The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996)
Directed by Kirk Wise
Isolated in the bell tower of Notre Dame, Quasimodo longs to experience the world beyond the cathedral walls, despite the wishes of his stern guardian, the Judge of Paris Claude Frollo. His first venture into the city leads him to Esmeralda, a fearless Romani woman whose defiance of Frollo's tyranny draws her—and Quasimodo—into his dangerous obsession.
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What critics compared The Hunchback of Notre Dame to
Finally, Luc Besson’s Dracula has gargoyles that look a lot like those from The Hunchback of Notre Dame. And yes, I am referring to the Disney animated feature film from 1996.
Rather, it evokes the boldness of Disney's experimental areas in the late ‘90s and early 2000s, such as The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Atlantis…
…something omnipresent in numerous Disney classics like Dumbo, Frozen, and The Hunchback of Notre Dame…
…defeated not just Walt Disney but also the well-oiled machine that the Disney studio became in the 1990s, when even Victor Hugo's grim novel of society and fate, The Hunchback of Notre Dame , was successfully crammed into the formula of a 90-minute animated Broadway-style musical.
The screenplay -- courtesy of screenwriters Tab Murphy ("The Hunchback of Notre Dame") and Bob Tzudiker & Noni White (collaborators on "The Lion King") -- satisfactorily keeps things moving at a good clip, and offers both laughs and some touching moments.
Gone was the tyranny of the planar background; gone also was the jarring CGI sheen found in the ballroom sequence of Beauty and the Beast , the "sanctuary!" scene in The Hunchback of Notre Dame , or even the wildebeest stampede in The Lion King and the snowy assault of the Huns in Mulan .
The lyrics fall into the "I gotta be me but who am I" mode of The Lion King and Hercules and The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Mulan -- sample from "Strangers like Me": "Oh I just know there's something/Bigger out there."
That's why Ariel survives in The Little Mermaid , the bulk of Aladdin only vaguely resembles "A Thousand and One Nights," The Hunchback of Notre Dame completely eviscerated Victor Hugo's attacks on the Catholic Church, and Hercules conveniently ignored the sexual appetites of the gods of Olympus.
"Tarzan," like "The Hunchback of Notre Dame," represents another attempt by Disney to push the envelope of animation.
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If anything, Verbinski (working in an unencumbered R-rated register, from a darkly adult script by Justin Haythe) seems more indebted to classic Lon Chaney silents like The Phantom of the Opera and The Hunchback of Notre Dame, early examples of body horror undergirded with deep psychological damage.
There’s a touch of early-era body horror here, taking cues from the classic Phantom of the Opera and The Hunchback of Notre Dame, but A Cure for Wellness is unabashedly R-rated.
I saw him as the American militant equivalent of Frollo from The Hunchback of Notre Dame — a monstrous force of power, deceit, hypocrisy, and lustful racial fetishization that serves to enhance his authority.
Although better than its immediate predecessors, Hercules and The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and its successor, Tarzan, its memory and legacy have never been protected by Disney the way that “The Big Four” (the fourth member being The Little Mermaid) have been.
The songs by Alan Menken and Stephen Schwartz (the team behind Pocahontas and The Hunchback of Notre Dame , Menken's much better writing partner Howard Ashman stubbornly remaining long-dead) are effective enough in the moment - and lead to the film's most transcendent scene, a Freed-style musical extravaganza in Central Park - but they're not all that memorable.
Speaking of excellence, the music is by Alan Menken and Stephen Schwartz (the duo behind Pocahontas and The Hunchback of Notre Dame).
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Beginning the film with an ominous psychotic determination, the unravelling imperfection of the situation results in his performance devolving into a bad impression of Quasimodo from The Hunchback of Notre Dame.
An early song performed by Broadway diva Donna Murphy, "Mother Knows Best," calls to mind Frollo's lyrics in Disney's greatest achievement, The Hunchback of Notre Dame: "The world is cruel/the world is wicked/it's I alone whom you can trust in this whole city/I am your only friend…"