THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME
A film review by Mark R. Leeper
Copyright 1996 Mark R. Leeper
Capsule: This is a wonderful film for anyone
who does not know the Victor Hugo novel and yet a
brazenly horrendous adaptation for anyone who does
know the story. Disney's animators have lavished
their greatest technical virtuosity on a script
that is painfully inaccurate to its source. With
such extremes of good and bad I have to give the
film a mediocre rating, but in fairness there is a
lot to admire here as well as much to revile.
Rating: low +1(-4 to +4)
By any objective standards, point for point, this is the best animated film that has come from Disney Studios. It has the best animation, the most complex story, and even the most interesting characters of any Disney Studios animated film. The reason that this film is getting flak--and I am not saying that it is not fully deserved--is that the violence that the Disney people invariably do to the story is this time being done to a different type of story. It is a story with which many people have both a passing acquaintance and, even more important, a certain respect. This is an adaptation of the often-filmed 1831 novel NOTRE DAME DE PARIS by Victor Hugo. But this time when the Disney people turn the characters inside-out, totally distorting them, and there is a sizable proportion of the audience who know what is going on.
There is a canonical version of the story of Aladdin--the one translated by Sir Richard Burton from the Arabic--but few people actually know the details of the plot. So if the Disney film moves the setting from China to Arabia and bases the story more on "The Thief of Bagdad" than on the original Burton version, few people notice or care. But just about every review I have written of a Disney animated film contains the complaint someplace that the story is not accurate to the original story on which it is based. This time around the Disney people have chosen a classic that is cynical, misanthropic, and extremely angry (not unlike the emotions I felt when I first heard that Disney would be doing HUNCHBACK.) But having resigned myself to seeing a novel I really like being desecrated on the screen, the film that Disney Studios have made is about as well-made as that studio has ever done. And it is not as if the classic Charles Laughton version was tremendously accurate to the novel either. It distorted the Hugo badly also, though nowhere nearly as badly as the new animated film.
This version is something of a saddlepoint, being on one hand the worst adaptation of the five well-known English language versions of novel. (I have not seen the two French versions nor the 1917 version THE DARLING OF PARIS with Theda Bara--and I am not sure I want to.) And yet, in my opinion at least, this is the best Disney animated film to date, beating out even BEAUTY AND THE BEAST. This is the darkest- themed of any of the Disney films and has some of the most complex characters, for what that is worth. There is little wrong with this film that could not have been fixed by re-titling it BELL-RINGER OF NOTRE DAME, changing all the character names, and saying that this was "suggested by" NOTRE DAME DE PARIS.
Though never stated in the film, the year is 1482, during the reign of Louis XI. In this version Quasimodo is cutely deformed in much the same way a troll doll is. He lives in seclusion (though not in deafness) because he is forbidden to leave Notre Dame by his harsh guardian, Judge Frollo, and because he is shy, being stigmatized by his deformity. In this version, the people of Paris are unknowingly cruel to him when they first see him close up, but are basically good at heart. The cathedral is run by people who are also good, and the chief evil in Paris is Judge Frollo. Quasimodo's only friends have been three gargoyles who come to life just for him, not unlike the tiger toy in "Calvin and Hobbes." But risking rejection, Quasimodo makes friends with the rambunctious and buxom gypsy woman Esmeralda and the dashing and noble Phoebus, Captain of the Guards and a man with a strong sense of morality and chivalry. Even in just this much plot the story has been horribly and painfully twisted.
The screenplay--by five people, always a bad sign--invariably finds the most vulnerable places to undermine Hugo's story and to distort nearly everything about it. It is almost impressive how they take such liberties as they do and still leave the story at least recognizable with so much of the screen story just the reverse of the Hugo novel. For example, Esmeralda has one quick moment of shock when she realizes that the ugliness of "Quasi" is not just a mask, and from that point on she has nothing but admiration from him. "You are a surprise from every angle," she sings. It took a great deal of sugar- coating to make the story innocuous enough that it could be a Disney film. And still it is the darkest and most powerful of Disney's animated features, which is perhaps not saying very much.
As bad as the distortion of the novel is, the writers have some powerful scenes. Where Frollo describes the Gypsies as being vermin, like ants crawling under a stone, the scene has the power of some of the anti- Jewish propaganda films of Nazi Germany. There is a terrific scene of the sexually-frustrated Frollo seeing images of Esmeralda in a fire that very nicely gets across to even fairly young children the thorny concept that Frollo's hatred of Esmeralda springs from his own desire for her. And the script also borrows from other film versions. There is a scene where Esmeralda prays in the Cathedral for nothing for herself, but for God to help her people. This scene was invented for the 1939 film version, but is the basis for a musical number in this film.
Being fair, Disney's HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME is also a technical marvel. The Disney animators are no longer trying to make a computer animated film look like it was entirely hand-drawn. Instead they are mixing in images of such technical perfection they could only have been created by computer. Gone is the feeling of just six or seven planes of flat images. The images now create a heightened sense of depth that is far too perfect to be done by hand. This film has jaw-dropping scenes that could never be filmed in live-action on animated without a computer. When Quasimodo swings down over the heads of the crowd to rescue Esmeralda and the viewer goes with him arching down, it is one of the most spectacular animated sequences in any feature film. Still that scene is flawed, perhaps intentionally. It does have the problem that everybody in the crown seems to be the same height to give the feel of a plane of heads. But it is a terrific image, nevertheless. There are some other problems with the animation. Once again a different team animates each major character. But the styles of animation do not quite match. While Phoebus has a natural, rotoscoped look about him, Quasimodo has a flatter look and feel. When the two walk together they do not look right. It almost looks like a human walking with a Toon. Nor is the artwork particularly original. In face Frollo looks far too much like the witch from SLEEPING BEAUTY turned into a man. And Esmeralda looks ... well, like Disney animators have lost their innocence and are now into drawing heroines with big breasts.
There is a lot of film here for a short 86 minutes, a lot that is terrific and a lot that is terrible. On balance I give THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME a low +1 on the -4 to +4 scale. I wish Disney had stuck to a lesser-known and lesser-loved book.
Mark R. Leeper
mleeper@lucent.com
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews