'The Hunchback Of Notre Dame' Was Disney Animation At Its Riskiest And Most Daring

Expectations for Walt Disney Feature Animation were sky-high after the success of Beauty and the Beast. The film's directors, Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise, had an improbable climb to the top — the 1991 classic was their first feature film, and they'd done the impossible by netting a Best Picture Oscar nomination for the debut. The other frequent directing duo throughout the Renaissance period, John Musker and Ron Clements, would hit a financial height with the following year's Aladdin, their third of four films made during the 13-year period covered in this series. Aladdin had proved that Musker and Clements weren't some kind of fluky pair. They were the real deal, having made three straight films that not only improved upon their predecessors at the box office, but clearly implied a grander, wider scope of storytelling.By contrast, Trousdale and Wise, after the success of Beauty and the Beast, didn't dive straight back into directing. (Musker and Clements directed three features in the span of just six and a half years.) They first worked on early storyboards for The Lion King before, in 1993, being informed by Jeffrey Katzenberg that they had a new project: The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Though Katzenberg left Disney in the fall of 1994, after attempting and failing to take the leadership position left empty after the tragic passing of Frank Wells, his presence was keenly felt throughout most of the Renaissance films released after the creation of rival studio DreamWorks SKG. Adapting the Victor Hugo novel The Hunchback of Notre Dame was a daring step forward for Disney and their animators. The studio was no stranger to literary adaptations — it's more remarkable how infrequently Disney's animated fare isn't based on something else. Even The Lion King, which Disney holds up as a rare case of original storytelling, is heavily inspired by William Shakespeare's Hamlet. But there's a large difference between adapting fairy tales, being inspired by a Shakespearean tragedy, and doing a straight-up adaptation of a tragic novel rooted in social commentary surrounding 15th-century France. Like a number of Disney's other adaptations, The Hunchback of Notre Dame is based on source material steeped in horror and sadness. Unlike most of those adaptations, Hunchback could only deviate so much from its source material. The eponymous little mermaid, for one, is turned into sea foam at the end of the Hans Christian Andersen story that inspired the 1989 animated classic, which ends in a decidedly happier way. But the works of Victor Hugo aren't just tragic, they are intensely heartbreaking — the novel on which the animated film is based ends with the comely gypsy Esmeralda being hung in the town square and a guilt-ridden Quasimodo dying of starvation as he comforts the woman's dead body. Hugo's work is, putting it mildly, not family-friendly. (Please remember: this is the author whose most well-known and popular book has a title that translates in English to, literally, "The Miserables".) The premises of the fairy tales that lead to Disney films of the past were fantastical enough that their dark finales could be rewritten without much concern. The Hunchback of Notre Dame is a story of cruelty, lust, greed, and hypocrisy, in which innocent men, women and children are constantly under attack. It's a story where the nasty antagonist tries to set fire to a house with its family inside. It's a story in which both the heroes and villains are drawn to extremes because of the lust they feel for a young woman who dances lasciviously in her introduction. And that, to be clear, is what happens in the Disney version.

And then, of course, there is the way that Claude Frollo desires Esmeralda. As represented in the dark song "Hellfire", Frollo sees only two paths: one in which the gypsy woman belongs to him, and one in which she burns...literally. Leaving aside the song for a second — we'll get back to it, don't worry — Frollo is represented as the height, or depth, of cruelty from the prologue. Once the proper film begins, roughly 20 years after the events of "The Bells of Notre Dame", Frollo has become less cartoonishly vicious to Quasimodo and more in line as a passive-aggressive surrogate parent. The ways in which Frollo guilts Quasimodo about his desire to explore the world outside the cathedral, and how Quasi initially submits to being locked up in a high place, is a good reminder that the tortured mother-daughter relationship in Disney's Tangled wasn't the first to mine this uncomfortable back-and-forth. Frollo's nastiness is heightened, perhaps, because of Quasi's physical appearance, but the younger character struggles for a while to break out of his master's control. For inspiration on the villain, Disney's animators were as bold as they were in the final treatment, thinking of villainous types from the Confederacy and World War II. In the latter case, they were inspired specifically by the Nazi character in Schindler's List played by Ralph Fiennes, lusting after his Jewish maid even as he slaughters Jews in the Holocaust. (As mentioned at the top: this movie is not fucking around.) When Frollo first encounters Esmeralda, it's when she briefly dances at the Festival of Fools in a moment animated in such a way as to skirt the G rating. (Genuinely, the fact that this movie was rated G, in spite of literally opening with cold-blooded murder, is shocking.) Just as in the book, Frollo is set off with lust for this gypsy, and — as much as possible in a Disney movie — Esmeralda's physical beauty is never diminished. Her dance seems to arouse just about every man in the film, whether it's dealt with in sly one-liners, like Phoebus saying to no one in particular, "What a woman!", or in Frollo's tortured mix of excitement and fury. Frollo's attraction isn't spoken of with words, but the visuals do enough of the heavy lifting. After the festival, Esmeralda winds up in Notre Dame Cathedral, with the gallant Phoebus lying to Frollo that she asked for sanctuary. Frollo, thwarted for the moment, stands directly behind the gypsy, sniffing her hair. When she asks what he's doing, he says, "I was just imagining a rope around that beautiful neck." Her reply is enough, without saying what's actually going on: "I know what you were imagining." On a subtextual level, this is all fascinating to consider. It's not the first time that a Disney animated film featured as a lead a conventionally beautiful caricature of a young woman. (It's frankly easier to count which Disney animated films don't have a conventionally beautiful woman as a lead.) Nor is Hunchback the first time the question of romantic pairing was directly interrogated — Trousdale and Wise's last feature, Beauty and the Beast, does that with the love triangle between Belle, the Beast, and Gaston. But the 1996 picture is the first to directly present the issue of sexual attraction in such blunt terms. The "Hellfire" sequence, which is arguably one of the best scenes in the entire Disney Renaissance, presents the internal battle within Frollo as one of high drama. Menken and Schwartz did not shy from the task of treating this character with adult gloves, with lyrics like "This burning desire/is turning me to sin". Children in the audience may not fully grasp what's going on, but anyone over the age of, say, 10 or 11 would have a pretty good idea of the thoughts running through Frollo's mind. The animation, music, and Tony Jay's richly complex vocal performance make for a scene that pushed the boundaries of Disney animation. For a few brief moments, at least, the Disney Renaissance felt like it was moving forward instead of being stuck in stasis.

