Disney animated features: the Gothic period (1977-1988)

wow, this is a kinda lousy bunch. torn between my childhood fave rescuers and what seems to be prob the most timeless of the bunch - fox + hound.

this is the Disney I grew up with. You can tell how Disney regards a movie by the number of plush toys and characters in the theme parks; this period produced none with the possible exception of The Rescuers (which I always sorta liked).

black cauldron obv a super classic book series - very important to my childhood but i don't think i ever even saw the film

The Rescuers was also the company's first major animated success since The Jungle Book (1967) and the last until The Little Mermaid (1989). The Rescuers marked the end of the silver age of Disney animation that had begun with Cinderella (1950). It also marked the first successful animated film that Walt Disney himself had not worked on.

Should be Winnie-the-Pooh, but it is older material so it doesn't feel right voting for it as part of this "era" since most of it was from earlier. So it's gotta be The Rescuers.

Geraldine Page much better in The Rescuers than in Interiors.

The only one of these I don't remember disliking is Fox and His Friend.

Voting Great Mouse Detective as I remember liking it when I saw it in the cinema as a nipper. Barely any other recollection of any of these.

My vote is actually going to go to Great Mouse Detective on behalf of my girlfriend, as it's her absolute all-time favorite and she doesn't ILX. At her insistence I watched it last year and was much more charmed than I expected from a "It's a familiar story...but they're animals!" movie. Some kinda odd characterization decisions (wish the titular character had a more fleshed-out journey from dismissive asshole to guy-who-cares), but the big set-pieces are super fun, and it's nice to see some real ambition in the action sequences again.

Most recently watched The Black Cauldron after a lifetime of curiosity (and a lot of hours sunk into the Sierra game as a kid). That one, I think, earns its reputation as a shambling mess - the seams are showing all over the place and there are just flagrantly missing sequences even beyond the ones Katzenberg personally chopped in the editing bay for 'darkness.' I mean, at one point Taran finds a magic sword laid to rest on the cobwebby sarcophagus of an ancient king, and then in the next shot he's running around swinging it at the bad guys; there's not even an attempt at showing him picking the damn thing up even though the other characters remark on the audacity of the grave-robbing. Other scenes, particularly those dealing with the Horned King's goons, have that Bakshi feel of clunky rotoscoped extras not populating the space as fully as is intended. That being said, the background paintings and some of the 'special effects' are really really wonderful in places. And John Hurt is kind of fun as the King even if the character animation doesn't quite take it far enough, making him look a lot more like a guy wearing a flat cardboard skull mask than a guy with a skull for a head. It's a film that really shows its origins as an over-budget beast that got pushed out the door in the hopes of recouping something. But definitely not...good.

I love the Prydain books too much to ever dare revisit The Black Cauldron.

By the way, Netflix has available for streaming The Rescuers, Fox & the Hound, Great Mouse Detective, and Winnie the Pooh. Check 'em out!

And yeah, the Lloyd Alexander books are awesome - tons of squandered potential I think. If the film had a little more faith in the book's plot and suppressed some of the "antics" (Gurgi, the lascivious witch - although it's amazing to see motorboating in a Disney film), it could have been something. Would also be great if it had more of a "hand-carved" or tapestry feel, like the old covers to the books (or the Sleeping Beauty introductory sequence). This is something we'll see again in the late 90s/early 00s films, Disney clearly has a hard time fully committing to "teen" level films, some superego vision of Walt seems to always come in and try to soften things up, pleasing no one.

Fox and the Hound was my first movie! Watched it with my kids recently. I still cry. I had a children's read-along book/tape of Black Cauldron and I read that until it was falling apart! Oh, that Gurgi and his munchings and crunchings... But I think when I finally got a chance to see the movie I may have been underwhelmed. Pretty unfamiliar with the rest of this lot.

ffs, I don't still cry. I don't even know why I wrote that. My kids did though.

