Home on the Range (2004)
THE ANIMATION
Let me say this: Home on the Range is not a… bad looking film. The animation is good,
and it’s plenty colorful… sometimes too colorful
(to the point of making the film look juvenile). But man, they should have
retired the Mignola-styled art direction. I’m in the minority that didn’t mind
its use in Atlantis and The Emperor’s New Groove (I guess… for
some reason? I’m not really sure what’s wrong with it in those movies), but it
just looks… awkward in this film. Is this what other people see when they watch
the two aforementioned movies? The models look weird when the animals are doing
non-animal-things like standing up and impersonating martial artists, and well,
it looks more like a Looney Tunes bit than a Disney one (especially the design of
Alameda Slim).
It was pretty funny
seeing animated Buscemi, though.
THE HEROES
Now, these three
heifers were pretty annoying—especially Roseanne
Barr’s Maggie. I didn’t even fully comprehend how she was supposed to be
characterized at first, due to the film’s sloppy expository scene. She’s terribly
obnoxious from the get-go, sure (“Yeah they’re real; quit starting” *groan* and
that voice…), but when tragedy
strikes in the beginning and she goes through an emotional slump, she sure is
quick to rebound, only ever reflecting on her past when the story comes to a
slump and some sort of stimulus is needed to give it more energy.
The second cow, Mrs.
Calloway, voiced by Judi Dench, is your typical straight-edge foil to Maggie’s
rebellious free spirit; absolutely nothing new here and nothing to talk about.
Same with Jennifer Tilly’s Grace, but hey, at least she manages to be somewhat endearing despite also failing
to bring anything to the table.
THE SIDE CHARACTERS
These guys are just as
forgettable as the primaries, so I’ll get this over with quickly: you’ve got
the old, short-tempered goat; the rambunctious piglets; the sensationalist
chatterbox hens; the oddly precocious chicks; the kindly and loving owner of
the farm, Pearl; a couple of horny bulls; and… the horse, Buck—voiced by Cuba
Gooding Jr.—who wants to be an action star…
I hate this character.
Why? In short: he’s obnoxious, and an obvious attempt by Disney to reuse Mushu
(in all the wrong ways).
THE VILLAINS
Alameda Slim is our
main villain here; a notorious outlaw who, along with his gang, has managed to
steal dozens of cattle from farms in the dead of the night without stirring even
a mouse. He’s played up as this threatening, ominous force, but (spoiler alert)
he’s soon revealed to actually be a cartoonish moustache-twirler who has the
(what can only be called) magical ability to hypnotize cows with the power of
his yodeling (somehow). I personally thought a straight up evil villain could
have made for an interesting contrast with the rest of the colorful, juvenile
world, but whatever; Slim was gonna be a generic villain either way—might as well
make him another source of “comedy”.
His sidekicks are the triplets,
the Willie Brothers. Their shtick is that they’re not really evil, they’re
just pushovers and too dumb to function.
Oh, and there’s the
Buscemi character. He’s just Buscemi, so he’s automatically the best.
THE MUSIC
One of the last scores
for Disney done by the great Alan Menken, this one is by far my least favorite.
Sure, it fits, given the setting of the film, but maybe this genre of music isn’t
for me (I kind of doubt that since I love “Do Not Forsake Me, Oh My Darlin’”
from High Noon, but who knows)? I
guess “(You Ain’t) Home on the Range” was a pretty catchy opener, and “Little
Patch of Heaven” is a harmless song, despite tasting like diabetes. "Yodel-Adle-Eedle-Idle-Oo" was pretty obnoxious, but it had energy, I guess? And if there were any other
songs, I’ve already forgotten them.
The Best: “(You Ain’t) Home on the Range”
The Worst: "Yodel-Adle-Eedle-Idle-Oo"
THE PLOT
Maggie, a once
prosperous show cow, has to be sold off when her farm is hit by the infamous outlaw
Alameda Slim and his gang, who made off with all the cattle sans her. She finds
herself on Little Patch of Heaven, a happy little farm owned by a benevolent
old lady, Pearl; however, the farm has hit some tough times as of late, and
unless Pearl can cough up the dough needed, she’ll have to auction off the farm
animals as well as the land. Driven to save her new home (and to get revenge on
Slim), Maggie teams up with two cows she meets in Patch of Heaven, Mrs.
Calloway and Grace, and become bounty hunters to capture Slim and use his
bounty to save the farm.
I’m dead serious.
To be fair, that’s a
premise that is so absolutely ridiculous that it almost could have worked.
Heck, it sounds almost vaguely Pixar-esque. Too bad Disney completely screwed
up and it came across as stupid as it sounds, with a predictable story and insipid
characters to boot. And what didn’t help at
all was Disney being incapable of resisting the urge to completely ruin the
integrity of the story and setting by shoe-horning in tons of anachronistic
dialogue and contemporary cultural references (something they often struggled
with in the Post-Renaissance era).
Total Score: 8/30 = 26% = F
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