Word: hunchback
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...animation a market that will always expand? Or was the Simba spectacular the apogee of a trend? Or a glorious fluke? Disney's last three fully animated films to hit theaters--Pocahontas, The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Hercules, all released after Katzenberg's rancorous departure from Disney and his start-up of DreamWorks--have earned together just a bit more than The Lion King...
...needn't cry for Eisner. Hunchback, his personal favorite as a passionate work of cartoon artistry, added $500 million more to Disney's bottom line. But you are free to wonder whether studios without the mouse-ears logo can count on customers that even Disney is losing...
Well, Quasimodo wasn't alive at the end of Victor Hugo's Hunchback, and Pocahontas wasn't all that much of a babe, and DNA tests proved that the woman widely believed to be Anastasia was not. But animated movies aren't built for lectures; they are supposed to move, and move people. Anastasia comes close to doing that with its coming-of-age tale of the orphan who could be a princess...
...movies, maybe in the entire entertainment industry. The pressure to keep producing the tiniest variations on a winning formula must be severe. So it was brave for the Disney artists to try tiptoeing away from what worked. Pocahontas had soaring melodies to match its do-gooding intentions; The Hunchback of Notre Dame came within two deaths and three cute gargoyles of being the first grownup singing-cartoon romantic tragedy. But these two movies also had an almost toxic serioso content. At times they got so solemn they could have been Broadway musicals in the fashionable I'm-miserable...
Composer Alan Menken, on vacation after the operatic Hunchback score, hasn't delved this deeply into pop pastiche since his 1982 off-Broadway hit, Little Shop of Horrors. The quintet of Muses, like Little Shop's black-thrush trio, tells the story, doing justice to the jaunty R.-and-B. inflections ("and then along came Zeus") of David Zippel's serviceable lyrics. The ballad Go the Distance, as pummeled by Michael Bolton, is the tune you'll hear coming from every radio, music store and elevator this summer...