What’s your favorite Disney movie? "The Little Mermaid?" "The Lion King?" "The Jungle Book?" "Cinderella?" A Pixar movie?
Mine: "The Great Mouse Detective." When I was younger, my mom would take me to Hollywood Video just about every week. My consistent favorites were "Alvin and the Chipmunks: Batmunk," "Return to Oz" (the terribly creepy 1985 sequel to the 1939 classic) and "The Great Mouse Detective."
The year is 1986, and "The Great Mouse Detective" (from this point on, we will refer to it as GMD) was competing with "An American Tail," another animated film about adventurous mice. "An American Tail" was more successful both critically and at the box office, and the history of Disney films overshadows GMD because their next release was the beginning of the Disney Renaissance, "The Little Mermaid." Consequently, GMD has been forgotten. I’m here to convince you that GMD is the most under-appreciated Disney film ever.
The film starts with one of the creepiest opening scenes in animation, and arguably one of the scariest openings in the history of cinema behind only Jaws, Halloween and Scream. From that point on, the film only gets better. Barrie Ingham voices our title character, Basil of Baker Street, the Sherlock Holmes-based character. His archenemy, Ratigan, is voiced by the master of macabre himself, Vincent Price. The perfect opposition of good and evil is highlighted by Ingham's brilliant vocal performance and Price's performance as one of the most underrated Disney villains.
So what is the story? London, 1897. Toymaker Hiram Flaversham is kidnapped in the previously mentioned opening scene and his daughter, Olivia, is left scared and alone. She decides to hunt down Basil to ask him if he will hunt down her father. On her journey, she meets Dr. David Dawson (based upon Sherlock's Watson) and they find Basil together. Basil is egotistical, self-obsessed and is determined to solve every case he accepts. When he realizes Olivia's father was kidnapped by his worst enemy, Professor Ratigan, he takes the case!
A highlight of the film is Ratigan's solo number, "The World's Greatest Criminal Mind." Ratigan is superbly evil and when you pair The Greatest Mouse Detective against The World's Greatest Criminal Mind, you are preparing your film for a powerful climax. And sure enough, that's what we get. Taking place in the interior of London's Big Ben, our final climax, which was one of the first animated film sequences to experiment with CGI, is the cherry on top of this wonderful kid's classic.
If I still haven't convinced you, try this. Co-Directors John Musker and Ron Clements also collaborated on Disney films like "The Little Mermaid," "Aladdin," "Hercules" and the upcoming "Manoa."
If you've never seen this movie, go ahead and watch it. It used to be on Netflix streaming, but they took it down. It's a wonderful movie that deserves to be seen.
