STARLOG, Volume 10, Issue 108
Article written by David Hutchison
© O'Quinn Studios for STARLOG magazine, July 1986

Elementary...
It's THE GREAT MOUSE DETECTIVE, pages 73-81

Beneath the floorboards of Baker Street lives a long-tailed sleuth named Basil — Disney's latest Mouse hero and scourge of the rodent underworld.

It was only a couple of months after Disney's The Black Cauldron opened that STARLOG began making inquires about the studio's next animated feature, then titled Basil of Baker Street.  As a special courtesy to this magazine's readers, studio publicist Howard Green arranged a meeting with two of the film's three animation directors — John Musker and Ron Clements.

At the time of this interview, Basil had been in various stages of production for several years.  The film has survived a complete turnover of management at Disney, the animation department's move to new quarters off the studio lot, a switch in producers, and, as reported in last month's "Medialog," a title change.  Disney marketing felt it would be desirable to distance themselves from Paramount's Young Sherlock Holmes with a new title:  The Great Mouse Detective.

After describing the action of the $12 million film from the dozens of immense storyboard panels that lined the halls of the spacious, new animation facility (now located in Glendale across the street from Walt Disney Imagineering, Disney's design facility for the parks), Musker and Clements fielded questions for STARLOG.

STARLOG:  Basil of Baker Street is taken from the well-known series of children's books by Eve Titus.  From the storyboards, it seems that the characters have been developed far beyond the stories.

JOHN MUSKER:  In the Titus books, Sherlock Holmes was Basil's mentor.  We don't play it that way.  Yes, Basil's character is a miniature of the real Holmes and he does live beneath his place at 221B Baker Street, but he doesn't relate to the real Holmes.  For our purposes, he is Holmes.  All the Holmesian references are throwaways for the audience to enjoy as incidentals.  We want Basil to be his own character, not a watered-down version of Sherlock Holmes.

STARLOG:  Basil seems much more of a face-paced cartoon adventure, in contrast to the dark doings of The Black Cauldron (STARLOG #96, 97).

MUSKER:  It's true.  The characters are much more in the forefront.  Look at the first sequence when we learn of Ratigan, Basil's evil nemesis in crime.  Basil is going on and on about his obsession with Ratigan, and paying no attention to this girl Olivia, whose father has been kidnapped by a peg-legged bat.  Basil isn't interested in her problems, he is only interested in catching Ratigan — the Adolf Hitler of the crime world.  He has been running a ballistics test that he hoped would lead him to Ratigan.  It didn't.  We're playing Basil slightly manic-depressive, so when the test fails, he collapses in a chair.  In animation, it will be much more caricatured than that, I think, but he just totters to his chair with a Holmesian slump, barely moving as he picks up his violin and plays a melancholy tune.
      Finally, Olivia mentions that this peg-legged bat was involved.  Basil is electrified.  He knows that the bat is one of Ratigan's squirmy henchmen.  Basil's nerves are on edge.  He becomes very theatrical.  The fireplace flares up under the portrait of the Famous Professor Ratigan and the expression changes slightly.  Basil exclaims to his friend:  "Ratigan!  A genius, Dawson, a genius twisted for evil!  The Napoleon of crime!"  As Basil talks, lightening from the storm outside flickers in the room as the walls appear to close in.  It's like a ghost story is being told.
      As he talks about his obsession, we cut away to Ratigan's waterfront lair.  The camera travels down through a sewer grate into a deserted wine cellar as Basil says, "Who knows what dastardly crime that villain may be plotting even as we speak?"  And so we see Ratigan at work.  Briefly, Ratigan has kidnapped this girl's father, the world's greatest toymaker, to help with a strange mechanical contraption.  Basil will have to figure out what it is.  Ratigan is lording it over to her father, urging him along to finish this diabolical machine.  He protests:  "This is insane.  I'm not going to do it!"  But Ratigan threatens him with his daughter's life.  It's all played with great style and melodramatically.

STARLOG:  It sounds like great fun for both the animators and the actors doing the voices.

