The Hunchback of Notre Dame, 1996. Directed by Robert Trousdale and Gary Wise. Voices by Tim Hulce, Demi Moore, Kevin Kline, Jason Alexander, Kathleen Freeman.

This is Disney's best animated feature since Beauty and the Beast, but in spite of that, it has deep and profound problems. This is the most frustrating movie Disney is ever likely to make and it is an avatar, a distillation, a singular incarnation of the tragedy of American cinema. This is the crux of the matter: The Hunchback of Notre Dame is a sensory delight, the most dazzling visual feast the studio has served up since Pinocchio, and the raw beauty of the movie is laced with darker undercurrents than Disney has ever allowed; it has the most complex villain the studio has ever concocted (Maleficent and Cruella DeVille are, in contrast, grander in a dramatic sense, but they are cartoons while Frollo is an all too human monster, which makes his evil more insidious and more dangerous); it has pathos and tragedy poised throughout the movie waiting to be unleashed; and it even has great comedy relief: in short, it has all of the elements of GREAT art and no one--NO ONE--behind the camera, from the screenwriters and directors to the executives and producers all the way to Michael Eisner himself has the will, the nerve, the balls to use them. Nevermind the emasculation of Victor Hugo's novel (one expects that from Disney), Hugo would still recognize his book here, and nevermind the excision of Hugo's indiictment of The Church (the point of the book in the first place--for the purpose of the plot here, it makes more sense for Frollo to be a judge instead of a clergyman), the attraction of the story has always been the humane tragedy of Quasimodo (Hugo's novel is not titled "The Hunchback of Notre Dame") and in translating this into the idiom of modern Disney animated musicals it has been transformed into some half-assed twelve-stepper tale of self-affirmation and acceptance--which I can assure you is NOT the point of the story at all. even if one accepts that the tragedy of Quasimodo is, in fact, that point. This is exacerbated by the fact that the POTENTIAL for this humane tragedy hovers over the entire movie and is brought to a head at a single point where, if they had allowed it, the whole thing could have come rushing in and left the audience stunned and wrung out and changed in the the way Great Art changes people--and the film averts itself from this. The Hunchback of Notre Dame, like Disney's other recent animation, like the slickest of Hollywood entertainments, brings to bear craftsmanship and technology that is finer and more powerful than any of the tools available to any previous generation of filmmakers, but the hands that guide these tools are using them to pander to the audience, to bilk them out of their six-to-eight dollars (and their twenty bucks when it hits video). But to produce something this close to real, enduring, profound art and to deliberately turn away from it in order to stroke the audience's perceived desire for a happy ending is worse than tragic: it's reprehensible.

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