It doesn't help that the song, "A Guy Like You", comes from the other major problem in The Hunchback of Notre Dame. It's not that Jason Alexander, Charles Kimbrough, and the late Mary Wickes (who passed away before she was able to finish recording her dialogue) are poorly cast as a trio of gargoyles who serve as comic relief for Quasimodo. Alexander, aside from being hilarious on Seinfeld, had a Tony-winning past on the stage; Kimbrough's baritone is perfect for animation; and Wickes' irascible nature is as clear on the soundtrack as it was in her many on-screen performances. You can't complain with the casting for these characters.The problem is that a trio of wisecracking gargoyles, including one who threatens to spit on mimes and farts freely, feels like an export from an entirely different movie than one that climaxes with Paris burning, protests, and a near-hanging. "A Guy Like You" tries to acknowledge this, in opening lyrics where Alexander's gargoyle Hugo acknowledges that Paris is "alight" because it's being burned up by protestors and the military alike. But the severity of the protests only makes the frivolous song more atonally unwelcome. There's something fascinating about the presence of the gargoyles — Hugo's novel alludes to Quasimodo perceiving the gargoyles to be alive, or communicating with them as if they were, thus allowing Disney to create the characters. But the film never fully grapples with an idea that's pretty complex and mature, that a hero of one of these stories doesn't actually have wacky best friends who serve as comic relief and moral guideposts, but they're just a figment of the hero's imagination. There are just a few acknowledgments of this – when Frollo first sees adult Quasimodo having been "talking" with the gargoyles, he dismissively asks him, "Does stone talk?"But the gargoyles exist primarily as a balm between the darker moments, which gets at the problem of adapting a story that's not intended for juvenile consumption. It might not be possible to make a "Disney movie" out of bleak material. The complexity of the love triangle — or, in a perverse way, it's a love quadrangle — is such that Quasimodo's happiness only extends so far. Though The Hunchback of Notre Dame is not an extremely faithful adaptation by its finale, Quasi doesn't wind up with the girl. That honor goes to Phoebus, though of course, in the book, no one ends up with the girl. The film echoes Beauty and the Beast slightly here, if you look at it a certain way. In that film, a beautiful young woman falls in love with a hideous-looking man, but that love unlocks his true physical beauty. In this film, a beautiful young woman may have some kind of connection with a hideous-looking man, but she winds up with a conventionally attractive hero.All this aside, it's entirely to the credit of Hunchback that this film is as remotely interesting as it is. Arguably, Hunchback is the most thoughtful film of the Disney Renaissance — as much as many people (this writer included) adore Beauty and the Beast, Trousdale and Wise's follow-up is vastly more challenging and introspective than you might expect from a studio that also has films where characters sing about being alienated for their flatulent nature. The songs that Menken and Schwartz wrote lean into the intelligent nature of the story, posing the idea that the notion of monster vs. man isn't so easy to pin down based on looks. Schwartz, who then worked on the DreamWorks animated film The Prince of Egypt, would not work with Disney again until the 2007 live-action/animated film Enchanted, and the Renaissance is worse for his absence in later efforts.But complexities aren't always easy to accept in family filmmaking. Perhaps the core issue is that a truly uncompromising version of this story couldn't come from Disney. Yes, the movie is more adult and more envelope-pushing than their earlier fare, but it's still got to be a "Disney movie". "A Guy Like You" and the gargoyles exist because people didn't just expect to see such wackily humorous characters in Disney movies; they wanted those characters.