The Hunchback of Notre Dame

1996 cartoon

Rating: 14/20 (Jen: 17/20; Abbey: 20/20)

Plot: When I was in fourth grade, I was in desperate need of an identity. So I started wearing leather pants and gave myself a nickname--Quasimodo. Only I didn't know how to spell it. I insisted that all my friends call me Quasimodo--it was Quasi for short--and even my teachers in fourth, fifth, and sixth grade called me that. Imagine how embarrassed I became when I found out that Quasimodo was a lonely ugly hunchbacked character who spent all his time in a belfry masturbating to figurines he's made in the likeness of the townspeople!

This is a very hit 'n' miss affair from the Disney folk. They handle dark and mature very well here, but that butts heads with the comic relief, almost all of it provided by a triad of gargoyles and almost all of it falling completely flat. Timon and Pumbaa have become gargoyles, make a bunch of fart jokes, threaten to spit on mimes, and are--to me, a non-child--extraneous. And contrast those gargoyle gags with scenes where babies are being thrown into wells because they're demons who need to return to hell where they belong, and it just seems to silly. That's pretty freakin' dark for a child though, right? Add Esmeralda's pole dancing, a scene which seemed racy and inappropriate for young viewers but succeeded in making me really horny and a villain who's just a little too complex to be understood by most children and just as horny as I am and you've got a movie that doesn't seem kid-friendly. But then you've got the gargoyles who seem like they're thrown in to say, "Hey! Don't worry because this is a children's movie after all!" This leans more toward opera than it does musical at times, and it takes a while to get used to the style of song. A lot of them are depressingly boring songs, including a big number at the beginning that is probably called The Bells of Notre Dame," a song in which they embarrassingly mispronounce Notre. Notra? Tell that to South Bend, Goofy! The "You're So Ugly So You Have to Stay in the Belfry, Ugly Guy" song is another stinker, but "Out There" is good enough to be considered as a minor Disney classic and the song the villain sings about Hellfire and the number in the Court of Miracles are pretty great. The animation is so-so. The scenery, the streets of Paris and the innards of the church are really well done except they goofed and forgot to put an Eiffel Tower in there. Esmeralda's animated well enough to give a dead gypsy wood, but Quasimodo is kind of ugly. A Disney hero should be better looking than that. What kind of kid is going to want to play with a Quasimodo action figure? Chester McBlondy (I don't remember the name of the other tip of the love triangle) has a bad haircut, so nobody's going to want that action figure either. Add him to the pile of uninteresting, wooden Disney hero guys. I don't really like how the characters move in this either. There's an unnatural glitchiness that shouldn't have been there. This isn't an upper-echelon Disney feature, but it's not bad. Reboot sans gargoyles and they might have something.