21. Robin Hood (1973)

Next was Robin Hood, an adaptation of the classic English legends, with a cast of anthropomorphic animals; perhaps afraid of making anything as grandiose or costly as Sleeping Beauty again, Disney continues its run of relatively standard comedies here, but the humour is starting to wear thin and the repeated ideas are becoming a lot more obvious. Robin Hood is certainly a step up from The Aristocats and at least has some sense of personality, but unfortunately, a lot of that is on loan from other, better films.

Disney continues to use the xerography technique of animation and, while a little cleaned up from The Aristocats, it’s getting very boring to look at now; the last five films have all looked very similar and Robin Hood really doesn’t change anything whatsoever. As a matter of fact, it’s very easy to think of Robin Hood as simply The Jungle Book in a forest, especially in terms of its visual style – the character designs are all heavily reminiscent of those seen in The Jungle Book, particularly the vultures, Sir Hiss, who is obviously based on Kaa and, most egregiously, Little John, who is just Baloo coloured in differently. There are actually points where the film copies entire sequences of animation from The Jungle Book, most noticeably when Sir Hiss tries to calm Prince John down and they just repurpose animation of Kaa hypnotising Mowgli; I understand that Disney’s budget at the time would have been tight and they needed to cut corners whenever they could, but when it gets that obvious it becomes distracting and really pulls you out of the movie. The backgrounds are fine, but not really up to scratch considering how good Disney’s pastoral, natural backgrounds usually are, seen in films such as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Bambi, but these more simplistic backgrounds fit the more stylised animation style better, I suppose. The character animation is good and all and there aren’t really any prominent flubs or slip-ups, but there’s just nothing really special here, nothing new or different, it takes so much from the last few films, The Jungle Book in particular, that Robin Hood’s animation and visual style really has no identity of its own.

I mean really, take off the hat and it’s just Kaa, come on

 

The story is very loose, the movie isn’t really based around a central plot so much as it is an environment – Sherwood Forest, a place where all the different characters can flit through and bump into one another for different comedic scenes. This is a perfectly fine idea, but unlike say, the jungle in The Jungle Book, you don’t get much of a sense of Sherwood Forest as a place, you only really see two or three areas of it; even though it’s an animated movie, Robin Hood feels very limited in its scope, it feels like a live action movie that only had two sets and had to really disguise that fact in order to try and build a larger environment, but didn’t really do a very good job of it, as the whole world feels very small, claustrophobic and lifeless – the movie really doesn’t take advantage of the unique benefits that come with being animated. These problems are exacerbated by the film’s biggest issue, its pacing; the movie feels very aimless and confused, it meanders from moment to moment with very little cohesion between scenes, only occasionally stumbling onto something that might be important. Scenes trundle on for much longer than they need to, many of them start out relatively interesting or entertaining, but then seem to keep going far past the point where they should have ended, before undeniably overstaying their welcome and then just kind of trailing off at a seemingly random point. I don’t understand how scenes were just allowed to drag on like this, so many should have the last five or so minutes shaved off, but I suppose that would have cut the running time down too heavily, so I guess I have my answer as to why they did this. These artificial attempts to drag out the running time really hurt the movie and make it feel completely unsure of itself or what it’s trying to say, even when scenes do start out pretty good, they invariably lose steam and drag on for as long as they possibly can.

Coppin’ Hood

The characters are a very generic collection of animal stereotypes – the sly and cunning fox, the strong but gentle bear, the cruel and predatory wolf, the cute and innocent rabbit, the intelligent but clumsy turtle etc. etc. – that are, on top of that, mostly copied from other Disney movies. Robin Hood himself owes quite a lot to Peter Pan, he’s a loveable rogue and trickster who seems to enjoy tormenting his pathetic and ineffectual nemesis, he’s very theatrical and a bit of a show-off, he’s adventurous and a drifter, even his character design borrows from Peter Pan, from the tunic and feathered cap to the colour scheme of green and orange; Robin is perfectly likeable and can be fun to watch, but he’s nothing we haven’t seen before. Little John is, as said before, just Baloo – he has the same basic character design, the EXACT same personality and, like the previous Baloo clone, O’Malley, he has the voice of Baloo, Phil Harris; thankfully this was the last time Disney tried to outright copy Baloo’s character right down to the voice, because it was getting a little embarrassing by this point. Most of the other characters are just generic, dull nice guys: Maid Marian is boring, Friar Tuck is boring, all the townspeople are boring; most noticeably the children are the stereotype of Disney children to a tee, they’re just there to be cutesy and for the youngest one to not even be able to speak properly, it’s the same old stuff from Peter Pan, The Aristocats, One Hundred and One Dalmatians and so on. There is Lady Kluck, a lively and boisterous Scottish chicken, but unfortunately she’s not as fun as she sounds and is really just kind of annoying.

Urkel the Turtle

The villains are a little better, at least in terms of having some personality – the Sherri ff of Nottingham is probably the best character in the film, he is well voiced by Pat Buttram, whose Southern twang someone manages to be much less annoying than it was in The Aristocats and instead be quite funny and charming. The voice perfectly fits the Sherriff as this sleazy, two faced kind of guy, who acts like he’s your friend but clearly just wants to fleece you for everything you’re worth and loves doing it; it’s great, he’s such a slime ball. Sir Hiss, on the other hand, is just kind of annoying and unfunny, him and Prince John have a very generic double act shtick reminiscent of Captain Hook and Smee, Jasper and Horace and a whole lot of others, it just isn’t very funny. Prince John is just too lame to be threatening or funny, he’s just pathetic; like Edgar from The Aristocats or, again, Captain Hook, who he is pretty heavily based on, Prince John is just a loser and a wimp, who exists purely to be shown up by Robin Hood, rather than to pose any real danger. I guess this is fine, considering the film is supposed to be a comedy, but unfortunately, it’s just not very funny, so Prince John just comes off as too sad – constantly sucking his thumb, screaming and crying out for his Mummy, he’s just way too over-the-top to be entertaining.

Wimoweh

There aren’t many songs, but the few that are there are quite well done, if rather forgettable; ‘Oo-De-Lally’ is kind of like a folk song, while ‘Not in Nottingham’ is more like a melancholy, country number. “Love” is actually really quite a nice song that seems a bit more modern than the others, almost ahead of its time and it creates a very nice atmosphere, but neither it nor the aforementioned two are really musical numbers. The closest to a traditional musical number in the film is “The Phony Old King of England”, which is pretty upbeat, but just not that fun to listen to and definitely not memorable. I think it would have been pretty interesting if the movie had been set around one of these styles, making Robin Hood a kind of country or folk music themed film, in the same way that The Jungle Book is themed around jazz, but as it is, the songs are too few and too varied in style to really pull together as one.

Robin Hood is a pretty bland movie, it falls into that familiar problem of aspiring to be cute and silly, but not much else; the animals are definitely cutesy and goofy, but they have very little soul or personality to them. There is no real story or character arc, nothing and no-one is ever really taken seriously or given much weight or depth, it’s just one silly scene after the other, each one dragging on and on for far longer than it needs to, making most of the film very boring and difficult to watch. It’s not a terrible movie, the animation is decent, the colours are nice, some of the characters are pretty likeable, if a bit dull and there are a couple of sequences that are really quite good, particularly Robin’s escape from the castle in the film’s climax; unfortunately, the negatives outweigh the positives in this lazy, average and forgettable film. 

Other Thoughts:

• The reuse of animation really is quite bad, they use this walk cycle of the Sherriff of Nottingham at least four times!

This scene is literally immediately after the exact same walk cycle, just from a different angle! Scandalous

5/10

Next Week: The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh!

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