I know that Disney is the megacorporation everyone loves to hate these days — and with good reason — but when I was a kid, I really enjoyed Disney movies. And however much of a mess modern-day Disney makes of today’s entertainment sector by attempting to monopolise all of it, it doesn’t take away from the fact that Disney’s classic movies are still a good time.
I haven’t watched any Disney movies for a while so, following a discussion on them the other day, I decided to grab a few Blu-Rays. They were like a fiver each on Amazon, so I snagged two of my all-time favourites from back in the day — Robin Hood and The Sword in the Stone — along with one that I’ve never seen but always wanted to see: Basil The Great Mouse Detective — or, as I’ve since learned it’s actually called, just The Great Mouse Detective.
Prior to today, when I got around to watching Basil The Great Mouse Detective, my sole experience with this particular Disney property was 1) the Atari 8-bit game by Gremlin Graphics, which was a rather obtuse arcade adventure sort of affair, and 2) this video, which I suspect created almost as many furries as the entirety of Robin Hood did.
Basil The Great Mouse Detective (I know that’s not what it’s called, but nearly 40 years of calling it that are a hard habit to break, so I’m not going to) follows the adventures of Basil of Baker Street, a mouse who lives in a hole beneath the home of Sherlock Holmes.
The story opens with a toymaker mouse being kidnapped by a bat called Fidget, and taken to the lair of the villainous Professor Ratigan for some initially unknown purpose. The toymaker’s daughter Olivia successfully hid herself while the kidnapping was taking place, and ends up encountering Dr. Dawson, the film’s Watson analogue, shortly after his arrival in London. Together, the pair seek out Basil of Baker Street, a renowned and somewhat eccentric detective.
The eccentricity of Basil is obviously designed to mirror that of Sherlock Holmes, and Basil The Great Mouse Detective does a great job of reflecting this. One of the first things we see Basil do is pile up a big load of cushions and then fire a pistol right into them — initially it looks like he’s just doing this for fun, much to the annoyance of his housekeeper, but before long it becomes apparent that he wanted to fire a bullet from that specific gun in order to compare its rifling markings with that of one he had retrieved from another unspecified crime scene that related to Basil’s arch-nemesis, the aforementioned Ratigan.
Basil is initially resistant to paying any attention to both Dawson and Olivia, but as soon as they mention Fidget — a known henchman of Ratigan — he takes on her case with enthusiasm. Thus begins an adventure across London that successfully incorporates elements of the classic Holmes stories — most notably the ever-reliable dog Toby, here presented as a Basset hound rather than the half-spaniel, half-lurcher mutt described in the original Holmes stories.
Basil The Great Mouse Detective hails from 1986, putting it in a category that I still think of as “more recent” Disney films despite it actually being 38 years old. Some critics point to this era of Disney as a time when their animated features contained markedly less in the way of peril and threat than earlier work from the animation studios, but I can see elements of Basil The Great Mouse Detective as being potentially scary for young kids. Fidget in particular is quite threatening despite also being a bit of a comic relief character, and he delivers a few mild jumpscares over the course of the movie.
Ratigan, too, is often cited as being quite a threatening Disney villain, showing zero hesitation or remorse for putting one of his own henchmen to death (via consumption by cat) in the relatively early moments of the movie. It’s got that classic Disney balance of appealing silliness with a dark undercurrent that really works, perhaps best exemplified by a sequence where Basil and Dawson are attached to a distinctly Heath Robinson-esque trap that, were it to go off, would not only strangle them in a mousetrap, it would also blast them with a human-sized pistol, drop an axe on them and finally crush them beneath an anvil.
I enjoyed the movie as a whole and am glad I’ve finally seen it. It felt somewhat light on musical numbers compared to some Disney films — there are only three real songs in it, with only one of them (The World’s Greatest Criminal Mind) being a traditional “song and dance” number, with the others being diegetic numbers in the form of a live performance (the above Let Me Be Good To You) and a phonograph recording (Goodbye, So Soon) that also acts as the end credits theme. That’s not necessarily a bad, thing, though; the format of Basil The Great Mouse Detective meant that excessive musical numbers would have probably dragged the pace down a bit, and the ones that were present were worthwhile and made sense. Given that the aforementioned “execution” occurs in the middle of The World’s Greatest Criminal Mind, one could argue that Disney was attempting to subvert its own formula somewhat.
Basil The Great Mouse Detective is actually the first full-length movie I’ve made time to sit down and watch for a long time, and I enjoyed it. I think I might have to invest in some more Disney Blu-Rays, as spending an hour and a half just enjoying the movie with zero distractions was a pleasant experience I wouldn’t mind having a bit more often. Plus I don’t think Andie’s seen that many Disney movies, so this might be a fun opportunity to educate her a bit!
Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.
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