Pocahontas: Awful. Absolutely terrible, and an unfortunate choice to start this project. It has two great songs, "Colors of the Wind" and "Savages". But the rest of the film is just so boooooring even getting to go "Hey, it's Christian Bale!" can't save it. Let us speak of it no more.
Hercules: There, that's better. It's slower to get started than I remember; after a great opening prologue that introduces the gods and explains why Hercules is on Earth the story drags for a while while as it goes through the same motions as an Superman origin. But by the time Meg and the Hydra appear Hercules finds its groove, with good music, a great villain in James Brooks' Hades, and a plot that manages to throw in some nice twists to the cliche "true heroism is about character, not strength" message. It justifies it's place in my Disney Top Ten.
Tarzan: Tarzan has the opposite problem of Hercules. It's first half-hour forms an excellent short film on its own, with some beautiful animation and a great use of music coming together to tell a touching story about an outsider's quest to prove himself to the group. Then Jane, her father, and Clayton show up and while the movie doesn't become bad it also never reaches its early heights. In trying to tell essentially an entirely different story in 2/3rds the time, Tarzan fails to fully develop either Clayton's threat or Tarzan and Jane's relationship. It's an okay film, but I won't be hurrying to return to it any time soon. I had also forgotten that this was not actually a musical. I knew Phil Collins did the score, but since none of the characters sing large chunks of the film essentially become music videos and as a decidedly non-Collins fan I could take or leave most of these.
Hunchback of Notre Dame: Up until a few years ago I had forgotten virtually everything about this film except that I didn't care for it. Then I came across the clip of "Hellfire", understood that this movie is a massive tonal departure from most Disney films, and finally watched it last month. It makes sense why young me was left ambivalent about Hunchback: despite its trappings, it's not a kids movie. At all. What it is though, is spectacular.
Hunchback is dark, opening with a murder and ending with a visual representation of damnation with some persecution, attempted immolation, and sexual extortion thrown in along the way. But though the story is somber it's also very well-told. Esmeralda is one of Disney's stronger female non-leads, her relationship with Phoebus is well-developed and Frollo is a magnificently unhinged villain who's all the more frightening because he represents a real-life style threat. I was also impressed with how the film dealt with Quasimodo/Esmeralda. While I've heard some criticisms about how the movie undercuts its message by having the girl go to the handsome man over the deformed one, the film makes it clear Quasi's infatuation is one-sided, and Esmeralda never leads him on. If anything, Hunchback manages to serve as a great rebuttal to the 'Nice Guy' trope.
There are moments when the film doesn't quite hold together as smoothly as I would like, struggling to balance its story's ambition and complexity against making it accessible to a younger audience. But for the most part Hunchback soars, and I found myself wanting to race past the comic-relief gargoyle scenes (which sometimes feel as though they were awkwardly added in a fourth draft when someone realized kids would be horrified by the film otherwise) to get back to the main plot.
Oh, and the songs are good to :)
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