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You know, prior to this excursion into the entirety of Disney’s animated feature catalog, I would have easily pointed towards The Aristocats, Oliver & Company or Pocahontas being the worst of the bunch. But I guess my brain shut out just how terrible Home on the Range is. (For the record, I still think Pocahontas deserves the lowest spot since it takes a historical event and whitewashes it to fit the princess mold.)
Home on the Range was advertised as the final hand-drawn animated feature to come from the studio, and it ended with a limped whimper. The Post-Renaissance was a continually downward spiral, with the persistent feeling that the studio was burning off its leftover ideas and releasing films that were over-thought, over-worked products of studio demands. Thank god they eventually released The Princess and the Frog and Winnie the Pooh, which may not be masterpieces, but they’re at least evergreen films which perform the typical narrative beats of their respective styles with aplomb. Oh, and those were loving animated.
This looks like Disney trying to do Chuck Jones, but missing the key ingredients which made his severe angularity and expressionistic backgrounds pop with zesty energy. They threw in references to Sling Blade, Little Caesar, and Spaghetti Westerns, I’m shocked they didn’t throw in a wink-and-nod to the Road Runner and Wil E. Coyote. But that may have gotten them into legal trouble, but at least it would have provided a potentially smart meta-joke.
No, the only time Home on the Range whips itself into any actual emotion is during the villain’s big number, “Yodel-Adle-Eedle-Idle-Oo.” This big bad isn’t very menacing, memorable, or engaging, only notable for Randy Quaid’s committed vocal work and for having a passing resemblance to the actor. Oh, and his reoccurring motif is that he can hypnotize cattle by yodeling. His big song is bright, colorful, vibrant, clearly indebted to the march of playing cards in Alice in Wonderland as it is equally indebted to Dumbo’s “Pink Elephants on Parade.”
For every adventurous choice made, it’s immediately undercut. Roseanne Barr as the leading voice in a children’s film is a ballsy choice, what isn’t is to muzzle her brash humor into the family-friendly brand. Robin Williams, Martin Short, and Eddie Murphy got to go-for-broke in their films, frequently riffing in ways which was at odds with the surrounding film yet still humorous, but she gets stuck with bodily humor and lazy writing and non-descript character.
Given the troubled production behind many of the Post-Renaissance films, it’s not surprise to learn about the unique sounding origins. Conceived as a story about a timid cowboy encountering a cattle hustler in a ghost town, which may or may not have been populated by spirits, it quickly went over-budget and stuck itself in development hell. Wanting to salvage what they could, they kept some names, character designs, and basic outline to produce this. This is the safest, blandest film to be made from those materials, and the final budget was somehow ballooned to $110 million.
You wouldn't know it from looking at the screen. There's no grand scale ambitious sequences, nothing to rival the artistry of Sleeping Beauty's moving tapestries, or Beauty & the Beast's fairy tale wonderlands. I'm sure the pre-school set finds this movie perfectly tolerable, but I don't think 76 minutes has ever gone by so laboriously for me before. Home on the Range is so slender that it's practically anemic. It tries hard for laughs, which are only rarely there, and provided a momentary silence on hand-drawn animation from the leader of the field, in America anyway. This is not how one pictured Disney going out.