I was pretty much Bakshi all the way during this period - don't think I've seen any of these besides The Rescuers (though probably Winnie the Pooh at some point).

young me would say that Great Mouse Detective is as good as any of the classic classics, I haven't seen it since then so I don't know how that opinion would hold up. The closing battle in and on Big Ben I remember as being pretty striking and scary.

Even five-year-old me knew that Oliver & Company was rubbish.

Yeah, I was pretty bored by Oliver back then too.

lol Fantasyland opened a fast food joint called Gurgi's Munchies and Crunchies in the mid eighties.

Oliver & Me will always stand out because of the kittens in distress opening that made 6yo me bawl, but these are all pretty bad.

i loved the great mouse detective as a kid. i'm sure it's still worth it for vincent price.

one thing i've realized by voting in these polls is that i've never been as strongly attached to the Disney movies about animals as I am to the ones about people. for that reason alone this list seems pretty bleak to me.

it distresses me a bit to see the original 'winnie the pooh' movie being grouped with the rest of this stuff, and not just because more than half of it is classic walt era material. it was always the disney movie i remembered most fondly from childhood -- no nightmares, no horrible traumatic deaths, no boring songs, no romance, no shitty sidekick characters, none of the things i hated or resented in other disney movies. rewatched it last year and was relieved to find that if anything it seems better now, as gentle and comforting and wondrous in its way as 'totoro.' and considering how crassly disney ran the pooh franchise into the ground later on, it's also rather touching how respectful the movie is of the milne books, right down to including the original text from the stories in almost every scene. it's like the filmmakers are constantly nudging you and going 'hey, there are BOOKS about pooh! go and read them!' it's still probably my favorite disney movie of all, and would make my list of top 10 animated films pretty easily.

Didn't realize that the The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh was a repackaging of the classic material. The Rain, Rain, Rain Came Down, Down, Down is a number one jam.

I don't even count Pooh as Disney tbh; the stories are too strange and haunting, even the Disney drawings.

yes -- the faithfulness to the stories gives it a distinctly 'not-disney' vibe.

The Rescuers has some pretty great moments, mostly involving Shelby Flint

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dlUYLrJkfAE

Saw two of these at the theatre. Liked "The Rescuers" and hated "Fox and the Hound", but my opinion can't be trusted because I was 9yo. when I saw the first and 13 for the second and was babysitting & had to pay for my own ticket and bus fare. (Second bad moviegoing experience of that summer: weeks earlier, my friends & I couldn't get into "Raiders" and had to settle for "Cannonball Run")

Yay, my era. Saw a few of the earlier Disney rereleases in the seventies as a kid so those were my actual first, but Rescuers was my actual first new Disney film in the theater (never saw Pooh at the time, oddly, but then again Star Wars two months later might have blotted it out). Saw all the rest on first release as well -- I suspect that's why I didn't see Little Mermaid in the theater because after Oliver I was burnt out. (Also, Billy Joel was a tough hill to climb.) But then Beauty came along...

Anyway these films -- yeah Black Cauldron is a botch, a sometimes inspired botch but a botch, and the Prydain books could really, really be done well these days. Hell if Disney still had some rights they could do the entire sequence as their youth-friendly limited TV series response to, I don't know, Game of Thrones's success even more than the Jackson/Tolkien films.

Both Rescuers movies are fun but I only ever saw the second one the once; the first, I had the vinyl soundtrack/story album, the board game, etc. Hey, I was six. (No complaints.) I should rewatch that at least. Always enjoyed Great Mouse Detective -- I'd read a couple of the original Basil stories in Cricket magazine -- and given current Sherlockmania I think it needs more of a second look/see.

The Fox and the Hound, though, that's my keeper. Which is weird because I definitely only ever saw it the once when I was ten and all, but that one dug deep somehow. It built up to such a nearly sad ending -- no, scratch that, it WAS sad. The movie in my head is probably different from the one on the screen but I remember being very, very quietly obsessed with it for a few months. (And yeah, had the story/soundtrack album for that too.) Bit of an important summer in retrospect -- moved back to Coronado then and started middle school. Maybe that explains it for me as well?