MUSKER:  We have pushed it to caricature, in order to give the animators more to play with, and it'll be even more fun for the audience.  Barrie Ingham, a veteran of the Royal Shakespeare Company, does the voice of Basil.  He added a lot of little colourful things to his readings which the animators have picked up on.  It's quite a change from Cauldron's scenes of 3,000 guys running and pushing somebody over a cliff.  In this film, there is much more emphasis on single character personality scenes so the animators can concentrate on the acting.

STARLOG:  Ratigan, of course, is voiced by Vincent Price.

MUSKER:  He's amazing.  His Ratigan is a very oily, very theatrical villain.  Liberace-esque in a way.  When Ratigan, who wants to be a ruler of the mouse kingdom, finally comes on stage, he's wearing this Liberace outfit and an overdone robe with sequins and spangles.  He parades around like Loretta Young.

STARLOG:  Tell us about Ratigan's pet.

MUSKER:  You remember Ernst Blofeld in the James Bond movies who was always stroking this big white Persian pussycat?  Well, Ratigan has one, too.  It's huge, of course, in comparison to Ratigan.  Ratigan uses the cat to dispose of anyone who gives him trouble.  You see, Ratigan is very sensitive about his lower origins; he doesn't like to admit that he is a rat.  In one sequence, there is an underworld celebration for Ratigan. Someone gets carried away and toasts Ratigan:  "The world's greatest rat!"  Suddenly, everything stops.  The whole gang cringes and Ratigan stiffens.  He takes out this little dinner bell which summons his pet cat.  For a scratch track, we used Gort's music from The Day the Earth Stood Still — sort of lumbering and rhythmic.  A big shadow appears on the wall.  You can't tell what it is at first, but then it turns out to be this enormously fat overstuffed Persian cat with a little bow around its neck.  It was modelled, vaguely, on Elizabeth Taylor in her more, uh...

STARLOG:  So I see.

MUSKER:  The cat eats this guy, while the gang is frozen in terror.  Then, Ratigan makes them finish the song!  Ratigan will stack up well with the other Disney villains.  He's appealing and funny, yet very menacing.
      Glen Keane has been animating Ratigan.  Originally, even though we had Vincent Price for the voice, we were going back and forth on what to make Ratigan look like.

RON CLEMENTS:  You're not going to say that?!

MUSKER:  Sure!  Why not?

STARLOG:  What?  What?

MUSKER:  Ratigan's character design is fondly based on Ron Miller — the guy who was our boss [formerly head of Disney].  We though it would be good contrast for skinny Basil to have this big...  Glen created a caricature of Ron Miller.  It has been toned down a little, and moved a bit closer to Vincent Price, but...well, the flavour is wonderful.  Basil is being animated by Mark Henn, who is also working with Basil's friend, Dawson, and the little girl mouse, Olivia.  Rob Minkoff is also on Basil and Dawson.

CLEMENTS:  Mike Gabriel is handling the big animals.  There is a big dog, Toby, Basil's hound.  And the cat, Felicia, Ratigan's pet.

MUSKER:  Andreas Deja has been working on the Mouse Queen, Victoria.  She's the story's fulcrum, in a way.  Ratigan wants to replace her and take over the mouse kingdom.
      Phil Nibbelink, who did many of the animated backgrounds and subjective camera scenes in Cauldron, has a fight sequence inside Big Ben clock works between Ratigan and Basil.  All the complicated perspective moves around the thrashing gears have been programmed into a computer, neatly solving the gears' perspective problem.  Phil still has to do all the perspective changes on the characters, but he really likes that kind of challenge.

STARLOG:  Can you give us a little background on Basil? How did the project start?

MUSKER:  It was back in 1980, while Cauldron was still in the early stages of development.  Some of us weren't too happy with the direction that Cauldron was taking, so we considered starting up another unit; we had always talked about getting two units going at once.  I was brought in after they had gotten it going.

CLEMENTS:  I was in on the project a little earlier.  I had something to do with it because I was interested in Sherlock Holmes.  That was how I got my job at Disney : I did a 15-minute animated film on Holmes.
      But Basil was first kicked around during Rescuers.  We talked about doing something with Sherlock Holmes in animation — just animating Holmes.  But there are difficulties with that idea.  Then, we saw Eve Titus' Basil books, but the feeling was that it was just too close to Rescuers — detective mice.
      After Fox and Hound and Cauldron, the idea was brought up again.  But we still wanted Basil to be very different from Rescuers.  The main difference is that there are no humans involved in the story at all.  It's an adventure that takes place in a miniature world hidden away from our own.  The characters have their own reality; they are quite real and menacing in their own world.  The animators haven't been limited to drawing talking animals in clothes.

