...not a Disney classic, but it is charming fun, with memorable characters and a few equally memorable tunes.
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The mouse has always been good to Disney, and Disney has always been good to mice. Mickey may not be the star of Disney's 1986 animated film, "The Great Mouse Detective," but a horde of Mickey's rodent relatives inhabit the world of Sherlock Holmesian London, and they all do him proud. "The Great Mouse Detective" is not a Disney classic, but it is charming fun, with memorable characters and a few equally memorable tunes.
The movie is set in a typically bizarre Disney world where mice and men walk side by side, the mice speaking the finest King's English in their waistcoats and top hats, while the rest of the animal kingdom, dogs and cats, for instance, remain lowly animals and pets. It's a little like Mickey's relationship to Pluto. The scene is London, 1897, and in a pre-title sequence we see a toymaker being abducted from his shop by a fiendish scoundrel, leaving the toymaker's young daughter behind. The girl, Olivia Flaversham (voiced by Susanne Pollatschek), immediately turns to one of England's premier crime-fighters for help, Basil of Baker Street (Barrie Ingham). These are all mice, mind you.
En route to Baker Street, Olivia meets Dr. David Q. Dawson (Val Bettin), recently returned from a tour of duty with Her Majesty's Army in Afghanistan and now looking for a residence in London. Seeing that the girl is in trouble and lost, Dawson helps her find her way to Baker Street. Together, the two of them call upon Basil, who conveniently lives beneath the floorboards of Sherlock Holmes's apartment, and the adventure begins.
The plot is pretty thin--this is a primarily a children's film, after all--and most of the movie's delight derives from its characters, especially their introduction. The villains, naturally, are the most interesting folk in the story, in this case Basil's archenemy, Professor Ratigan (wonderfully voiced by Vincent Price), and his peg-legged, right-hand bat, Fidget (Candy Candido). Ratigan's nefarious scheme is to kidnap the Mouse Queen of England, use the toymaker to replace her with a lifelike mechanical doll, and have the doll Queen declare him King of all Mousedom! A cunning plan.
In one of the film's most inspired bit of casting, the voice of Basil Rathbone is used for that of the human Sherlock Holmes. It's a very brief bit, and you'll have to listen closely to recognize the most popular Holmes of them all, but it's a splendid touch. Of course, since Mr. Rathbone died some twenty years before this film was made, I assume they used an archival recording; in any case, it's a fitting if minor tribute to the man who inspired practically every actor in the part since, as well as inspired the mouse's name.
Basil and Dr. Dawson don disguises as lowlife ruffians and, with a bloodhound named Toby in tow, go about tracking the missing toymaker. Along the way, we are treated to some handsome tunes by Henry Mancini ("The World's Greatest Criminal Mind" and "Goodbye So Soon") and Melissa Manchester ("Let Me Be Good To You"), the latter sung by Ms. Manchester in the form of a barroom mouse in a waterfront dive.
The film is based on the "Basil of Baker Street" book series by Eve Titus and Paul Galdone. It features some of Disney's better background paintings, harking back to the old days of detailed, three-dimensional realism, but the character drawings are rather simplistic in design with few facial features. I understand this film incorporated some of Disney's first uses of computer graphics, and perhaps several corners were cut.
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[release]10494[/release]