They could keep making zippy comedies, Xeroxing successes like Aladdin for a predictable billion-dollar gross in the theatrical and video markets. But the artists at Disney's animation unit--it should be called the ambition unit--have bigger eyes. They figure that where they go, into melodrama or political sagas, the audience will follow. With The Hunchback of Notre Dame, directors Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise (who made Beauty and the Beast) have splashed the broody emotions of Victor Hugo's epic novel with a bold, dazzling palette. Alan Menken and Stephen Schwartz (Pocahontas) have written the largest, most imposing score yet for an animated film. The result is a grand cartoon cathedral, teeming with gargoyles and treachery, hopeless love and tortured lust.
This Quasimodo (voiced and sung by Tom Hulce) is a young man with the most intense growing pains--Beauty's Beast, but without the majesty. Imprisoned in the Notre Dame bell tower by his master, the imperious Judge Frollo (Tony Jay), Quasi pines to be among the people he sees from above. His one furlough has him crowned King of Fools and leads to his lovestruck meeting with the Gypsy Esmeralda (the indomitably spunky Demi Moore). Frollo, to his surprise and shame, loves her too.
This Esmeralda is less a medieval Gypsy than a willful California teen with Joan of Arc aspirations; imagine a Loire Valley Girl, a Militia Silverstone. Hurling invective at Frollo, flirting with the hunky, John Smith-like Captain Phoebus (Kevin Kline) and singing the film's most poignant solo, about a Gypsy holocaust ("God help the outcasts, or nobody will"), she emerges as the latest in Disney's line of feminist freedom fighters--a Pocahontas with Romany eyes.
And a little sex. Frollo can't understand his ardor for the Gypsy. Like the Schindler's List commandant with his pretty Jewish captive, the judge both loves Esmeralda and hates the love she makes him feel. Frollo's aria, Hellfire, is a clashing symphony of red and black: crimson-shrouded ghosts line his way to a raging hearth, where he shouts out his twisted passion. This one will be hard to explain to the kids. But then Disney animation, from Snow White to The Lion King, is a parade of grim fairy tales about death, separation, betrayal. Hunchback has new traumas for the little ones; they will be terrified, perplexed, mesmerized.
And amused. If the comedy, represented by three gargoyle pals of Quasimodo's, seems grafted onto an essentially solemn story, it still has an infectious giddiness. A sign over a manhole reads mon sewer; one song rhymes Quasi with "was he" and "bourgeoisie." At times the cathedral is a theme park, with cute characters, dark scary spots and a drain pipe that Quasi uses as a giant water slide. The movie may not soar like Aladdin or roar like The Lion King, and it demands plenty of parental guidance; but it fulfills the Disney animators' dream. From a blank sheet of paper, monsters and magic emerge.
--By Richard Corliss