Still, it’s a very enjoyable movie that features a mouse detective (a great one), and his sidekick as they scour the foggy streets of a London searching for a kidnapped girl. In a more objective sense, I don’t think the story works on any deeper levels the way those Renaissance films did, either. I can’t say that The Great Mouse Detective resonated with me as much as any of the films from the Disney Renaissance, but I grew up with those films, and I can’t recall ever having seen The Great Mouse Detective, so the emotional connection simply isn’t the same. The animation of the main and most ancillary characters is consistent, compelling, and generally exceptional (save some scenes with Professor Ratigan), the characters themselves are almost all memorable, the backgrounds are interesting, and the story is fairly well-told and strong overall. The Great Mouse Detective works for me in a variety of ways. Many at least acknowledge it as being a precursor to The Little Mermaid, commenting that it showed Disney was beginning to right the ship, but I’d go a bit further, arguing that The Great Mouse Detective should be receiving praise for its own substantive quality, rather than as a bridge movie that took Disney towards its Renaissance. In fact, I’d go as far as to say that The Great Mouse Detective is one of the most underrated Disney films in the entire library. Waking Sleeping Beauty tells the full story much better than me, but the point is that despite all of the uncertainty and morale around the project, The Great Mouse Detective turned out to be a pretty impressive film. In a roundabout way, the point is that this feature was developed at an especially dark time at Disney, right as The Black Cauldron was flopping hard. What does all of this have to do with The Great Mouse Detective Blu-ray? I’m not really sure. You can find the full list here, and you should absolutely check it out, as it’s hilarious. The memo indicated that the entire library of Disney animated classics would be renamed, and offered a list of those names. The animation team was furious, causing on disgruntled animator to react in typical Disney animator fashion (no, he didn’t doodle a caricature of Jeffrey Katzenberg), with a tongue in cheek memo. However, after a battle with marketing, which was apprehensive after Disney had been defeated at the hands of The Carebear Movie (a classic in its own right…right?), an edict was made that the film should be renamed to something that would instantly identify it to audiences.Īlas, The Great Mouse Detective it was named. The film was originally to be called the infinitely more creative Basil of Baker Street (the moniker of the main character). Perhaps my favorite part of Waking Sleeping Beauty is the controversy surrounding The Great Mouse Detective. The Basil of Baker Street Blu-ra…err… The Great Mouse Detective Blu-ray‘s release has intrigued me for a while, as I’ve been wanting to watch this 1986 animated feature since first seeing the excellent Waking Sleeping Beauty, which examined the Walt Disney Animation Studios from its darkest years in 1984 until it was revitalized in 1989 with the release of The Little Mermaid up until 1994 when The Lion King was released.
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