Director: Ron Clements, Jon Musker
Cast: Tate Donovan, Danny DeVito, James Woods, Susan Egan
Have I Seen It Before?: Never. After right about The Lion King (1994), the degree of my familiarity with Disney feature animation becomes spotty at best. Why now? I accidentally scratched my wife’s car, and watching this on Disney+ is my penance.
Did I like it?: And it wasn’t that much of a penance at all. Even in their relative nadir, Walt Disney Feature Animation would never let something out of the lab that was not designed within an inch of its life to entertain as many people as possible. So what’s not to like about the movie? I mean, I think there isn’t a warm-blooded creature still living who could use less James Woods in their lives, but how about those muses? Danny DeVito is always terrific, and you can’t help but smile when you hear Michael Bolton crooning over the end credits (although that might be a bit of historically revisionist criticism, I’ll admit).
There’s an element of Disney animated films that never work too well for me. The cell animation in this film is pretty great, and each character is designed as if they are the relief art on a Greek vase. Cell animation is great. I wish they continued to make more movies like this. But this is an interesting post-Toy Story (1995) era where the Mouse House (and to be fair, any other feature animation of the era) felt the need to fuse computer generated images with their cell-animated characters. It most often happens in action sequences, and it never looks quite right. I am not sure if it was a cost-saving measure, or if there was a sensibility that merging these two styles would be the cutting edge of artistry, but twenty-plus years later, the seams will always show.