Robin Hood (1973)

In a vacuum, this might be a decent, kid-friendly retelling of the old legend. But this movie did not drop in a vacuum. It showed up not just as the Disney studio was losing its way, but also within the context of movie history. Seriously, can one really argue that this animated, animal-oriented version of the story is in some way a better choice than Michael Curtiz’ 1939 classic, even for kids? As someone who used to be a 7-year-old boy, I’d take Errol Flynn over a cartoon fox any day, and I dare say young girls would appreciate Olivia de Haviland more than this flick's foxy lady. This film’s cartoony silliness doesn’t out-amuse or outshine or outthrill the adventure depicted in the antecedent (which, to be fair, happens to be one of the greatest movies of all time). The animal characters only remove the tale a little further from the viewer, and dull the deeper impact of the story. Indeed, the decision to make this story with animal characters comes across as the product of a lazy and simplistic in mindset; i.e., “cartoons are for kids, kids like animal stories, etc.”--a paint by numbers version of moviemaking. Thus, the whole project comes across as conceptually flawed from the get-go. In the interest of fairness, I will note that some of the animation here—particularly the backgrounds, as usual at this point in the studio's history—are pretty good, and a couple of the songs are OK, if not classics (others less so). You don’t hear much about this piece of the canon these days, and it says here there’s good reasons for that. If The Mouse wants to remake this one, as it’s done with any number of its older titles, I would suggest a complete overhaul, starting with human characters. Otherwise, this work and its legacy will remain a largely forgotten piece of the total picture.