D52 Week 23: The Rescuers!

Wow. It's already the last week of this project that I can whine about Wolfgang Reitherman? Though I've enjoyed the "sketchy" animation over the last decade and a half, it's been obvious that I've been increasingly unimpressed with his habit of recycling, over and over and over again. (Perhaps calling it "recycling" is, itself, giving this practice too much credit. I love recycling! But this....this is just lazy.) But, then I realise that I can't really whine about him all that much this week either! With a couple other directors also, um, directing, and a bunch of new animators stepping up, there's a distinctly different feel from any other Disney film, not only during Wolfgang's wolfreign, but up to this point in general. You'd think that change would be a good thing by this point, but The Rescuers would be their last reasonably successful film for, like, twelve years. I guess they could only keep cannibalizing their past efforts to maintain the post-Waltie goodwill for so long. Now, the studio has to try, and fail, on their own merits, which is probably not the best thing in the world for them. Why, it would take some sort of miraculous renaissance, of some sort, to save them from themselves!

It really is striking just how little this really feels like a Disney film, though. It feels more like the sort of animated features being released by other studios around that time in direct competition with Disney. Like Don Bluth, who worked on this film, would end up making elsewhere a few years later. I think Bambi was the only other non-packagey Disney film so far with vocal songs performed by people who aren't actually characters in the story, but it didn't seem quite so unusual then, perhaps because I hadn't been absorbed in the project for as long. Or maybe it's just because the vocal songs in Bambi weren't accompanied by pointlessly boring slideshows of still paintings. And then there's also the fact that Penny is so openly unhappy, in contrast to so many Disney "heroines" - this movie is convinced that it's really quite an emotional movie indeed, and it's gonna make damned sure that you realise it!

Who can blame her for being so sad, though? Her kidnapper is basically the biologically improbable bastard offspring of Cruella de Vil and Lady Tremaine, but less interesting than either, of course. (I'd be shocked if Madame Medusa driving around like a madwoman didn't feature some reused Cruella animation, actually, because Reithermen never change.) Her scheme is positively nonsensical, too. She needs to kidnap a tiny human child because that's the only thing that will fit in this tiny human child-sized hole? This is a more practical solution than finding some piece of equipment that could just make a bigger hole, something that would have the advantage of not being illegal? I also don't exactly understand why she refuses EVERYTHING from the hole that isn't the Devil's Eye diamond, as if the extra money from the other gems would just be a burden. She....wants to be rich, but not too rich? I know, money's a huge pain in the ass to have, especially if you're an immoral evil person, right?

Also, Madame Medusa looks like she was animated by a team of people who, collectively, hated Vicki Lawrence with the flaming hot passion of at least a thousand suns. Like, maybe she kidnapped them as children, or something.

The other thing that sticks out to me about this movie is how blandly characterized everyone is. Aside from the self-plagiarism thing, another typically Reithermanic thing we've seen a lot over the last couple months is his love of finding distinctive voices and milking them for all they're worth. (Lest we forget how Phil Harris was made to play fat hairy gay men on two separate occasions.) Yes, The Rescuers has its stunt casting too, but it's directed in a more low-key way that sort of, y'know....undermines the point of spending more money to hire famous-type people. It's a little easier than it should be to forget that Bernard and Miss Bianca are Bob Newhart and Eva Gabor, respectively. And no one should EVER be able to forget that someone is Bob Newhart and/or Eva Gabor! (Sadly, the voice of Medusa's alligators is still painfully recognizable, as the awful Indian Chief from Peter Pan.)

The Rescuers is a noble enough effort and all, but for all the strange things about it, it's really not all that interesting, is it? Rufus, the elderly cat, is supposed to be funny because, um, he has glasses and a moustache, which are not features you would typically find on a cat, I guess? Mr. Snoops is supposed to be funny because, um, he's a half-finished Jewish stereotype? And the existence of Penny's teddy bear, cleverly named Teddy, only served to remind me that Disney released a far more entertaining film involving a stuffed ursine that very same year! So....yeah. I'm glad the studio is trying to shake things up, but it'll still be a decade or so before they're able to do things consistently well.

But, hey. Albatrosses, right? Awesome.

And at least there's one song sung by characters in the film, I guess....

BLAH BLAH BLAH SEQUEL THING YOU KNOW THE DRILL: The Rescuers III: The Prescuers is, of course, a prequel, featuring the adventures of a younger and more sprightly Bernard (an older and even less sprightly Bob Newhart), and his attempts at working with a previous wackily accented partner, played by Yakov Smirnoff. (Never mind the fact that the original movie establishes that he was previously a custodian...) The quest this time is the rescue of a terrified overacting young boy (Atticus Shaffer) from an evil old man - let's call him Sir Cerberus, though don't let that fool you into think he's actually Cerberus-like or interesting in any other way either - who is taking advantage of children to retrieve pennies from wishing wells, which sounds petty, but it adds up, I assure you! In a shocking surprise twist, Bernard discovers that his Russian partner was a spy all along, in cahoots with the enemy all along. Nonetheless, in the end, Bernard saves the kid, who comes out of the ordeal unscathed, aside from being "a little hungry" - a comment that inspires Bernard to choose a new partner who is little, and from Hungary, thus paving the way for the events of the original film, except not really, at all.