STARLOG:  Is this a new story?  Or is it taken from the books?

MUSKER:  We threw out most of what was in the books.

CLEMENTS:  It's probably based more on the Holmes stories than on the Basil books.  It's basic Holmes with a little James Bond, a little Alfred Hitchcock and a lot of evolution.  I would say it's an original story.

STARLOG:  This film has three directors — you two and Dave Mitchner.  How did you divide up the chores?

CLEMENTS:  Burny Mattinson and John Musker were the original directors then Dave came on, and then, Burny...

MUSKER:  Basically, Ron Miller used to be this film's producer, and we had a few directors under him.  But Ron was a real laissez-faire producer:  He was hardly ever there, and it was tricky, decision-wise, like who's really in charge?  You must have a strong producer if you have a system with a couple of directors, otherwise, it gets too complicated.  Then, when the big Saul Steinberg attempted take-over happened, Ron Miller was out.  Suddenly, the film didn't have a producer.  I don't think they even realised it.

CLEMENTS:  Ron was not the executive producer, he was the producer.

MUSKER:  Once he was gone, it was like, "Do people even know that he was the producer?"  And when Roy Disney came into the picture, and [new Disney execs] Michael Eisner and Jeffery Katzenberg, we had to represent Basil, even though we had been working on it for years.

CLEMENTS:  There were some pretty tense moments.

MUSKER:  First, we had to sell it to Roy — slightly.  He had some suggestions on what he wanted and then we had to pitch it to Eisner and Katzenberg like, you know, "Are we going to do this or not?"  If they had said, "Nah, forget it," that would have been the end of Basil of Baker Street.  We would have just thrown out a few years of story work and beginning animation.  But they said, "Yeah, we like it.  Let's go."  And Roy Disney said, "Okay, Burny.  You're the producer."  And so at that point, Burny was producer/director and I was a director.  But Burny was getting so swamped with the work of trying to do both, he said, "I'll just be producer."  Dave Mitchner came on as another director.
      There was still a fair amount of work and Ron was interested in directing, so Burny said, "Okay, we'll have three."  So, Ron Clements was drafted.  It's tricky because the same characters go from sequence to sequence, and trying to keep consistency in the way those characters are played isn't easy.

STARLOG:  Do you feel that you guys are doing anything different from past animation directors?

CLEMENTS:  The time schedule is different, which is not an innovative thing, but, in a certain way, it is crazed.  We're trying to do this film in about half the time that we would normally take, so everything is accelerated.

MUSKER:  Stylistically, it's broader than the last few films I've worked on.

CLEMENTS:  It's cartoony.

MUSKER:  More cartoony than Fox and Hound, Cauldron, and even Rescuers. It's closer to the flavour of Wind in the Willows and Song of the South as far as the feeling of caricature.  It's simpler.
      Our attempt, whether or not we succeeded, was to try and do characters who were easier to draw and construct, and could afford more caricature in their expression; be easier for people to grab a hold of as characters.

STARLOG:  What about the use of music in this film?  There seems to be a concerted effort to bring back music.

CLEMENTS:  There are three songs in the film right now.  There's the introduction of Ratigan, a big production number, which fits his personality.

MUSKER:  A hammy sort of showman.

CLEMENTS:  It's called "The World's Greatest Criminal Mind."  It's about all his great crimes and how this new crime that he's about to set in motion is the biggest thing he has ever done.  The second song is set at a riverfront pub; there is a stage show and a singer.

MUSKER:  That song is really just for atmosphere.  It isn't like one of the principals has an aria.

STARLOG:  Is that the one they wanted Madonna for?

CLEMENTS:  Right!  We had a very period-type song in there.

MUSKER:  It was a British music hall type song, although Henry Mancini had pushed it into a Dixieland sound.  Jeffery Katzenberg didn't like it, and said "We gotta do something about that song...  Kids aren't going to like it.  It's not contemporary enough."  So, they had Mancini rewrite it, but it has already been animated.

CLEMENTS:  The song that's in there now is called "Look at Me."