The live action films are ringers in this context for sure (Pete's Dragon was BIG in our third grade class) but when you also add Cat From Outer Space, The Black Hole and of course Tron to all this, there was a lot going on with Disney late seventies/early eighties. This was also the era pre Disney Channel when a slew of their old/repurposed cartoons and TV specials got a second lease on life on HBO.

Loved the Rescuers as a kid but haven't seen it since.

Ah, the Disney movie screen animation of my early youth. What a dark time.

and Bette Davis in Return to Witch Mountain.

I saw all the 80s ones in the theater and the only one I remember not liking at the time was Oliver & Company. I also remember almost nothing about any of them despite vividly remembering much of the classics that were rereleased in theaters during the 80s, so that might say something about how good these movies are.

there was a Disney Gummi Bears show?

gummi bears! flying here and there and everywhere! high adventure that's beyond compare! they are the gummi bears!

Rescuers is so dark and gloomy and weird, totally gotta go with that. I found the villain lady horrifying as a child.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g2z8V2yL5P0

Gummi Bears kickstarted that whole Disney Afternoon block, followed by DuckTales, Rescue Rangers, TaleSpin, Darkwing Duck, Aladdin, etc. though it may have originally been a Saturday morning AM show

Rescue Rangers theme song by the Jets is their best song imo

ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-chip n' dale!

oooh weee ooooh
talespin!
ooooh weee aaaay

Reminds me...

We need to poll the dreary likes of Saturday morning cartoons: "Meatballs & Spaghetti," "Gilligan's Planet," "Supercade," "Blackstar," "Kwicky Koala," and all those based on TV (Laverne and Shirley! Happy Days!).

DuckTales inspired the best videogame, but Talespin on the TG-16 is an overlooked gem.

I have no idea what any of the ones you mentioned were, Alfred

http://www.inthe80s.com/saturdays.shtml

this was the first videogame I ever played

http://www.abandonia.com/files/games/430/Black%20Cauldron,%20The_8.png

xpost The Garry Marshall TV spinoffs are the best. A cartoon where Laverne and Shirley are in the army and their sergeant is a pig with the voice of Horshack. Who was that for?

Bafflingly enough, I think The Great Mouse Detective is the only one of these I've seen (learned to read with the help of Gold Key Fox & The Hound comic adaptations, though). I was a kid at the time, but that era of Disney seems to have passed me by relatively unnoticed.

If Pooh "counts" in this grouping, then Pooh it is, by a wide margin. If not, Rescuers. Love the intro, so melancholy:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=My7kP35acMQ

Rescuers had the best songs! This one still makes me a little weepy tbh even though I know it's just a crying cue/reflex from my youth
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=McWN59YwIn4

Bernard was so cute too.

Black Cauldron game is kind of a mess, but it's actually super early in the adventure game genre and is interesting for some of the things it tries to do - I mean it has multiple endings for crying out loud. I kept waiting, in the movie, for certain stuff from the game, like sneaking in between the big wine casks for a secret passage, or the magic wallet of infinite food.

The idea of a Prydain miniseries or short-season 'arc' series, man, that could be great if done right. The comment above about Pooh honoring its source material and having faith in it (even at the level of form: set of short stories) is really instructive here. The majority of Disney films, I think, are adapted from 19th or 20th century narratives, all involving some pretty massive translation (as we touched on with Pinocchio and Alice, but would also apply to Pan, Dalmatians, Jungle Book, etc. etc.) but somehow Prydain is really a step too far, the translation into Disney idiom breaks the material.

