The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996)
A cartoon in the spirit of the old epics. The best musical Disney ever made.
Musical
Dumbo (1941): The First Disney Film to Fall Short
Beautiful animation complements a pretty bare story about proving yourself even when you have nothing to prove. Not the studio’s best.
Mary Poppins Returns
When Mary Poppins pops out on stage in stockings and Mia Wallace hair I was reminded of some Mary Poppins-themed miniskirt ensembles I saw in a shop window in Disney Springs. From then on, I was half-afraid of the Banks home staging a rendition of the sexy maid porno situation. I’m fairly certain Andrews’ version would have scoffed the scanty jollity of this number in particular. I’m positive that author P.L. Travers would have wept.
Bugsy Malone
The film actually makes the fictional landscape of the gangster film more real, by taking its troublesome boys and distant, unknowable broads and making them children at an age when that’s just the way things are. The mysterious sexual tension is made strangely innocent, though the archetypes haven’t changed from when Bogart and Cagney inhabited them. Bugsy Malone is a gangster film that took a good look at itself and wondered if it could do better. It’s really close.
Hello Dolly!
Hello, Dolly! can’t get passed Streisand. It’s a solo concert trying to be a movie. Character is more a windfall than a result of the plot, which concerns Dolly pulling so many strings to get what she wants that it’s not even clever – it’s so decadently convenient that she seems to have the writers on her side.
Robin and the 7 Hoods
This moral naysaying is shockingly against type for a film bursting with Copacabana headliners. Remember that these are the guys hired explicitly to hold a mic in one hand, a drink in the other, and to generate a fantasy of wealth and well-meaningness that makes thousands of less charming people mistake clubbing for having fun. Robin and the 7 Hoods is drastically less endearing than any of its hoods.