loryanaviteamedici
I love the Hunchback of Notre Dame. At least I love it when I haven't seen it in a while. The soundtrack to this movie - composed by the brilliant Alan Menken - is magnificent. While I personally favour the "background" pieces over the solo-songs of the actual good guys ('Out There', 'God Help the Outcast' & 'A guy like you'), these songs nevertheless are musically great. So when listening to the score, first and foremost Minister Frollos song 'Hellfire' and the title song 'Bells of Notre Dame', I LOVE this movie.Watching it sadly is almost always a slight disappointment to me, when I see how unfittingly rough the animation is drawn, compared to the epicene of the score. The background imagery is still beautiful, but the characters are drawn much simpler as in other Disney movies (for example compared to The Jungle Book) which I personally don't like as much.The plot is good and sends a strong message, but only one scene - the Feast of Fools - really gets to me emotionally. The harshest realisation I came to as an adult is that Frollo, while being truly despicable, is actually telling Quasimodo the truth: He wouldn't be accepted in our world. Despite this cold and brutal truth, the movie doesn't get me involved as other Disney movies do (I still cry every time I watch 'Inside Out') and the animation isn't as breathtaking as usual.Overall, the plot and animation would get this movie a 4-5 star rating, but the score (I really love Alan Menken for that) and this unveiled realistic statement of how cruel our world actually is against those, who are different, pull it up to 7 stars for me. I still enjoy watching it a lot, though I have to say that I prefer just having 'the Bells of Notre Dame' playing on repeat.
ElMaruecan82
This is one of the best Disney animated movies for many reasons, one and not the least, is that it is a visually dazzling experience even by Disney standards. Victor Hugo's "Notre Dame de Paris" has been adapted several times and featured many iconic performances of the misshaped bell ringer Quasimodo: Lon Chaney, Charles Laughton and Anthony Quinn to name the most memorable, but there comes a point where animation reveals itself to be a more difficult challenge than live-action, just think of all the implication such a title as "The Hunchback of Notre Dame" carries.You've got to recreate in the most convincing way the magnificent cathedral, which happens to be the most famous Parisian location perhaps after Eiffel Tower, and the Arc of Triumph. It is one thing to draw all the details, I'm a drawer and I know I can do it, but the animators work in three dimensions, it's not just the Cathedral from the ground, but from the top, from every single aisle, its majestic view on Paris and the Seine, the Gargoyles, the bells, like a virtual tour guide at the dawn of the Internet era. The Cathedral, as an emblematic representative of the Gothic period is known for the richness of its interiors, the magnificence of the stained glasses, and the vertiginous roofs and status, it isn't just any location, it is a character by itself that Quasimodo know by heart and the animators needed to render that impression, for some, it's a monument, for Quasi, it's home.They spent hours and hours of visits and notes and it started since 1993, and it sure paid off because you could tell they spent enough time so they could feel at home, too. So, we're never introduced to the Cathedral in a static way, whether it's a sword fight between Phoebus and Esmeralda, a vertiginous inspirational sliding over the roofs, or an acrobatic climax in a fire-stricken tower, the animators prove once again that there are infinitely more possibilities with animation, you can't have Quasimodo playing Tarzan with the ropes in a live-action film without a good deal of editing and preparation, in the film, it's all in lightness and fluidity. Disney has always been about imitating reality but to better transcend it. That's the trick! And the difficulty didn't only lie on the central elements but also the peripheral ones like the crowd. In a movie, you hire extras, in Disney, they used to set films in nature, or small villages, or places of a few characters or extremely different, but no overcrowded streets. In "The Hunchback of Notre Dame", when the action isn't set in the Cathedral, it's in the streets of Paris, which, as we can guess, were quite full in these medieval days. The animators had to draw many people, making them move, cheer, throw tomatoes, fight or laugh during crucial sequences, and they obtained the effect thanks to the CGI department, when CGI was a mean, not an end, and as it was used to recreate the thrilling stampede in "The Lion King", they recreated a wonderful and convincing Paris that had nothing to envy from her representation on movies.But I don't want to make it feel all tapestry and wizardry, the film doesn't just take a challenge on the field of visuals but on the messages delivered in the story, starting with acceptance, through the touching and haunting character of Quasimodo. While the animators eliminate a few other elements such as his deafness and one-eye, he's not a pretty sight, but there's something that oozes gentleness and naivety. Locked in the Cathedral by his "Protector" Judge Claude Frollo, he wishes to discover the real world out there. This might look as a set-up to a story that will teach him the value of self-esteem but the film is more ambitious and goes beyond that predictable premise. While Quasimodo is confronted to a hateful crowd, he also falls in love with the beautiful gypsy Esmeralda.And there's just something about Esmeralda, the tanned blue-eyed beauty that catches the men, Captain Phoebius instantly falls in love with her fieriness, and to make things even more complex, even the straight-laced and conservative Frollo gives her a kiss in her hair while holding her tight. Now that was a bold move in a Disney film. Indeed, villains, while not being one-dimensional, are generally defined through one particular trait: greed, power, jealousy. Frollo is an interesting antagonist in the sense that Esmeralda inspires him the very devilish thoughts he tries to fight; he's his worst enemy before being the enemy. In the extraordinary "Hellfire" sequence, he sings his incapability to repress his impulses, and the only way is to kill Esmeralda. This is Disney's best villain song, on a character so dark that I suspect adults will feel more responsive while children can learn the lesson about racism and intolerance, from his hatred toward gypsies.Yes, Esmeralda isn't just an object of desire, she embodies the pain of Quasimodo as a representative of people who are victims of racism and violence in ways seldom seen in Disney's universe, and in one of the film's most moving moments, she implores God for one thing: to save her people. Yes, God is present, as he was in "Fantasia", to those who believed that religion and sex couldn't share a sentence with Disney, here's a film that shows that in the midst of the great Renaissance period, there's nothing Disney couldn't achieve, it would have been rather bizarre not to have Jesus of the Virgin Mary in movie set primarily set in a Cathedral.I was in the right target during Disney Renaissance but I stopped watching the new Disney after "Pocahontas", I wish I could see this one at the time of its release, but I'm not sure I would have loved it more as a teen, than as an adult now.
