Family Home Theater

Grade:  A-
Entire family:  Yes
1979, 95 min., Color
Rated G
Disney
Aspect ratio:  1.85:1
Featured audio:  DTS-HD MA 5.1
Bonus features:  C+
Includes:  Blu-ray, Digital Copy
Trailer

I watched The Muppet Movie with my ‘tween daughter last night and we both were apprehensive. We had gone to Disney’s Hollywood Studios earlier in the summer and were totally unimpressed with “The Muppets 3D” attraction—a 3D movie that frankly wasn’t worth the long wait. The jokes were bad, the puppetry was only so-so, and the script was as ordinary as a called strike in baseball.

But it’s hard not to warm to a film that begins with Kermit the Frog strumming a banjo on a log in the swamp and singing “Rainbow Connection,” the Oscar-nominated song from Paul Williams and Kenny Ascher (who wrote the other seven songs in this film as well). And when Kermit decides to leave the bayou and we see his long, fuzzy green legs pedaling a bicycle down the road, we both laughed out loud. We were hooked.  More

Grade:  C+
Entire family:  Yes (though it might bore older ones)
1973, 83 min., Color
Rated G
Disney
Aspect ratio:  1.66:1
Featured audio:  DTS-HD MA 5.1
Bonus features:  C+
Includes:  Blu-ray, DVD, Digital Copy
Trailer

Of all the animated Disney movies from the ‘70s, Robin Hood had perhaps the most potential, but suffers from a mild case of “averageitis.” For me it just didn’t hold up as well as some of the other Disney entries—though the kids thought it comparable to other Disney features.

Although Wolfgang Reitherman, one of Disney’s fabled Nine Old Men, directed Disney’s 1973 animated adaptation of the Robin Hood legend—one which hovers close in plot to the Errol Flynn Adventures of Robin Hood classic—the music isn’t as well integrated, and the story seems flat in spots.

There’s a hint of limitation in the title sequence, which simply features a parade of characters marching across the screen to a folk-pop song by Roger Miller, then running back the other direction, chased by another group of uniformed animals. At times, the animators seemed satisfied to be going for “cute” instead of clever, and there just isn’t the same give-and-take robust energy to the characters of Robin Hood (a fox, voiced by Brian Bedford) and Little John (a bear, voiced by Phil Harris) as there was with Flynn and his partner in live-action convivial crime, Alan Hale. Other characters also seem too nice, or too nondescript.

The most memorable ones are Prince John (Peter Ustinov), whose demeanor vacillates between delusions of grandeur and infantile withdrawal, and his advisor, Sir Hiss (Terry-Thomas), a snake whose schtick comes closest to what passes for snappy patter in this film.  More

Grade:  B
Entire family:  Yes
1988, 74 min., Color
Rated G
Disney
Aspect ratio:  1.85:1
Featured audio:  DTS-HD MA 5.1
Bonus features:  C
Includes:  Blu-ray, DVD
Clip

The first Disney movie with attitude.

That’s the tagline for this 1988 animated feature, which draws its inspiration from Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist. Instead of setting it in Dickens’ Victorian London, writers Jim Cox, Tim Disney, and James Mangold plunked this one down in the middle of New York City in the Eighties. A soundtrack that includes songs by Huey Lewis, Billy Joel, and Bette Midler date Oliver and Company just as much as Dickens’ stovepipe hats, and it’s a feature few would consider one of Disney’s best.

But boy, does Blu-ray breathe new life into it!

My wife has never been a fan of this film and has sometimes had a problem telling the difference between a DVD and Blu-ray. But even she remarked how much better the picture looked, and how it helps you to see details that you never saw before, and appreciate the art design more.

The juiced-up audio does the same thing for city sounds. It feels more authentically Big Apple now with this extensive HD makeover—the most dramatic, really, of any recent Disney catalog title new to Blu-ray. It really helps you appreciate the great mix of Dickensian allusions, upbeat songs, fun animal characters, poignant moments, and elements of peril.   More

Grade:  B
Entire family:  Yes
1963, 79 min., Color
Rated G
Disney
Aspect ratio:  1.75:1
Featured audio:  DTS-HD MA 5.1
Bonus features:  B-
Includes:  Blu-ray, DVD, Digital Copy
Trailer

In the words of bumbling TV spy Maxwell Smart, The Sword in the Stone missed it by THAT much—Disney’s Golden Age, that is. Most students of cinema date the high point of Disney animation from 1938 (Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs) to 1959 (Sleeping Beauty), and this animated feature hit theaters in 1963. It was also a movie about Arthurian legend that had the misfortune of being released on December 25, just a month after America’s version of Camelot died with President John F. Kennedy.

I’m not about to argue that The Sword in the Stone belongs on the tail end of the Golden Age, but I do think it’s been underappreciated.

The writing is solid, for one thing. Bill Peet (Pinocchio, Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan, Sleeping Beauty, 101 Dalmatians) gives us a script that’s based on a book by T.H. White, who adapted Sir Thomas Malory’s famous Morte d’Arthur into four novels, one of which, The Sword and the Stone, was published in 1939. Disney snapped up the movie rights to the novel that year, but it took decades to finally bring it to the screen. Peet’s screenplay juggles magic, whimsy, humor, and action, and gives us characters that are endearing—even lesser ones, like a mangy wolf. The Sherman brothers give us some solid music, too, with a number of songs really making scenes like Merlin’s “packing” and the squirrels-in-love montage more memorable.   More

Grade:  B, C-
Entire family:  Yes
2000, 2005; 78 min., 75 min.; Color
Rated G
Disney
Aspect ratio:  1.85:1
Featured soundtrack:  DTS-HD MA 5.1
Bonus features:  C+
Includes:  Blu-ray, DVDs
Trailer

While the world was preoccupied with Y2K fears, Disney decided to start the new Millennium with something a little different from their usual animated features. The Emperor’s New Groove is a little sassier, a little hipper, and maybe just a little crazier—as if the cartoon cast drank some of the old Warner Bros. Kool-Aid.

I certainly had flashbacks to those irreverent cartoons when early in the film the emperor has an old man thrown off his mountain palace, and again when one of the characters experiences some quick changes into various creatures as he drinks potion after potion.

The Emperor’s New Groove is very loosely based on Hans Christian Andersen’s The Emperor’s New Clothes, about a vain ruler who’s taken in by a pair of con artist weavers claiming a new suit of clothes they’re making for him will be invisible to anyone unfit to behold it or too stupid to hold their jobs. Of course, all of the emperor’s advisers are too afraid to admit they can’t see this pretend garment, and it takes a naive peasant child to shout “But he isn’t wearing anything at all” as the emperor parades half-naked in public and finally realizes his folly.

It’s probably the loosest adaptation of a fairy tale that the House of Mouse has attempted. In this Disney version, the emperor is an extremely vain (“It’s all about ME”) 17 year old who rules a tiny Incan empire somewhere in ancient Mesoamerica with no thought for anyone but himself. Instead of two weavers it’s a shriveled up adviser named Yzma (Eartha Kitt) and her boy-toy assistant Kronk (Patrick Warburton) who try to bamboozle the emperor. And the child-like peasant who is finally able to make the emperor see the error of his ways is village leader Pacha (John Goodman).  More