The Rescuers Down Under

The animation here is superb. Some sequences actually prefigure the top-notch work of the still to come The Lion King. And Eva Gabor and Bob Newhart remain charming as ever as the leads Bianca and Bernard. Still, something is a bit off in this flick. There’s just a bit too much slapstick in the story, and the tone of the tale varies a bit too much, erratically spiking high and low from scene to scene. It all reveals a movie that’s trying just a touch too hard, like the filmmakers didn’t quite trust what they were working with. So while there are impressive moments that give this movie a familial resemblance to the classics to come—this piece was released between The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast—at this juncture the studio had almost but not quite found its footing. A solid, transitional step, but still just below the heights the studio would soon achieve.

The Rescuers

It has its charms. The songs, for instance, are notable improvements over previous works' musical interludes. The main characters are sweet and likable enough, though the villains and supporting cast are mostly forgettable. The plot, such as it is, doesn’t make much sense; it seems a bit too involved for what is otherwise just dingy, small-time crime. The script lays on the schmaltz pretty thick at times, and delivers more than a few weird tone shifts. The animation--always a key ingredient when we're talking Disney--varies significantly throughout the film and from aspect to aspect. Sometimes the drawings are very good; at other times the scenes or scene elements look amateurish. Put it all together and stir it up, and you get a fair representation of mid-century, mostly lost-years Disney studio output. It's not painful to watch, but it hardly measures up to what came (well) before and what was to come (in about 15 years).

The Aristocats

An instructive example of where the Disney studio stood about 40 years into the project—and it’s not a particularly encouraging example. Nothing particularly clever lives here. Compare this film's style to the wit of Aladdin or the Pixar movies (particularly the earlier ones) and this flick hardly seems like the product of the same studio (and, in a very real sense, it’s not, when you consider the difference in eras and crews).  On the animation itself, as befits films of this timeframe, characters are more roughly drawn, though backgrounds are still beautifully rendered. Some of the musical numbers here are entertaining and even a bit sophisticated for a Disney work of this era, but at the same time, much of the comedy is juvenile and slapstick, as we’ve seen in previous outings from the same production team. In the larger picture, one thing becomes clear at this point, after having watched four decades of the filmography: Disney films back in the day were consistently backwards looking, always set in the past, and as a result—or as an intentional product, depending—are inherently regressive and conservative in outlook. It is a wonder, after all, that the studio not only became what it eventually became—today something far beyond a movie studio—but that Disney was even what it was back then: a property that had a lot of clout and cachet even in its period of decline. Bottom line for this work: it is barely above Saturday morning cartoon quality, and it would be almost another two decades before Walt’s baby would see its revival. I guess "what's in a name" is something more than we imagine.