The Great Mouse Detective

The Great Mouse Detective (1986)

Directed by Ron Clements, Bunny Mattinson, David Michener, and John Musker

The first Disney film to be released after I was born was The Great Mouse Detective, a few months shy of my arrival in this world.  I was weened on pictures like The Lion King, where Jonathen Taylor-Thomas provided voice for the would-be king of the jungle and where my early impressions of Africa were first instilled.  Being prior to the Robin Williams heyday of celebrity cartoon voices (and the slow descent to Eddy Murphy's questionable braying about), I am served with the treat of Vincent Price as Ratigan, the main villain in this anthropomorphized rodent detective caper; a disease-ridden Holmes, of a sort.  The thin plot (the badguy, who is bad because he is bad, kidnaps a little girl's father for some reason, and the Basil of Baker's Street is on the case) surrounds cigar-chomping, elixir-downing mice, rats, and peg-legged bats who apparently exist either in a human-occupied world scale (withe none in sight), or everything is inexplicably built several feet too large.  Part of the charm of this movie is the idea that all this drama, intrigue, and these comical mishaps are happening at a miniscule level below our feet.  

Released toward the tail-end of the pre -Little Mermaid period, the Disney crew had began to experiment with computer animation, tossing in scenes like the Big Ben sequence as a sort of practice for the larger role it would take in their later cartoons.  The 3-D portion inside the giant watchtower is easily my favorite part of this film, as none of the songs nor gag sequences really captured me, beyond the song where the sexualized she-mice crooned how they would do "anything, just for you".  It made me realize how important the visuals are in these old Disney films.  

This is not one of the Disney movies I think back to with any particular fondness.  Sure, I enjoyed it well enough, even then, but, next to the classic period and the 1990's renaissance, even a perfectly acceptable film like this slips through the mind's cracks.  I was really more into the Don Bluth directed animated films (The Land Before Time, The Secret of Nimh, among others), which combined the classically-animated aesthetic with darker and more compelling storylines.  The mostly uninteresting tale of a mouse who spouts nonsensical physics terms and is hence incredibly smart is a great thing to play Monopoly to at Grandma's or to write a poorly-worded online essay while taking occasional glances upwards, but ultimately I was left a bit underwhelmed.  Disney is consistently well-put together as always, and this was a delightful example of when Disney still mattered, but, overall, eh.