News for
Roy Rogers (I)

photos

board

add

contact

details

1 article from 2004

2 April 2004 | From Studio Briefing | See recent Studio Briefing news

If Disney is abandoning hand-drawn animation after releasing Home on the Range, it's going out without either a whimper or a bang. Critics have few discouraging words to say about the film but suggest that it offers little that will draw the big crowds that showed up for The Lion King and Beauty and the Beast. Mostly, they have nice things to say about the catchy music by Alan Menken and lyricist Glenn Slater. "I can easily imagine Gene Autry performing any of them, including the yodeling number," writes Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times, "and wasn't too surprised to find out that the Sons of the Pioneers [Roy Rogers' back-up group] starred in a 1946 movie with the same name." Joel Siegel on Good Morning America calls it Menken's "best score since Beauty and the Beast." Gene Seymour in Newsday regards the tunes as "amiable and witty," while Glenn Whipp in the Los Angeles Daily News says that the film offers "enough catchy songs to make you want to buy the soundtrack (and tolerate your kids listening to it a couple of hundred times)." Several critics, while finding fault with the script and suggesting that some celebrity voices are miscast, nevertheless appear to mourn Disney's abandonment of traditional animation -- among them Liam Lacey in the Toronto Globe & Mail, who writes: "Home on the Range is supposed to be the end of the line for Disney's 2-D animated film division, which feels like a loss. Whatever the narrative shortcomings, these characters have the warmth of antique painted storybooks, unlike the eerie plastic simulation of Pixar characters."

Permalink | Report a problem

1 article from 2004