As we've mentioned before, Walt Disney Pictures' financial and creative quality took a nosedive after Walt's death. This was particularly true when it came to animation; the work had become shoddy and cliched (look at the dance sequences in The Aristocats and Robin Hood and you'll find that they're exactly the same). Critics and audiences took notice, and graced the film with lukewarm reviews and diminishing returns. The Disney animators bounced out of their slump with 1977's The Rescuers. In 1973, Disney executives discovered that Walt had acquired the film options to Margery Sharp's Rescuers novels. Said novels revolved around the Rescue Aid Society, an organization, made up of mice, who took on missions to rescue people in distress. The Disney execs took characters from the first novel, combined them with the plot of the second, and they had their screenplay. The execs turned the script over to the animators and told them to make something of it. The group of animators included both the surviving members of Walt's original animation team (affectionately known as the "Nine Old Men") and a group of recently-hired young animators. This team's work is an example of animation at its best. The colors are rich, the drawings are intricately detailed, and, above all, they all contain that magic that comes with watching hand-drawn animation. Said magic is a hard thing to define, but the roughness that's inherent in even the best hand-drawn animation lends films like The Rescuers a charm that's lost in computer-animation. But I digress. Anyway, The Rescuers boasts both a strong script and beautiful animation. The story unfolds in an intelligent way; indeed, one of the things that keeps the film entertaining, even as we grow older, is the fact that the screenwriters didn't dumb down the plot. Rather, the plot unfolds in a standard mystery form, as Bernard (Bob Newhart) and Miss Bianca (Eve Arden) track down clues and uncover the mystery behind the disappearance of young Penny (Michelle Stacy) piece by piece. The film is a landmark of post-Walt Disney-studio animation. Audiences and critics noticed the increase in quality and gifted the film with shining reviews and the best financial returns that Disney studios had seen in over a decade. It deserves a lot more attention than it's been getting.
Alan Howell is a native of Southern California. He loves movies of any and all kinds, Hollywood, indie, and everywhere in between. He loves pizza, sitcoms, rock and pop music, surfing, baseball, reading, and girls (not necessarily in that order).
