D52 Week 26: The Great Mouse Detective!

It's a bit strange, when you think about it, that Sherlock Holmes first popped up one-and-a-quarter centuries ago, and is being borrowed so heavily from even to this day. Earlier this millennium, the formerly number one rated drama on television, House, was a fairly blatant ripoff homage to Holmes, at least conceptually, and actually was pretty much only amusing when Hugh Laurie got to pull the old Holmesian deduction routine. Even more recently, Hollywood-type people have decided to stop beating around the bush and just revive Holmes wholesale, with those insane big-budget films directed by Guy Ritchie, and the supposedly quite good (and presumably less insane) BBC series, and the upcoming CBS series which sounds like basically the same thing as the BBC series, but boring, and with an audience in their eighties, because it's CBS. So, yeah. The Sherlock Holmes stories still have legs.

That still doesn't mean it's not a strange concept to adapt the Holmes universe with mice that aren't Holmes and Watson, but happen to live in the same flat as they do, and have many of the same character quirks, so they might as well be. I can get behind the idea that Basil thinks Sherlock is totally rad and wants to emulate him, even though the movie downplays this to a confusing degree. But, really, what are the odds that this Holmes-adulating mouse would just happen, conveniently, to meet another mouse, that is exactly like Watson in every way, even down to his participation in the Second Anglo-Afghan War? For that matter, why were mice participating in that war at all? It's a really bizarre concept for one book, let alone several as well as a major motion picture. It's nuts! But let's not hold that against it, okay?

It's clear just by looking at The Great Mouse Detective that it occupies the same role as, say, a Dumbo or a 101 Dalmatians, in that it follows a catastrophic financial failure and is clearly intended to be a simple cheapie to get the studio back on its feet, yet again, with its generally basic visuals. Basic doesn't mean they're bad, though. There's a lot of character in the animation nonetheless, especially with our resident Professor Moriarty, Professor Ratigan. Indeed, even though the movie is named after Basil, in as generic a way as they possibly could name it after him apparently, Professor Ratigan is the real star of the show. Once again, Glen Keane is responsible for animating the most compelling character in a 1980s Disney film. One wonders how much of that interesting is directly caused by his work, or if it's mostly just a case of him being assigned the most inherently exciting characters in the first place? (In this case, it's probably the latter - Ratigan could be a fucking stick figure and still be interesting, because Vincent Price.)

Am I overselling Ratigan? Maybe a little bit. But I don't care. He's one of the most compelling villains we've had in a long time, and he loves overselling himself, so why shouldn't I, too? I don't care that his plan is completely insane, as per usual. (Wouldn't it be far more practical to just kidnap a portly mouse actress and let her do her thing? Not that Victorian steampunk robotics aren't nifty too, but still.) I don't care that he fell into the exhaustingly stereotypical overly complicated death trap....trap. (And we're expected to believe that he was able to record a single and have it pressed to vinyl for the sole purpose of accompanying this occasion? How would he even find the time???) I don't even care that he's tasteless enough to employ the tasteless Indian Chief from Peter Pan. In the end, I found myself taken by what a genuinely charming and witty villain he is initially, at least on the outside, gradually superseded by his chaotic, unhinged inner nature seeping forth, to the point where he has no qualms about casually murdering Fidget on his way to the finale. He's a scary guy, relatively speaking! We've seen Disney villains gradually unravelled before - they tried this with Cruella de Vil, you might remember - but Ratigan is probably the most entertaining and oddly believable example of it thus far, not just because of some pretty good character animation, but also, again, because Vincent Price.

In fact, I'll even go as far as to oversell him even more. Professor Ratigan is the one part of this film that stands as proof that Disney was heading for their much beloved "Renaissance" in just a few years. What would make me declare something so boldly insane? Why, his villain song, of course! Is this the first time Disney has even had a villain song? If not, it's certainly the first one I can remember at this point in time! It's really quite a good song, and stylistically, it certainly seems like a harbinger of good animated musicals to come, even if The Great Mouse Detective isn't a musical at all, aside from Ratigan's strange musical tendencies. It's no surprise that directors John Musker and Ron Clements would later go on to direct The Little Mermaid and Aladdin - which, for that matter, I recall also being kind of uneven films with really catchy songs, but we'll see for sure soon, now won't we?

You'll notice I don't have a lot to say about the parts of the film that aren't Professor Ratigan, because they're significantly less interesting. Like the one non-Ratigan musical number, performed by Melissa Manchester in a truly bizarre pseudo-sexy cameo, well....in what sense was that necessary, really? Seriously. Can anyone give me an even vaguely plausible explanation for why that had to be a thing? And, as for our vaguely titular character, well....Basil has his moments of adorable enthusiasm, to be sure, but somehow he didn't really hold my attention. (Holmesian deduction that relies on things hidden completely from the audience is just cheap and lazy, though I liked his calculated escape from the deathtrap, however luck-based it might've been.) And Dawson and the Flavershams? Well, they're, um....certainly characters in this movie, aren't they?

So, back to Ratigan. Wasn't his final showdown with Basil in and around Big Ben awesome? It seems like this is where at least three-quarters of the production values went. I completely understand why people dislike the CGI-ification of the film industry in general, but it is simply not allowed to argue that the clock gears here, meticulously traced from wireframe CGI graphics, don't make for one hell of an impressive sequence unlike anything Disney had really produced before, with a truly fascinating sense of claustrophobia. (Next week's film - well, technically, this week by this point - Oliver & Company actually employed a dedicated CGI department for use throughout the film, and somehow they couldn't produce anything even remotely as impressive as this one-off sequence, which is just sad.) And then the Reichenbachian finale? Well....it's kind of a cheap cop-out of a conclusion, but still, it's an awesome sequence! And, um, I guess maybe it would've still been kind of nifty even if Ratigan hadn't been involved in it. But he certainly didn't hurt.

In summary and in conclusion, The Great Mouse Detective's Great Mouse Archenemy was a really quite impressive Disney film, especially for the 1980s! It's just too bad they had to splice in all that less interesting yawn-inducing business with whatshisname and the other guy and the token soul-crushingly depressed child-type person.

TERRIBLE AND UNNECESSARY AND THOROUGHLY WORTHLESS RECURRING DISNEY SEQUEL BIT: The Two-Per-Cent Solution has Basil facing a public relations nightmare when Professor Ratigan's posthumously published memoirs claim that he was actually a saintly philanthropist, and that Basil's outrageous accusations against him were clearly nothing more than the result of psychosis brought on by eating reduced fat cheese product. Suddenly, even Dawson is doubtful of his old friend's mental state, and when the Flavershams disappear again, he's even willing to pin the crime on Basil! That is, until Basil, backed into a corner, figures it all out - an aging Melissa Ratchester had wanted Hiram to construct her a new body, for her old one was starting to look, well, old, and gross. Also, she ghostwrote Ratigan's memoirs for the sole purpose of discrediting the one person who could've possibly found her out. Vincent Price is dead, so none of this is worth caring about, of course.