Word: hunchback
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Critics have said it. Intellectual poseurs have repeated it. You have snidely asked yourself: "Where does Disney get off making a children's film out of a Victor Hugo's classic, tragic novel, The Hunchback of Notre Dame? Is Disney not satisfied with mousefying Americana; must they now bastardize French culture as well...
...like Aladdin for a predictable billion-dollar gross in the theatrical and video markets. But the artists at Disney's animation unit--it should be called the ambition unit--have bigger eyes. They figure that where they go, into melodrama or political sagas, the audience will follow. With The Hunchback of Notre Dame, directors Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise (who made Beauty and the Beast) have splashed the broody emotions of Victor Hugo's epic novel with a bold, dazzling palette. Alan Menken and Stephen Schwartz (Pocahontas) have written the largest, most imposing score yet for an animated film...
...crimson-shrouded ghosts line his way to a raging hearth, where he shouts out his twisted passion. This one will be hard to explain to the kids. But then Disney animation, from Snow White to The Lion King, is a parade of grim fairy tales about death, separation, betrayal. Hunchback has new traumas for the little ones; they will be terrified, perplexed, mesmerized...
...HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME (June 21), the Disney animated feature that recasts Quasimodo as a semi-cute young fellow who learns the T. M. of F., also promises the vaulting swank of Alan Menken at his most pop-eratic and the saving japery of three witty gargoyles...
Daisy Eagan plays Mary Lennox, an orphan whose unloving parents died in a cholera epidemic in India. John Babcock, 14, plays her cousin Colin, a sickly boy kept locked away from chill winds and excitement in a room where he frets that he will be transmuted into a hunchback like his father. Mandy Patinkin plays the father, his deformity barely noticeable but his behavior conspicuously odd: he visits his son only when the boy is asleep, a quirk that never makes psychological sense. In the woods -- including the walled enclave of the title, cultivated by Colin's late mother...