Philosophers have the notion of parallel universes
— whole worlds that exist right next to our own, but in a different
dimension, so that we can't see them, even while our actions are mirrored
with infinite variations. Movie animators have a similar notion,
which is that human lives are mirrored on a smaller scale by the parallel
lives of the little cartoon characters who live down there closer
to the floor.
Near the beginning of The Great Mouse Detective,
the camera moves through London, passing many of the familiar landmarks,
before finally tilting down and moving in toward a little doorway
near the ground. Inside there's a busy little mouse, a craftsman,
hard at work. Like so many domesticated cartoon animals, he
is the very soul of bourgeois respectability. (I always liked
it in the Tom & Jerry cartoons when they showed the floor
lamps and chintz-covered sofas inside the mouse holes.)
Before long, however, a mysterious figure appears
who disrupts this image of comfortable domesticity. And then
The Great Mouse Detective launches its story, which depends
on the conceit that London in those days housed not only a great human
detective (Sherlock Holmes) but also a mouse who was every bit as
good a detective.
The Sherlock Holmes legend is such a durable story
that all sorts of filmmakers have adapted it to their own ends, styles
and genres. In recent years, we've seen Billy Wilder's The
Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, Gene Wilder's Sherlock Holmes'
Smarter Brother, Nicholas Meyer's The Seven Percent Solution,
and the Steven Spielberg/Barry Levinson movie about Young Sherlock
Holmes, which told the story of the schooldays of Sherlock and
young Watson, surrounded by props and special effects borrowed from
other Spielberg extravaganzas.
Now here is the Walt Disney version, told on a mouse
scale in cartoon form, with a freedom and creativity of animation
that reminded me of the earlier Disney feature-length cartoons.
In recent decades, Disney and the other animators have started to
cut corners: The old-style full animation of such classics as
Pinocchio, with its endless man-hours of drawing, was simply
too expensive to duplicate in today's movies. So we began to
get backgrounds that didn't move, and actions that seemed recycled
out of other actions. Now, however, computers have taken most
of the drudgery and much of the expense out of animation, and the
result is a movie like The Great Mouse Detective, which looks
more fully animated than anything in some 30 years.
The movie's story involves the usual silliness about
evil villains and abducted geniuses. Although the detective
in the movie is not called Sherlock Holmes (or Sherlock Mouse, for
that matter), he obviously is cut from the same cloth, right down
to his ever-present pipe. And there is a Dr. Watson character,
who befriends a bewildered waif in the street, and takes it to the
detective, who catches the scent of a great case.
What's fun is the carefree way the animators swing
through their story, using the freedom of the cartoon form to blend
19th-century realism with images that seem borrowed from more recent
special-effects pictures. For a long time, I was down on the
full-length animated efforts of Disney and others, because they didn't
seem to reflect the same sense of magic and wonderment that the original
animated classics always had. Who, for example, could ever equate
101 Dalmatians with Snow White? But now, maybe
thanks to computers, animated movies are beginning to sparkle again.
NOTE: On the same bill with The Great Mouse Detective
is Clock Cleaners, a classic Disney cartoon with Mickey Mouse
and Donald Duck working on a perilous perch high above the city.
The cartoon is an example of the meticulous craftsmanship and great
ingenuity of the first Disney animators, who created an endless variety
of situations by using the laws of gravity and physics and ladders
and paint buckets. It's a lot of fun.
The Great Mouse Detective (STAR) (STAR) (STAR)
Walt Disney Pictures presents
an animated movie featuring the voices of Vincent Price, Barrie Ingham,
Val Bettin, Susanne Pollatschek, Candy Candido, Diana Chesney, Eve
Brenner, Alan Young, and Melissa Manchester. Directed by John
Musker, Ron Clements, Dave Mitchner, and Burny Mattinson. Produced
by Burny Mattinson. Music by Henry Mancini. Running time:
73 minutes. Classified G. Opening today at local theaters.