I really liked it; currently reading the book now. Obviously there are some big differences but I think it was a good film.
Thoughts?
I really liked it; currently reading the book now. Obviously there are some big differences but I think it was a good film.
Thoughts?
We bought it when my daughter was old enough because my wife and I were both nursed on Disney cartoons. I will give it credit for having some GREAT music--the opening "Bells of Notre Dame", Frolo's "Hellfire"--, a very powerful villain character, a complicated and wholly untidy love triangle and some very unDisney criticality of human nature.
However, I am so very, very disappointed in it's simultaneous GLARING weaknesses in the part of the gargoyles. I think that things were so serious and adult with Frollo's complex/sexual villain and with the unresolvable fact that a good person if ugly enough is not considered a person, even by his closest friends, frightened the movie-makers into adding silliness that really detracted. I am all for silliness in it's place, but in this particular film it is so grating, forced and just lame, that the movie doesn't hold up as well as others.
'Little Mermaid' is actually a film of incredible solidarity, beauty and complexity--obviously as far as children's movies go--and 'Hercules', though flawed in a similar way to Hunchback, is underrated with an INCREDIBLE soundtrack and probably the strongest trio of love-interests and villain of any of the Disney films.
Haha, my mom bought that movie for me when I was in third grade and I LOVED it! She wouldn't let me watch it before bed because it was too late when she brought it home and I had school the next morning, so I got up at four am and watched it twice in a row before I had to get to class. I've probably seen it about eighty times. I sang that "Hellfire" song in front of class, and I bought these two colorful scarves so that I could dance around like Esmeralda. *sigh* Childhood. Good times.
__________________
"Personal note: When I was a little kid my mother told me not to stare into the sun. So once when I was six, I did. At first the brightness was overwhelming, but I had seen that before. I kept looking, forcing myself not to blink, and then the brightness began to dissolve. My pupils shrunk to pinholes and everything came into focus and for a moment I understood. The doctors didn't know if my eyes would ever heal."
-Pi
ooooo it's so long ago. I think it was one of the last that I went to see in the cinema with my mother.
I cried all the way through the second half I think. And I had already read the cartoon version in the Dutch magazine Donald Duck. So I knew what was coming (can't remember anything though).
Apparently nothing like the oiginal... But, I guess I should watch it some time, just to feel young again.
You make me want to read the book now. And I have just started Die Verwandlung of Kafka. But I think it is time to get out of historical mode. Ater Eliot, Dumas and Defoe, it's now time for someting more modern before I turn into a fossile myself
.
One has to laugh before being happy, because otherwise one risks to die before having laughed.
"Je crains [...] que l'âme ne se vide à ces passe-temps vains, et que le fin du fin ne soit la fin des fins." (Edmond Rostand, Cyrano de Bergerac, Acte III, Scène VII)
*sigh* Where are those innocent days *sigh*Originally Posted by JuniperWoolf
great about getting up at four
One has to laugh before being happy, because otherwise one risks to die before having laughed.
"Je crains [...] que l'âme ne se vide à ces passe-temps vains, et que le fin du fin ne soit la fin des fins." (Edmond Rostand, Cyrano de Bergerac, Acte III, Scène VII)
I thought that it had some themes that were a little bit too mature for the audience it attracted. Young children shouldn't be exposed to such lustful themes. You've never seen such things done so explicitly in another Disney animated feature.
Les Miserables,
Volume 1, Fifth Book, Chapter 3
Remember this, my friends: there are no such things as bad plants or bad men. There are only bad cultivators.
I only saw it once because my mom didn't like it (probably because she felt it was "too serious" as others have said). However, I do think the theme is an excellent one, and I can't remember it being so violent or having such sexual overtones that a young child would be damaged by it.
As for the gargoyles, one must remember that it is a Disney film, and comic relief is essential in keeping the attention of young children!
Another much overlooked Disney film is Mulan... not necessarily a rendition of a classic book, but a very strong story with likable characters and a deeper-than-usual story.
I really like Mulan. It was the last of Disney's great films.
Hunchback really creeped me out when I was younger. Saying that, most of the Disney films creeped me out.
