150 Word Review: 'The Hunchback of Notre Dame' (1996)
Sanctuary! Sanctuary!
Disney's Renaissance was ten years of animated 2D musicals that started with The Little Mermaid in 1989 and ended with Tarzan in 1999. My favorite is 1996’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame, a colorful adaptation of Victor Hugo’s Gothic romantic tragedy about outcasts.
Only a corporation as confident as mid-90s Disney would greenlight a main character who is hunchbacked, bug-eyed, and buck-toothed. He's a sweetheart who is kept prisoner in the bell towers of a Parisian cathedral by an evil clergyman whose horniness for a Roma dancer turns him into a mass murderer. (A specific slur is repeated throughout—so trigger warning.)
The songs are full of Les Misérables-like brio and drama, with music by Alan Menken (Beauty and the Beast) and lyrics by Stephen Schwartz (Wicked). The animation is spectacular. Soulful, gritty, demented. There's a soupçon of CGI. Quasimodo is Medieval Spider-Man. Jason Alexander stands out as a haunted gargoyle.