The Anodyne Era in Disney animation began post-JUNGLE BOOK/’67 (last to have Walt’s direct participation) and was ended by THE LITTLE MERMAID/’89. From this mild lot, THE RESCUERS/’77*, a little adventure in the Deep South for a pair of Manhattan mice, at least had a decent amount of charm, a feisty girl protagonist (still rare at the time), and an outstanding villain in Geraldine Page. It also made a considerable pile of cash. So, a belated sequel made sense as the new era got going. Plus, it offered a great chance to try out game-changing digital animation techniques in the Aussie outback (note PIXAR getting its own section in the end credits), seamlessly blended in with regular hand-drawn leading characters and all those wacky Antipodean critters. The vistas spectacularly successful; right up there with Chuck Jones’ Monument Valley canyons in those early Cinemascope ‘Road Runner’ shorts. Now with vertiginous POVs! If only anything else in here was nearly as good. Lousy story construction and lazy character development as a fatherless boy tries to save a mammoth mother eagle from a rapacious poacher. We leap from a prologue so OTT you’re convinced it’s a dream sequence, to pointless use of those two RESCUERS mice (why send them down from Manhattan?), to a villain drawn to look like Jack Palance but voiced by George C. Scott. (This last one simply weird. Though give credit to debuting director & producer (Mike Gabriel; Thomas Schumacher) for killing this guy off with the most gruesomely gleeful onscreen death in Disney animation since The Evil Queen went down in a blaze of deep purple in SNOW WHITE AND THE SEVEN DWARFS/’37.
DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: *For detail on the Disney animation revival (and this film’s major flop), see WAKING SLEEPING BEAUTY/’09; and for this film’s back story the original RESCUERS. http://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2024/03/waking-sleeping-beauty-2009.html https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2016/12/the-rescuers-1977.html
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