MUSKER:  Melissa Manchester is doing it.

STARLOG:  And the third song?

CLEMENTS:  Ratigan has put this elaborate trap together, and he has this timing device:  A Victrola, which plays a song.  The tone-arm is pulling a cord so that when it gets to the song's end, it will release this ball, which goes through a Rube Goldberg device that sets off the trap.  So there's a song playing and when the song ends, our heroes are going to die.  It's called "Goodbye, So Soon" and Vincent Price sings it.

STARLOG:  So, the numbers are well-integrated.  A character just doesn't start singing for the sake of a song.

MUSKER:  We were very leery about that.  We considered giving Basil a song, but it was hard to think of him just breaking into song.

STARLOG:  He already plays the violin.

MUSKER:  We're hoping the piece that he plays will be thematic and heard throughout the score.

STARLOG:  When did animation really begin in earnest?

MUSKER:  Fall 1984.

CLEMENTS:  And release is July 1986.

STARLOG:  Animators are always complaining about what happens to their work in clean-up.

MUSKER:  We are trying to change that by going back to the old system where the animators were involved in clean-up.  In a number of recent films, the animation has left the animator's hands and he never sees it again until it's on the screen.  We're trying to avoid that by having the clean-up person working with the animator to make sure all the animation stays there.  It hasn't totally worked that way, but at least we haven't had any animators saying, "What happened?"

CLEMENTS:  Clean-up sometimes erases subtleties.  You'll animate a scene and then, three months later, you'll see it cleaned up.  It will be basically the same, but many little things are not there anymore, so the animation stiffens up.

STARLOG:  There seems to be much more emphasis on story with this film.

MUSKER:  Basil is a little more story-oriented.  It's a simple story, but...

CLEMENTS:  It's a tighter story.

MUSKER:  Originally, this was a 90 minute film, but for budgetary reasons, we had to lose 20 minutes and bring the film in at 72 minutes.  But the most important aspect is that the characters must motivate the story.

CLEMENTS:  The way you judge a good story is not by how you feel when you're watching the film, but how you feel when it's over.  Do you feel satisfied?  Did it leave you with something?  If you forget what you just saw, then the story is not pulling together.
      We're trying to prove something with Basil.  We want the film to be really good and to show that it can be made for a reasonable amount of money.

STARLOG:  How do you feel about the animators' level of talent?

CLEMENTS:  The hardest kind of animator to find is the good, strong personality animator.  We've found that there are many people who can handle action and more complex scenes, like characters running around.  But it's much rarer to find animators who are good with personality and emotions.

STARLOG:  Why is that so?

CLEMENTS:  I would say that animation technique can be learned.  But certain people are actors and others are not.  The people who aren't actors can learn how to animate, but they are not going to put the same thing into a scene that an actor can.

MUSKER:  First, you must get the technique of animation down, so that it is second nature.  Then, you can concentrate on acting.  You need a good sense of timing, drawing, caricature and design.

CLEMENTS:  That's a rare combination of talents:  Someone who can draw well and is naturally a good actor with a strong sense of entertainment and timing.

MUSKER:  We still have Eric Larson with us, who we tried to use often as an animation guru.  [Larson, one of Disney's venerated "Nine Old Men," was animator Hamilton Lusk's assistant in the 1930s.  Larson announced his retirement in March 1986.]

STARLOG:  What has Larson's contribution been to this film?

CLEMENTS:  It has been a major contribution.  He has been in charge of the training program at the studio for years.  Almost everyone who came in started with Eric.

MUSKER:  People bring their scenes to him, show him video tests or drawings and he makes suggestions in terms of pattern and timing.  Quite often, it's the director and Eric looking at a test with an animator.  He's big on making positive, clear statements:  Getting the ideas across as strongly as he can.
      Burny Mattinson, the producer, used to be Eric's assistant, so that's one of the reasons why Burny has encouraged people to go to him, because of what he has learned from Eric.

STARLOG:  The advance word on Basil has been very positive.

MUSKER:  Well, we've really been learning on this film.  I was sort of a director on Cauldron for a few months, but that's all.  The big question still remains:  What will an audience say?  We've shown the reels as they are to staff and invited guests, but there's still so much you have to interpret when you see the story reels.  I hope it works.