Which I was going to say is partly because the books kind of depend on a cast that's mostly craggy and opaque or thoroughly unlikeable for most of the series - down to the protagonist - but then again I think of Collodi's destructive and amoral marionette and I think, nah. They just really didn't have a strong vision of how to turn Prydain into a single movie except, I guess ''make it kinda like Star Wars'' and it...doesn't work.

seriously considered spending $25 on ebay for a complete set of adventure time happy meal toys (decided against it)

i know i'm gonna regret asking this, but what did these toys look like

http://img.gawkerassets.com/img/19bqjbad2shpqjpg/ku-xlarge.jpg

The closing battle in and on Big Ben I remember as being pretty striking and scary.

I remember watching Fox & Hound a lot too but I can't actually remember anything about it :(

the 'ratigan' song is amazing, just for:

"worse than the widows and orphans you drowned?"

Clock tower scene also the first major use of computers behind the scenes, though I've never been 100% clear on what they did - I'm guessing generate some kind of geometrically-correct wireframe that could then be basically traced/painted over?

This was pretty o_O also

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8BfY8m4FyC8

essential viewing for this period (and the next)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waking_Sleeping_Beauty

the 'ratigan' song is amazing, just for:

"worse than the widows and orphans you drowned?"

― (The Other) J.D. (J.D.), Friday, February 28, 2014 12:39 PM (8 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

otfm, almost posted this line earlier. this whole song rules tho. ratigan's spoken-word interlude, playing the harp. thank you. theeeeeeeeenk you. but it hasn't all been champagne and caviar. then there's another interlude, during which he feeds one of his drunken henchmen to a cat for forgetting to refer to him as a mouse.

i also like fidget the bat's pack-a-day voice. i got everything. everything on the list.

j.d. also otm re winnie-the-pooh, which is pretty easily the best here i think altho i voted mouse detective in deference to child difficult listening hour. however

it was always the disney movie i remembered most fondly from childhood -- no nightmares,

obviously you have forgotten cinema's most terrifying dream sequence
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CLnADKgurvc

they tie themselves in horrible knots

grew up w the prydain books but didn't see any of the movie until recently and honestly i didn't even wait for gurgi.

watched The Rescuers last night. It dawdles between the Rescuers Aid Society meeting and Devil's Bayou. The drawings are beautiful; I watched a few minutes of The Great Mouse Detective and thought, well, the parks needed to sell more popcorn.

BTW, on the subject of computer game adaptations, there's also this, which I played several times at a neighbors' house, though I'm fairly certain almost nothing happens and you just kind of wander around the woods saying hello to people. Peaceful.

http://i1.ytimg.com/vi/uQZzp_gLLMs/hqdefault.jpg

my vote is for Pooh

a) Wonderful thing abt Tiggers is an awesome song & tigger is gr8

b) Sterling Holloway's voice makes me teary & simultaneously happy

c) i am a little black raincloud

c) is a pretty damn strong argument actually, I get that in my head all the time without realizing it.

"You never can tell with bees," also.

YES

for posterity :D

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXugwdI37yY

grrr try that again won't I

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXugwdI37yY

Youtube preview image pretty satisfying also

right!?

the scene that haunts me most, if that's the right word, is when pooh wakes up from the nightmare (thanks DLH), finds himself sitting in rainwater, wanders over to the mirror and plaintively goes: 'is it raining in there? (long pause) it's raining out here, too...'

almost all of these are from before my birth but the great mouse detective is one of my favs as were the rescuers. great mouse detective was also our usual xmas movie with all my cousins while the grown-ups were having dinner, along with an american tail (yeah not very xmassy i realise). i remember reading the fox & the hound & oliver&company books (basically tells the movie with images from it) - they were staples at the place where i'd spend my summer holidays. not gonna be the one who reminisces fondly about oliver & company, but the third kitten we got looked exactly like oliver so with my brother & sister we chose to name it oliver.

i get the feeling the great mouse detective (and prob all the others on this list) are less known, even relatively unknown maybe? i've had friends mock me because they thought i was making it up when i mentioned a disney mouse-as-sherlock holmes movie. i haven't seen the black cauldron and winnie the pooh too, probably among the first disneys from those polls that i can say that about.

