1997's Hercules would be one of the least memorable Disney animated films, and one of the least memorable Hercules movies, if it weren't riding the wave of the Disney Renaissance. As it is, you could say this is when the heart of the Renaissance stopped beating while a few interesting vital fluids continued flowing through its veins. The Hunchback of Notre Dame soured the company on risk so there was clearly a desire to go back to something simpler and closer to the Little Mermaid formula. At the same time, composer Alan Menken's fatigue caused by writing the same songs over and over seems to have caused the film to borrow from his celebrated musical adaptation of Little Shop of Horrors. The end result is a film with a few decent qualities that overall fails to be really bad or really good. It's Spam--vaguely familiar meat-like substance in a can.
This version of Hercules probably owes more the TV series starring Kevin Sorbo than to the original Greek or Roman myths. The shlocky Italian movies from the '50s and '60s, with the likes of Steve Reeves and Alan Steel, are actually, tonally, not too distant from the original stories in their aim to please the audience on a more visceral, carnal level than on a moral level.
I don't think art should be morally prescriptive but I think me pointing to Disney's Hercules as an example of why morally prescriptive art is bad is a bit like people pointing to Pocahontas to say cultural appropriation is bad. It's a strawman. A more honest adaptation of Greek mythology would be fantastic because of the amorality involved but I would never except a Disney movie to be that bold (though Frozen nearly was). The trouble with Hercules is that it doesn't feel like there's much love in it.
It is somewhat ironic, though, considering it was sex that was the catalyst for the Disney Renaissance (as it usually is for births, come to think of it). Jessica Rabbit and Ariel showed how a sexy lead could propel a film above the likes of Oliver and Company and The Fox and the Hound. Hercules (Tate Donovan) and Meg (Susan Egan) are attractive and Meg is even sexy but not quite sexy in the right way. A Greek myth needs a bombshell, not a cynical comedienne. I say this despite thinking, like most people, that she and Hades (James Woods) are the strongest aspects of the film.
This would have been the right movie for a pin-up along the lines of Glen Keane's Pocahontas--it's notable that Glen Keane didn't work on Hercules or Mulan but he did work on Tarzan, a film with a pulse far more noticeable than Hercules' or Mulan's.
Like Little Shop of Horrors, Hercules features an R&B chorus of black women who have no apparent relationship to the characters and, like Little Shop of Horrors, the film features a number of seemingly Jewish characters, signified by the use of Yiddish by characters voiced by Danny DeVito and Wayne Knight. Unlike Little Shop of Horrors, neither of these elements fit the mise en scene. Along with a number of modern pop culture references, they do less to establish a sense of a people and place as to destablise the whole thing, as postmodernism, at its worst, so often does.
The sort of streetwise comedy antics would be more natural on the streets of New York, too, though James Woods' ad-libbed take on Hades is certainly a delight in itself. Conceptually, the character's not too far from Ratigan in The Great Mouse Detective or even Cruella de Vil. But Woods brings a typically magnetic performance to the role. It's a shame his almost invariably terrific performances are so often featured in inferior films. Maybe in a Mel Brooks take on Hercules, he and Meg would have been right at home, but as it is, their ironic tone butts against the film's sincerity. Or they might have worked had the story been set in 20th century New York, as Little Shop of Horrors successfully combined tragedy and acerbic comedy.
But this is a movie with the most rote and tired "I Want" song, Hercules' "Go the Distance". The best song in the film is the one that parts most from formula, Meg's "I Won't Say (I'm in Love)", which notably was a late replacement for another song that had been cut from the film. Unexpected circumstances forced Alan Menken and lyricist David Zippel to think on their feet, thereby achieving something more organic than the rest of the film. Even so, it's no "A Whole New World" or even "Kiss the Girl".
Hercules is available on Disney+.
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This is part of a series of posts I'm writing on the Disney animated canon.
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
Pinocchio
Fantasia
Dumbo
Bambi
Saludos Amigos
The Three Caballeros
Make Mine Music
Fun and Fancy Free
Melody Time
The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad
Cinderella
Alice in Wonderland
Peter Pan
Lady and the Tramp
Sleeping Beauty
101 Dalmatians
The Sword in the Stone
The Jungle Book
The Aristocats
Robin Hood
The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh
The Rescuers
The Fox and the Hound
The Black Cauldron
The Great Mouse Detective
Oliver & Company
The Little Mermaid
The Rescuers Down Under
Beauty and the Beast
Aladdin
The Lion King
Pocahontas
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
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