Movie Reviews
Oliver and Company
The Disney take on Oliver Twist, set in present-day New York City. Oliver is an abandoned kitten. Dodger (voiced and sung by Billy Joel) is a streetwise mutt, leader of a gang of stray dogs. Fagin is a human bum (voiced by Dom DeLuise) who is in debt to Sykes, a loan shark who drives a big black Cadillac and has two Dobermans named DeSoto and Roscoe. All the dogs ... Read more »
The Great Mouse Detective
Now we finally make some real progress at getting out of the abyss Disney animation descended into during the ‘80s with crap like The Aristocats and Robin Hood. While nobody is likely to put this on a Best Of list, it’s a quite nice little story with good characterization, good art, good humor, and an engaging story. Basil lives at 221 ... Read more »
The Black Cauldron
This was an experiment, a movie at least a decade ahead of its time, and like several Disney experiments going all the way back to Fantasia, it was a failure. There have always been scary scenes in Disney animation, but few images of real horror. The only one I can think of is the “Night on Bald Mountain” sequence from Fantasia, from ... Read more »
The Fox and the Hound
This film is a big step upward from the nadir of Disney animation reached in Robin Hood eight years before. They’re not quite back to “classic” level, but they’re making progress. They spent serious money on this one—$12,000,000, the most expensive animated film produced up to that time—and it shows. The art work is lovely, much of it reminiscent of the best of ... Read more »
Pete’s Dragon
Disney really wanted another Mary Poppins, and made two more attempts at live-action musicals with animation. The first was Bedknobs and Broomsticks, which was amusing but uninspired. This was the second, and it’s not much. It’s full of sometimes amusing slapstick, but that’s about all it has. The songs are not memorable except for one, ... Read more »
The Rescuers
The Rescue Aid Society is located in the floorboards of the United Nations, and exists to find children in trouble and deal with their situation. All the members are mice. Miss Bianca picks, for some unknown reason, the janitor to accompany her to the bayou country to rescue a little girl kidnapped from an orphanage by Madame Medusa, who needs the child to recover some pirate treasure. ... Read more »
The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh
Here, for once, is a Disney movie about whose source material I am intimately familiar. When I Was Very Young we had both Winnie-the-Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner on our bookshelf, and my mother used to read them to me at bedtime, along with a few other favorites like Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel. ... Read more »
Robin Hood
Disney made a lot of feature-length animated masterpieces, some movies that were merely competent, and a few that were not very good. Here we have the absolute nadir, the rock bottom of the long decline that began with The Sword in the Stone and didn’t really end until The Little Mermaid. Absolutely everything ... Read more »
Bedknobs and Broomsticks
This is the 26th film we’ve watched in our marathon Disney animation festival, and the first one I hadn’t already seen. It will be 23 more until we reach another I haven’t seen: Atlantis: The Lost Empire.
It was based on two books by Mary Norton—The Magic Bedknob; or, How to Become a Witch in Ten Easy Lessons, and Read more »
The AristoCats
Possibly the worst of the Disney animated features. I’ll have to see Robin Hood to be sure, something I’m not really looking forward to. Plot: A rich old bitch makes her will leaving all her money to her four cats, a mama and her three annoying kittens. After the cats are dead, the money would go to her butler, Edgar. Now imagine Edgar, overhearing this, doing ... Read more »