Really not my favourite era. Too many stupid mouse films. Voted the Black Cauldron, which is actually a really entertaining movie and one I always saw as a spiritual cousin to Sword and the Stone.

I remember being really frustrated by one of these films but I can't remember if it was American Tale, Basil or The Rescuers. And I can't remember why but I just remember really disliking it.

lol @ too many stupid mouse films, i like that phrase

Pooh movie is such a wellspring of great characters/dialogue. Particularly love this part:

Somebody's there, because somebody must have said "nobody". Oh Rabbit isn't that you?

Noooo.

But isn't that Rabbit's voice?

I don't think so, it isn't meant to be.

kinda funny how disney made so many films involving mice around this period and yet none of them even remotely resemble mickey mouse.

Starting up with Rescuers, in the spirit of mouse films. The production values are so shot to hell at this point that it doesn't even look like a Disney movie at all, and actually I really like that about it! Madame Medusa especially - she just sort of rolls and distorts and scrunches around, grouchily. I want to say there's something British about that animation but I have no idea what it is I'm thinking of. Alternately, maybe a little Jules Feiffer?

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Ahhh, crap. Probably won't finish Rescuers after all. Already made my proxy vote for Great Mouse Detective, but still.

Madame Medusa especially - she just sort of rolls and distorts and scrunches around, grouchily.

According to wiki: Her appearance was based on animator Milt Kahl's ex-wife, who he did not particularly like.

haha awesome

Yeah, wow! Makes me imagine an alternate universe where they got Crumb working there.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

j.d. also otm re winnie-the-pooh, which is pretty easily the best here i think altho i voted mouse detective in deference to child difficult listening hour. however

it was always the disney movie i remembered most fondly from childhood -- no nightmares,
obviously you have forgotten cinema's most terrifying dream sequence

― difficult listening hour, Saturday, 1 March 2014 05:06 (1 week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink
You've seriously never seen Dumbo?

Wow, super interesting results - never thought it would be that even, and would've given the edge to Fox and the Hound just from the way some people describe it. Also impressed Black Cauldron got even that many votes. Poor Oliver though - our first shut-out.

Next poll coming tomorrow, most likely.

ha i haven't seen dumbo since i was rly little but yeah that scene scared me way more. i was exaggerating. love that heffalumps and woozles song tho.

doctor casino i never knew about that classic-era sierra adventure game adaptation of winnie-the-pooh omg! that looks v zen.

Designed, like Black Cauldron, by Al Lowe - later of Leisure Suit Larry fame!

oops I forgot to vote for Basil.

feel like 'great mouse detective' would be held in higher regard generally if it were called 'basil of baker street' instead.

This Madame Medusa as extremely biased ex-wife caricature tidbit gets funnier the more I watch of Rescuers. She's easily the highlight of this thing. Wanted to applaud when her response to the appearance of mice in her dilapidated, half-sunken boat headquarters proved to be (1) shriek (2) freak out, demand that the nebbish henpecked husband figure deal with it, then (3) whip out a shotgun and just start blasting holes in her own home.

Disney animated features: The rappel à l'ordre (1989-1994)

http://i459.photobucket.com/albums/qq313/doctorcasino/madamemedusa_zps51035edd.jpg

Finally finished up with Rescuers, mainly in the interest of checking out the sequel. Gotta say I was basically charmed and finished with a smile on my face, though the wonderfully 70s closing music was key to that. It does drag a bit whenever Medusa is offscreen, I really just can't get enough of her continuous bad attitude. There was one really jumpy shift in tone, from the kid being dragged away by alligators to this sudden comic-relief climax with all these animal friends joining in on a plan that they've somehow learned about, wackily beating the bad guys with their animal ways. It somehow doesn't seem to do honor to the real terror or creepiness of this situation.

It's also kind of awkward at the end when all the kids at the orphanage are cheering that Penny's been adopted - you can't help but imagine the sad comedown after the TV cameras leave and they shuffle back inside. Just some...weird vibes in this movie is all.

