I don't like this movie.
I'm not alone in my distaste for Robin Hood. During its making, whispers spread among the staff (Ward Kimball and director Wolfgang Reitherman at least are recorded as complaining to each other). This, to me, is the absolute nadir of finance driven animated trash, akin to a Shrek sequel in artistry. To its credit, though, it is handled by master animators and designers, but this is hindered by the fact that every good piece of animation has to be reused once more to save time.
As a Robin Hood adaptation, this one is quite far from its source material. Rather than the legendary folk hero, we get a pussified interpretation who dresses up in drag rather than resort to heroics and trots about carelessly so that he and Phil Harris are easily ambushed by a troop of run cycles. Did I mention cycles? Anyway, Peter Ustinov at least lends some comic voice acting to Prince John, but he doesn't exactly make for much of a villain. Phil Harris plays Baloo as Little John, and three films with Baloo is a bit much for me. Sir Hiss is Kaa...and that's all anyone can say. Maid Marion and her faithful steward Bess...I mean "Clucky"...are basically useless and oblivious to what's going on around them. Pat Buttram's kind of enjoyable as the Sheriff, but, again, it's hard to take any of these villains seriously on any level when they're all played for cheap laughs. None of the characters endear much, and at least half are basically reused characters from past Disney projects.
As for the plot...there is no plot.
Instead, we get an aimless series of episodes that advance nothing and provide nothing but cheap, largely unfunny gags. One finds it hard to thrill over Robin Hood garbed in drag when we want to see him doing something masculine and likable. The party sequence in the middle is a masterpiece of suck, tethering together reused animation from The Aristocats, Snow White, and The Jungle Book while basically wasting the audience's time with a lousy song that I can't even recall at the moment. Wrapping it all up is a bit of exposition that essentially skips over the climax of the story, like a final insult to its stupid, stupid audience that will buy into anything with the Disney name.
Moving on to animation, this film features all the masters of the last few films, who normally elevate even mediocre material like The Aristocats, and they do contribute a few impressive pieces to this. Milt Kahl does a fun and technically tricky bit with the Sheriff where he bounces down the street in perspective in a very characterized way. The problem is that it proceeds to be reused TWICE. Unfortunately, the rest of the animation is so occupied by walk cycles and reused animation and COPIED animation from films past that whatever virtues are contained wear out their welcome and good pieces are harder to come by.
To be fair, the design values aside from the budget cheating are solid, and even with the appalling number of shortcuts the animation is never any less than well crafted otherwise. But what's the takeway? No breakthroughs are made on a technological or artistic level, no characters stand out, no scenes make an impression, and I swear the only bits I can remember are the thumb sucking and the fact that Robin Hood's anthropomorphized character design kind of looks like the primary inspiration for "furries" (do NOT look that term up).
I've heard from a few folks who worked on this, and have never, in my entire life, heard any of them say they were proud of it. The thing's a cynical sucker punch to anyone who enjoys Disney films, a cesspool of mediocrity and disrespect that doesn't even think its supporters are worth giving competent production values. Yogi Bear and The Flintstones are more exciting to me. Heavy Traffic from the same year also took shortcuts, but out of necessity rather than greed, and actually managed to be an excellent film where its rough animation worked for its themes. I'm not against cheap animation, and think such limitations can actually lead to some of the most interesting animation around when the people involved are putting their all into wrangling descent expressiveness and motion out of their material.
But Robin Hood is just half-assed. Usually, The Black Cauldron is brought up when discussing bad Disney movies, but that film had something called originality to some extent in the context of Disney's work. Robin Hood is, for lack of a better term, animated inbreeding.
I'm not alone in my distaste for Robin Hood. During its making, whispers spread among the staff (Ward Kimball and director Wolfgang Reitherman at least are recorded as complaining to each other). This, to me, is the absolute nadir of finance driven animated trash, akin to a Shrek sequel in artistry. To its credit, though, it is handled by master animators and designers, but this is hindered by the fact that every good piece of animation has to be reused once more to save time.
As a Robin Hood adaptation, this one is quite far from its source material. Rather than the legendary folk hero, we get a pussified interpretation who dresses up in drag rather than resort to heroics and trots about carelessly so that he and Phil Harris are easily ambushed by a troop of run cycles. Did I mention cycles? Anyway, Peter Ustinov at least lends some comic voice acting to Prince John, but he doesn't exactly make for much of a villain. Phil Harris plays Baloo as Little John, and three films with Baloo is a bit much for me. Sir Hiss is Kaa...and that's all anyone can say. Maid Marion and her faithful steward Bess...I mean "Clucky"...are basically useless and oblivious to what's going on around them. Pat Buttram's kind of enjoyable as the Sheriff, but, again, it's hard to take any of these villains seriously on any level when they're all played for cheap laughs. None of the characters endear much, and at least half are basically reused characters from past Disney projects.
As for the plot...there is no plot.
Instead, we get an aimless series of episodes that advance nothing and provide nothing but cheap, largely unfunny gags. One finds it hard to thrill over Robin Hood garbed in drag when we want to see him doing something masculine and likable. The party sequence in the middle is a masterpiece of suck, tethering together reused animation from The Aristocats, Snow White, and The Jungle Book while basically wasting the audience's time with a lousy song that I can't even recall at the moment. Wrapping it all up is a bit of exposition that essentially skips over the climax of the story, like a final insult to its stupid, stupid audience that will buy into anything with the Disney name.
Moving on to animation, this film features all the masters of the last few films, who normally elevate even mediocre material like The Aristocats, and they do contribute a few impressive pieces to this. Milt Kahl does a fun and technically tricky bit with the Sheriff where he bounces down the street in perspective in a very characterized way. The problem is that it proceeds to be reused TWICE. Unfortunately, the rest of the animation is so occupied by walk cycles and reused animation and COPIED animation from films past that whatever virtues are contained wear out their welcome and good pieces are harder to come by.
To be fair, the design values aside from the budget cheating are solid, and even with the appalling number of shortcuts the animation is never any less than well crafted otherwise. But what's the takeway? No breakthroughs are made on a technological or artistic level, no characters stand out, no scenes make an impression, and I swear the only bits I can remember are the thumb sucking and the fact that Robin Hood's anthropomorphized character design kind of looks like the primary inspiration for "furries" (do NOT look that term up).
I've heard from a few folks who worked on this, and have never, in my entire life, heard any of them say they were proud of it. The thing's a cynical sucker punch to anyone who enjoys Disney films, a cesspool of mediocrity and disrespect that doesn't even think its supporters are worth giving competent production values. Yogi Bear and The Flintstones are more exciting to me. Heavy Traffic from the same year also took shortcuts, but out of necessity rather than greed, and actually managed to be an excellent film where its rough animation worked for its themes. I'm not against cheap animation, and think such limitations can actually lead to some of the most interesting animation around when the people involved are putting their all into wrangling descent expressiveness and motion out of their material.
But Robin Hood is just half-assed. Usually, The Black Cauldron is brought up when discussing bad Disney movies, but that film had something called originality to some extent in the context of Disney's work. Robin Hood is, for lack of a better term, animated inbreeding.