You're Gonna Wanna See This!

On my deviant art account, I decided to do the impossible, and rank all the films of the Disney Renissance from weakest to strongest. You can find the journal here!

Comments

[Jesse Coffey]

I'm looking at this with interest.

I particularly take great note at the listing for The Hunchback of Notre Dame. We all know that Disney ended 1995 with their monster hit Toy Story. That was the first CGI-animated feature film production and the amount of money that the film made was such that just about everybody who went to see it probably forgot that Disney was getting desperate after the burnout experienced by Pocahontas (indeed, some people, especially Native Americans, saw the film as a stinker).

In retrospect, you wrote in the DA article that the film dealt with the themes of "religion, prejudice, racism, and sin" - and by that year, many of these subjects have already been dealt with in various PG-13 or R rated films, making The Hunchback of Notre Dame the first G-rated film to deal with the subject - as well as the first from Walt Disney Pictures proper (come on, we dare you to name a Touchstone movie that hasn't touched the same subjects - they're owned by the same company). In additional retrospect, when it was released, it competed against much more pleasant films - namely Matilda, a TriStar film directed by comedian Danny DeVito and based on a novel by Roald Dahl, and Harriet the Spy, a Paramount release of the cable channel Nickelodeon's first feature film production - both of these were applied PG ratings by the MPAA.

It also didn't help that Disney was all to eager to shove The Hunchback of Notre Dame in many faces during the year, most jarringly in a prime-time special titled Disney's Most Unlikely Heroes, which aired on ABC, a newly purchased TV operation of the Disney Studios. In the July 6, 1996 issue of TV Guide, this special was in their "Cheers and Jeers" section where it received "Jeers"; staunch criticism was lent to the "timing and the Quasimodo-steeped content" of the special, and the periodical labeled it as "yet another overt example of the Disneyfication of ABC." (It would certainly not be the last. - Ed.)