Aladdin had proved that Musker and Clements weren't some kind of fluky pair. The other frequent directing duo throughout the Renaissance period, John Musker and Ron Clements, would hit a financial height with the following year's Aladdin, their third of four films made during the 13-year period covered in this series. The film's directors, Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise, had an improbable climb to the top - the 1991 classic was their first feature film, and they'd done the impossible by netting a Best Picture Oscar nomination for the debut. In short, it takes very little time for Disney's The Hunchback of Notre Dame to establish that it's not fucking around.Įxpectations for Walt Disney Feature Animation were sky-high after the success of Beauty and the Beast. This film opens with a six-minute musical number in which a self-righteous and cruel villain murders an innocent, defenseless woman and is just barely stopped from drowning a deformed baby by a horrified priest. Take, for example, a film from the same studio released in the summer of 1996.

When, however, you become wildly successful with critics and worldwide audiences, you can push yourselves and your target demographics. Being daring is risky enough when you're popular, let alone on death's door. The studio couldn't push the envelope because they were struggling to get by. But The Black Cauldron also arrived at a low point for Disney animation. A film in which a character called the Horned King strives to raise an army of the dead was simply too grim for the studio to handle.

Even in the 1980s, there existed a cultural notion of what was and was not acceptable and expected from a 'Disney movie'. ) In the mid-1980s, when Jeffrey Katzenberg sat down to watch an early cut of The Black Cauldron, one of the concerns he had was that the film was too dark. In today's column, he discusses the 1996 film The Hunchback of Notre Dame. ( Revisiting the Renaissance is a bi-weekly series in which Josh Spiegel looks back at the history and making of the 13 films of the Disney Renaissance, released between 19.

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