Trousdale and Wise take Hugo’s novel further into the dark than any Disney cartoon before it, and Tony Jay’s Frollo is a proper villain. Then three wisecracking gargoyles turn up to remind us it is a children’s film, and the join shows.
Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise, who made Beauty and the Beast five years earlier, take on Victor Hugo’s novel about a deformed bell-ringer, the judge who raised him and the woman both of them want. The Hunchback of Notre Dame carries a U certificate and, inside its first three minutes, shows a woman killed on the steps of a cathedral. For two-thirds of its 91 minutes it is the darkest and among the best-made things Disney’s animators have put on a screen. The other third is three talking gargoyles, and they nearly sink it.
The prologue is told as a puppet show by Clopin (Paul Kandel), and it is sung rather than spoken. A woman runs across the snow with a bundle, horsemen behind her, and reaches the doors of Notre Dame a moment too late. Frollo, about to drop what he thinks is stolen goods down a well, is stopped by the Archdeacon (David Ogden Stiers), who tells him the eyes of the cathedral are on him. Alan Menken scores it with bells and a Latin choir, and the animators draw Notre Dame from below, so the building seems to be watching too. We were startled, not by the death, which happens on a cut, but by how fast a film for children gets to it and how little it apologises.
Tony Jay voices Frollo in a low, dry, unhurried bass that never rises above conversation, and it is the film’s best decision. He is not a sorcerer but a magistrate who believes he is doing good, and the film lets him believe it. Halfway through he stands before a fireplace and sings ‘Hellfire’, admitting that he wants Esmeralda and blaming her for it, while hooded figures chant around him and her face forms in the flames. We sat forward and did not move until it ended. That a U-certificate cartoon contains it at all is remarkable. That nothing after it comes close is the film’s problem.
Around him the film looks as good as anything the studio has done. Paris is drawn in stone greys and torchlit browns, the Festival of Fools in confetti colours, and the inside of the cathedral in the blues and reds of its glass. Quasimodo’s tower holds a carved wooden model of the city below and bells he has given names. Tom Hulce gives him a boy’s voice, eager, a little too articulate for a man raised alone in a belfry, and ‘Out There’, sung from the roof, is the film’s most hopeful stretch. Demi Moore plays Esmeralda with a low, tired defiance, and her candlelit ‘God Help the Outcasts’, sung while the wealthy pray for wealth in the pews beside her, is its most honest. Kevin Kline’s Phoebus is dry and decent. Ellen Keneshea cuts the festival and the street chase fast enough that we lost our bearings and did not mind.
Then the gargoyles. Charles Kimbrough, Mary Wickes and Jason Alexander voice Victor, Laverne and Hugo, stone companions who come alive when Quasimodo is alone and, in ‘A Guy Like You’, perform a music-hall number while Paris burns outside the window. We sighed. Every time the film has gathered itself into something serious, they arrive to check whether we are still having fun. The screenplay is credited to five writers, and plays as if the film Trousdale and Wise wanted to make and the one the formula required were written on alternate days. Their songs are Menken’s weakest here; Frollo’s and Quasimodo’s are among his strongest.
The second half takes a turn we will not describe, except to say that Hugo’s ending has not survived the journey. The last ten minutes hurry to be kind to everyone, and after the fire and the sermonising, the kindness feels rushed.
Beauty and the Beast had one tone and kept it. This has two, and they take turns. It attempts more than the earlier film and finishes less, and we would still rather watch a studio try this than not. The certificate says U; we would say older children, with an adult nearby for Frollo. He will stay with them longer than the gargoyles, which is as it should be.
