It made little box office noise, earning $25 million on a $14m budget in its initial release (it earned another $13m in a 1992 reissue), but its relative success compared to the pricey misfire of The Black Cauldron kept Disney Animation alive long enough for the new guard to swoop in and save the day. Light as the picture may be, it is as relentless in its pacing as an 80's-era action picture, concluding with a dynamite chase around Big Ben that remains one of the great pre-Pixar animated action sequences as well as a pioneering piece of computer animation. His big number, "The World's Greatest Criminal Mind", not only contains humorous references to past crimes ("worse than the widows and orphans you drowned.") but concludes with one of his henchmen being fed to a cat. The film is breezy and stylish, with a delicious star turn by Vincent Price himself as the heavy.
It's not high art, but it's loads of fun. It's directed by Ron Clements, who would later helm The Little Mermaid and Aladdin. The story isn't much beyond the obvious, telling a Sherlock Holmes story from the point of view of pint-sized Basil of Baker Street as he helps a young girl rescue her kidnapped father from the evil Professor Ratigan. I'd argue that it operates as a bridge between the kind of Disney animated films that were arguably "cartoons" after Walt Disney died and the Waking Sleeping Beauty era that restored their reputations as "animated features". This one came out right as Jeffrey Katzenberg was coming in, and as such it has been somewhat lost in the crowd over the past twenty-eight years. All show that the Disney magic didn't die with Mufasa. One is a pre-Katzenberg picture, because I'm cheating, while the others are firmly in the post- Waking Sleeping Beauty era.
So while we celebrate the artistic and financial success of Frozen, let us also take a moment to look back at a handful of other Disney animated films that don't get the adulation that they deserve. As an indirect result, the post-Katzenberg period is often considered something of a comedown for Disney. The animated films that came out after The Lion King all more-or-less failed to reach the domestic box office heights of Aladdin and The Lion King, while the opening shots from Pixar and DreamWorks Animation changed the animation landscape. And it's a telling sign of how box office can retroactively determine the critical esteem of a given film. The implication is that the non-Pixar Disney animated films had been in a rut for nearly twenty years, basically since Jeffrey Katzenberg left the studio and started DreamWorks SKG with Steven Spielberg and David Geffen in October 1994. Much of the initial buzz around Frozen centered on the idea that it was " the best Disney animated film since The Lion King".
That makes it officially the biggest-grossing single-release Disney Studios animated film in domestic history surpassing the $312m original theatrical gross of The Lion King in 1994 (it was of course reissued in September 2011 and earned another $90m). As you probably know, Walt Disney's Frozen ended its eighth weekend yesterday with $317 million in domestic grosses.
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