by Jake Hjort, Contributing Writer
Welcome back, fellow time travelers, to another edition of 20th Century Flicks! This month, in a continued effort to check classic cinema off of my list of shame, I’m diving back to the year 1977 to watch the Disney animated film The Rescuers. With Thanksgiving fast approaching and the holiday season just around the corner, I wanted to tackle an animated film for the whole family, so I scoured through Disney’s filmography to pick out one of their few flicks that I’d yet to check out.
The Rescuers centers around the Rescue Aid Society, an international secret society of mice dedicated to finding victims of abduction. When the society receives a message in a bottle from a missing orphan named Penny, Hungarian agent Bianca (Eva Gabor) and janitor Bernard (Bob Newhart) take on the case and seek out to find her. Eventually, they trace Penny to Madame Medusa (Geraldine Page), a villainous treasure hunter who has kidnapped Penny to search for the world’s largest diamond in the Devil’s Bayou. With the help of an albatross named Orville (Jim Jordan) and a dragonfly named Evinrude (James MacDonald), Bianca and Bernard are able to stop Madame Medusa and rescue Penny.
Without a doubt, my favorite thing about The Rescuers is the animation. The movie starts on an incredible high note with a sequence of gorgeous watercolor paintings detailing the journey of Penny’s message from the Bayou to New York City, the home of the Rescue Aid Society. While the film doesn’t quite keep up this level of artistry throughout, there are still some great watercolor backgrounds throughout, and one particularly beautiful sequence as Orville and the mice fly through New York. Alongside the animation, I do want to commend the character design as well and the amount of personality that the animators were able to bake into the characters.
Unfortunately, my positives for the film pretty much begin and end with the animation. Aside from getting enjoyment from the visuals on the screen, I largely found myself bored with the film, and I cannot imagine having enjoyed it if I watched it as a kid. Despite having all the bones of an exciting adventure and a runtime of only 78 minutes, the film seemed to drag on forever between the few moments where something interesting was happening on screen. The music in the film is largely forgettable, with a few uninspired songs which are nice enough, but would never be featured on a “Best of Disney” playlist. As far as characters go, Bernard and Bianca have very little to them, besides being cautious and carefree, respectively, and the most memorable character, Madame Medusa, is just a bargain bin Cruella de Vil, complete with her gaudy outfits, reckless driving, and propensity for taking advantage of innocent souls, but lacking that “it factor” that makes Cruella so iconic.
Speaking of Medusa, I have to wonder if this film is a little bit too dark for kids. I do want to give the filmmakers credit for being willing to tackle some pretty heavy subjects in an animated film, and Penny’s story is downright heartbreaking at times, but at the same time, I think they may have tipped too far over the line into the realm of scary. I’m not a parent myself, but I did use to be a child, and there were some parts that I think would have really freaked me out. Maybe it’s true that modern audiences and palates are softer than they used to be, but if I was a six-year-old thinking I was walking into the fun Disney movie with mice who go on adventures, I would have walked out traumatized. I don’t think that we need to coddle younger audiences, but I do also think that The Rescuers may have gone too far with some of the frightening imagery and scenarios it put its characters in without having lighthearted moments to balance it out.
I’m not sure if this is going to be a controversial take or not, but I’ve also got some issues with the casting of the lead roles. Newhart and Gabor are both great actors, and I’ve enjoyed their work in other projects, but I just don’t think they were right at all for Bernard or Bianca. I don’t know how much of this is on the performance and how much is on the sound design, but at no point in the film did it ever feel like their voices were appropriate for their characters. When Bernard spoke, it didn’t feel like I was hearing the voice of that mouse, it felt like was listening to someone in a sound booth reading lines that would later be ascribed to that mouse. Sure, maybe I’m being overly critical of some anthropomorphic cartoon characters, but if you compare this to something like Albert Brooks as Marlon in Finding Nemo, the difference in how much they bring the characters to life is night and day.
I went into The Rescuers really wanting to enjoy it, but that unfortunately isn’t the experience that I had. Maybe if I had watched this when I was younger and had some childhood nostalgia it would have been a better experience, but at the same time I cannot imagine my younger self would have enjoyed this either. I apologize to anyone who has cherished memories with this film, but for me, it ranks among the bottom of Disney animated films.
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