of the movie is Quasimodo’s ashen bones, crumbling to nothingness in lovingly hand-animated detail before the cut to credits. It would have sent my most insufferable 7th grade teachers to the asylum and prompted the cool ones to find any excuse for their class to incorporate a 15th century French history unit so they could wheel a VHS deck into the classroom and screen it. They should’ve shot for a version that never would’ve made it into Kingdom Hearts.
I guess I’m a wet blanket, though: The critical reception of the movie wasn’t bad, it made a decent haul at the box office, and there wasn’t any worse a backlash against it among the religious nuts as there is for any other Disney movie. Some religious groups actually praised it for centering Christianity in its narrative, which it definitely does. (Victor Hugo’s estate and scholars of his work, of course, hated it.)
Menken, whose compositions single-handedly made the Disney Renaissance what it was, reportedly asked to work on the project because of the themes of social stigma, sympathy for outcasts and the abuse at the core of Quasimodo and Frollo’s relationship. It feels closer to Little Shop of Horrors than anything else he ever did for the Mouse House. Since then, Disney has never gone that dark (or that horny) again, and it never will. I want to like the movie, but it wants to pull back from the tragedy at its core right when it’s getting interesting. It stands on the fiery precipice of being a haunting work, but in the end, it’s just Disney.
Join us next month as Walt Disney’s Century sails the high seas to theme park ride adaptations with Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl.
You can follow Kenneth Lowe on Twitter @IllusiveKen until it collapses and read more at his blog.