The Hunchback of Notre Dame 1996

[5.9/10] I like Frollo. I mean I don’t actually like Frollo. But he’s the only genuinely interesting character in The Hunchback of Notre Dame. He has the best song. He’s the only person in this movie with a clear motivation. He has the benefit of Tony Jay’s frightening oily baritone. And he has interesting, contradictory layers in the rationale behind his choices and actions here, which makes him the sole complex character in the piece. He’s a great villain, in need of a better movie.

That’s a little unfair to Quasimodo. The title character of the film has an arc, albeit a rather jagged one. He starts the movie feeling cooped up and wanting to bask in the glow of his fellow man and “Heaven’s light,” and ends it finding friends and being accepted by the public at large. There’s even some solid psychological depth there, with Quasimodo chalking up much of his self-loathing and unworthiness of love to having been abandoned by his mother, only to self-actualize after he defends another young Gypsy woman from Frolo’s wrath and learns the truth. The movie botches and rushes much of that transition, but it’s there if you pull back and generalize enough.

But if you play the movie out scene-by-scene, it’s a jumble of thinly-drawn characters, on-the-nose dialogue, and weird tonal shifts. This is assuredly Disney’s darkest movie of the modern era, with multiple attempted murders, near-infanticide, efforts to exterminate a people, and intense images of fiery death and eternal damnation. Even drawn back to the personal, it’s full of psychological abuse, immediate heartbreak, and self-loathing. But each of these fairly serious things is punctuated by wacky cartoon gargoyle antics, or a temperamental goat sidekick, or jaunty banter between the captain of the guard and his love interest. There’s a way to balance heavy material with comic relief, but Hunchback doesn't even come close to pulling it off.

It would help if the characters made sense. Outside of Frollo, it’s unclear, at best, what any of the major figures in Hunchback actually want and how it drives their choices. If you squint, Quasimodo, the put upon outcast, Esmeralda the defiant Romani woman, and Phoebus the cocky soldier have the outlines of a personality. But their motivations are muddled and seem to change from scene to scene.

Quasimodo wants to go outside of his tower, but when he does, he receives the freakish reception he always feared and doesn't seem to want that anymore, before fixating on the one person who showed him kindness. Esmeralda has a fairly generic “fight for my people and all outsiders” vibe, but from moment to moment, there’s not really any depth to that. And Phoebus is an empty suit of armor, buoyed only by Kevin Kline’s undeniable the faintest patina of moral principal.

The strange and unfortunate thing about the movie is that the only thing any of the main characters clearly want is Esmerelda. Quasimodo nurses a crush, only to have his heart broken immediately afterward. Phoebus’s only real character trait is that he thinks Esmerelda is pretty. (The film’s attempt at some Beatrice/Benedict chemistry with them falls flat). And Frollo’s hot for what he considers a forbidden temptress whose very existence tears away at his sin-eliding self-image. It’s cloudy, at best, what drives the main characters of this film beyond wanting to be with the pretty girl, which isn’t a great look.

Neither are the film’s visuals, to be frank. Look, it’s Disney, so there’s still some neat sequences here. The spinning shot when Quasimodo slides down the aqueduct, the tableau of Esmerelda in the reflected light of a stained glass window, and the flame-bathed images of a besieged Notre Dame catch the eye. But for the most part, Hunchback looks downright pedestrian compared to the other Disney Renaissance movies around it. The sprawl of Paris feels small; the poses and expressions feel generic, and the cartoon antics scan like reheated versions of prior Disney features.

That’s an issue that infects much of the film. Clopin’s introduction to Quasimodo’s story plays like the Genie’s opening spiel in Aladdin. Quasimodo’s “Out There” plays like a retreat of The Little Mermaid’s “Part of your World”. Phoebus isn’t much different from John Smith in Pocahontas from just the prior year (and Disney would go to that well again with Flynn Rider in Tangled), and Esmerelda feels like a gender-flipped Aladdin. Even Frollo’s end bears a striking resemblance to Gaston’s. If you strip away the darker tone, borne of the Victor Hugo-penned source material, Hunchback looks like a patchwork quilt of other, better House of Mouse flicks.

Were that its songs could meet those standards. Rest assured, the film is chock full of musical numbers, but none of them are particularly great or memorable. Few of them are outright bad (although a few suffer from odd placement in the narrative which contributes to the tonal whiplash), but none of them reach that level of clarity or melody that stick in your brain for days, and for many of us, years to come. There’s ambition here, with more of an operetta vibe to many of the tunes, but the overall musical effort falls flat.

That is, once again, except for Frollo. “Hellfire” is both the musical and visual peak of the episode. A one-song psychodrama of the puritanical tyrant’s tug of war between his loathing of depravity and his own sexual desires, there’s a force to the song and sequence missing through the rest of the movie. The images of robed figures and flame motifs give it a visual distinctiveness, and Tony Jay’s pleading concerns, his angry defiance, his frightening determination, give the scene a complexity and momentousness that little else in Hunchback can match.

It also speaks to the overt religiousness overtones of the film, of the kind you don’t normally see in Disney movies. Make no mistake, beyond all the characters who offer prayers as major parts of their signature songs, Hunchback posits a very active and interventionist god. There’s a strange sense that in the end, Frollo isn’t punished so much for his general misdeeds, but for the way that he violates the sanctity of the church, disrespecting its boundaries as a holy place.

When he carelessly kills Quasimodo’s mom, the Archdeacon admonishes him for committing the deed on the steps of the church. He’s disrespectful of Esmerelda’s sanctuary claim in the film’s middle section. And he tries to storm the church, breaking down its protections, and burst through a hole in the door before receiving his comeuppance. The cathedral literally comes alive to kill him, with the irony of his declaration that God sends the wicked to their fiery ends.

It dovetails with the film’s notions of xenophobia and hypocrisy. The film hits the audience over the head with its ideas of self-righteous brutes like Frollo looking down upon the Romani and other “undesirables” as abominations to be snuffed out, while it’s his own hubris and lack of empathy that’s deserving of divine punishment. The movie reduces that to a simple (arguably appropriately, given the common author) “Can Your Hear the People Sing?”-style uprising, but nods toward the irony. There’s the suggestion that God is looking out for the maligned outcasts as those truly worthy of His light, while self-justifying pretenders like Frollo receive only karmic vengeance and damnation.

That’s another detail that marks Hunchback as an odd duck, but also an ambitious one. There’s some big time, challenging themes in the movie that stretch beyond the endearing but simpler ones in other children’s entertainment. The poor folks behind the scenes just cannot translate those worthwhile ideas into an engaging film, losing them in tin-eared dialogue, a rushed (at time, nonsensical narrative), and jumbled up character relationships.

But Frollo is the exception, the one dark gem amid an otherwise noble failure. The hypocrisy that is ultimately his undoing, the way his self-image of an upstanding city father is torn in twain by his carnal desires, his gaslighting and psychological abuse of his young ward, mark him as scarier and more complex that nearly any other Disney movie. That’s just not enough to save The Mouse’s garbled take on The Hunchback of Notre Dame, anymore that Frollo could save himself.