The Unseen Movie Review

Home on the Range

What is it with Dame Judi Dench? After years of sticking primarily to TV and the stage, she suddenly appears to be taking every film role offered. In three weeks she’ll be seen zooming around in space in The Chronicles of Riddick, here she’s lending her voice to what will apparently be the last Disney film to be animated in the old, hand-drawn manner. From now on, computers will be taking over, ending nearly seventy years of Disney feature film tradition.

It’s therefore a real shame that this film really doesn’t cut it. This is not so much The Lion King as The Aristocats – one of those rather shoddy, half-hearted features Disney seem to put out more from habit than any real desire to make something really decent, funny or original. Coming as it does a few weeks after Shrek 2, it really looks far shoddier in comparison – otherwise it may simply have seemed a bit weak, rather than actively bad. In reality, it is by no means truly awful – it’s just blandly average, the sort of film that used to be churned out in the bad old days before the likes of Toy Story came to revolutionise kids’ cinema.

Here, Dench teams up with the frequently irritating Rosanne Barr and the hardly well-known Jennifer Tilly, between them providing the voices of three cows in the depths of the Old West who discover that their ranch is in danger of bankruptcy. They hook up with a cocky horse, a wannabe Bounty Hunter voiced by Cuba Gooding Jr – an actor who, since his Oscar-winning turn in 1996’s Jerry Maguire, has appeared in nothing but dross. The film’s four-legged heroes set off to try and capture a local outlaw, the Randy Quaid-voiced human Alameda Slim.

Cue the usual mish-mash of songs, bizarrely including contributions from K.D. Lang and even Quaid himself, lightweight jokes and, following the lead of the Shrek movies but to less effect, the odd movie reference. It’s all very safe, unchallenging, predictable and, as with pretty much every Disney movie ever made (well, bar some of those 1930s shorts which appeared to condone Nazism), utterly inoffensive.

This is one of those films designed purely for the kids, which adults forced to watch as well will find a tad tedious in places, but probably won’t resent having to sit through too much. It is, however, a disappointing end to seven decades of Disney tradition. The hand-drawing legacy of the studio’s animation division deserved a more classic send-off.

posted by Nosemonkey @ 12:00 AM