It was pretty gutsy of Disney to do Hunchback- after all, it doesn't exactly spring to mind as making a good Disney film.
Gotta love the gargoyles- good comic relief. It's probably the least comic Disney film (like when that old guy says 'I'm free' and then he falls in the stocks or when the gargoyles are playing with a newton's cradle of hanging figures.
As for the lust, I'm pretty sure that it would go over most children's heads. The whole damnation and seemingly happy ending (because they have a prety downbeat song for the credits) might be more of a worry if you're showing it to children but good on Disney for showing darker sides to life and genuine problems.
Kids are funny critters. I remember being terrified of Ursula in the little mermaid and the ugly stepsisters in Snow White, but being perfectly fine with Pinocchio being eaten by a whale, Mowgli being stalked by a Shera Khan, and the mean witch in Sleeping Beauty. I also remember being more fascinated than frightened by the demons in the last Fantasia sequence.
Prompted by this thread, I just watched it today for the first time in about nine years. No wonder I'm the way that I am with childhood heros like Esmerelda, she's a fantastic character.
__________________
"Personal note: When I was a little kid my mother told me not to stare into the sun. So once when I was six, I did. At first the brightness was overwhelming, but I had seen that before. I kept looking, forcing myself not to blink, and then the brightness began to dissolve. My pupils shrunk to pinholes and everything came into focus and for a moment I understood. The doctors didn't know if my eyes would ever heal."
-Pi
I personally think Disney hasn't done anything groundbreaking since Bambi, after that it has been the same standard stuff coming out. Some are good, some are bad, but Disney hasn't really made anything genius since their first four features: Snow White, Pinocchio, Fantasia, and Bambi. They lost that spark of innovation after WWII.
"If the national mental illness of the United States is megalomania, that of Canada is paranoid schizophrenia."
- Margaret Atwood
I've heard this, but honestly I think it is not true. I think that those early works have the quality of nostalgia around them, and even a modicum of reverence, but they are not near the quality of the early 90's work.
Little Mermaid, Aladdin, Beauty and the Beast and Lion King are all very funny, moving, musically astounding and engaging to wide audiences. The only difference that I can gather is that people consider the older films more "classic" while they admit the newer ones are more engaging story-wise, more funny, more morally complex and faceted and mostly--and this is coming from PhD's in musical performance--more musically impressive. I love some of the older films, but the characters are often flat and faced with no real choices, they are also--as far as moral delving goes--completely unprobing.
It's not merely a matter of nostalgia, although I'm sure it plays a part. Snow White is the first full length animated film ever to be made. Everything in that film is an innovation for the medium of animation. I haven't seen anything in a recent Disney movie that approaches the brilliance of the silhouette fight between Bambi and the buck, or the forest fire from the same film. The use of shadows and colouring in "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" scene of Fantasia is still beautiful over 60 years later. I admit being more interested in the visuals and less in the plots and music. It seems that in recent years Disney just hasn't been as experimental as it used to be when Walt was at its head. I've never really liked the musical aspect of Disney, except for maybe in Fantasia. Disney's early films are practically fully responsible for the "naturalistic" animation style that has dominated animated features since Snow White was in theaters (Disney owes a lot to the animation of Winsor McCay though). Everything that followed has just felt like a rehashing and modernization of the same things done before.
1912 animated film by Winsor McCay - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvzAJ...eature=related
"If the national mental illness of the United States is megalomania, that of Canada is paranoid schizophrenia."
- Margaret Atwood
I think you are absolutely correct OrphanPip about Snow White being innovative as the FIRST feature length cartoon. And of course, the films of the first few decades will all be more 'innovative' than later ones, but I think this is what I was getting at.
The earlier films where groundbreaking because they were prototypes, but not archetypes. I think people confuse the terms often in art. Things that are the first are rightly praised for innovation but I think they get too much credit in the larger scheme of things. The later films, in my opinion, are superior examples of the fine art of filmmaking. Maybe not revolutionary--because they came 60 years after the first ones--but more refined, more well voiced, more well written.
The complaint I have is that Disney prettied up the hunchback. The look that Disney gave the hunchback is ludricrous. I mean, read the book, good god. Come on.
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