Oh, and Miss Bianca was fun too. Basically it's just a shame Bob Newhart's character is so blah.

Just finished Oliver and Company. That was... weird. Not awful, and not the least essential Disney feature... but maybe one the most incoherently-conceived. The story is threadbare and doesn't really need the Dickens connection. The tone jumps from jaunty Huey Lewis/Billy Joel sunny times in the city to gun-packing kidnappers, death by subway collision, and Dobermans flailing wildly as they're fatally electrocuted on the third rail. Would you really want to see that as a five-year-old? One almost prefers the nearly uniform gloom of Rescuers, but OTOH at least here the animation is generally able to back up the tone from scene to scene. It's not a bad-looking movie... colorful, bright, things keep moving and the camera swings around... not lazy. None of the locations really come into focus as places, but I liked the creepiness of the dockside meetups with Sykes (who apparently runs a one-man criminal syndicate with no other accomplices besides his dogs and occasional patsies like Dom DeLuise). And I really appreciated the basic pleasantness of some of the sequences, especially the montage when Oliver and the little girl first get to know each other and the movie is willing to slow down and just show you that, without someone blurting out some terrible comic relief. Feel like you wouldn't get that today.

What ultimately holds it back is that the characters and story just aren't that good. Fagin's story in particular seems incomplete; even if he's an animal-loving sap who's forced into crimes beyond his competence, shouldn't there be some consequences or clearer arc of redemption for attempting to ransom a kitten and thus facilitating the kidnapping of a little girl? Poodle Bette Midler also seems to miss a step somewhere; I guess that she decides to work with the ragtag gang because her owner's in danger, but her whole setup was that she was vain and jealous of Oliver, so clearly there's a "she realizes that the girl is genuinely sad the cat's gone, and realizes the error of her ways" story that we don't get. Oops! Two or three of the dog gang members are filler with no stories of their own.

The stunt casting is mostly fine, but typecasting Cheech Marin as the wacky wildman chihuahua is right at the border of, like Dreamworks doing a Speedy Gonzales reboot... I don't remember him getting stuck with any particular dialogue that specifically made me uncomfortable, but it was distracting. Joey Lawrence is just, yknow, a likeable kid cat. Billy Joel is surprisingly good.

Saw this in theatres as a kid, and bought it for like $5 used a few months back, but only got about 20 mins in before giving up on it. Was mostly annoyed by its sloppiness; what is the logic of setting Oliver Twist in an animal world, and then having half of the characters be animals and the other half humans? Thought about giving the DVD to my nieces (5 and 2 years old) but thought better of it after the scene of Fagin being choked by Sikes's power windows, and that's without me remembering the dobermans being electrocuted. Jeezus.

I was figuring the mixed animal-human world, and the jarring tone, was some failed attempt to keep up with An American Tail, which came out two years to the month before O&C - but maybe that's not really enough time for the kind of production timetable they had?

From Wiki:

After the release of The Black Cauldron in 1985, Michael Eisner and Jeffrey Katzenberg invited the animators to pitch potential ideas for upcoming animated features, infamously called the "Gong Show". After Ron Clements and John Musker suggested The Little Mermaid and Treasure Island in Space, animator Pete Young suggested, "Oliver Twist with dogs". Originally wanting to produce a live action adaptation of the musical Oliver! at Paramount Pictures, Katzenberg approved of the pitch. (...) At a certain point, this film was to be a sequel to The Rescuers.[citation needed] If this had happened, it would have given the character of Penny more development, showing her living her new life in New York City with Georgette, as well as her new adoptive parents. This idea was eventually scrapped and later shelved because the producers had then felt that the story would not have been convincing.

So...that makes sense I guess, in that most of the stuff in this that doesn't have much to do with Oliver Twist actually does feel pretty Rescuers-y. I just don't know why you'd make a movie of Oliver Twist if you didn't actually want to. I mean, lord knows A Christmas Carol seems like it'd have some potential in animation if you can get around the leaden structure.