La ferme se rebelle

With Disney fazing out their hand-drawn animation studios in favor of the computer animation brand, one must accept the quiet passing of their traditional style with a mix of both admiration and frustration. A nod of respect for 44 motion pictures of varying degrees of quality followed by a note of sadness at the demand for bottom-line economics over artistic dedication.

As a swan song, "Home on the Range" is not the best send-off from the Mouse House. If "Lilo and Stitch" or "Brother Bear" had ended up as the final 2-D animated piece from the studio, it might have finished the tradition on a slightly higher note. Not that this latest one isn't entertaining, but it lacks the drama to bring about the end of an era on a high note.

The time is the 1800s. The place -- the Old West. Cattle drovers roam the land with their livestock, thieves and other miscreants terrorize the countryside and homesteaders try to eek out an existence in the middle of the wilderness. It is here that local farmer Pearl has set up her own his little paradise appropriately titled "Patch of Heaven."

Among the animals on the farm, the cows clearly command the most respect. They include prim and proper Ms. Caloway (voice of Judi Dench) who does not tolerate recklessness, the air-headed Grace (voice of Jennifer Tilly) who spouts kooky Zen tidbits at inappropriate moments, and cocky Maggie (voice of Roseanne Barr), a headstrong show cow and the latest addition to the farm following misfortune at her old home.

Times are not good for Pearl, with the bank threatening to foreclose on her farm if she doesn't come up with $750 within three days. Not wishing to lose another home, Maggie convinces Ms. Caloway and Grace to aid her in hunting down cattle thief Alameda Slim (voice of Randy Quaid). The three heifers find competition in a conceited and ambitious stallion named Buck (voice of Cuba Gooding Jr.) who is anxious to make a name for himself by being the mount of legendary bounty hunter Rico (voice of Charles Dennis).

The various parties continually cross paths in energetic vignettes, with Western clichés both adhered to and skewered as only a cartoon could do. The cows want Slim to collect the reward, Slim wants the cows to raise money to buy land cheap at auction, and Buck wants to impress Rico with his abilities to track and fight crime. Traps are set, alliances are forged and action ensues.

"Home on the Range" is certainly lively, and is often times quite humorous, but it suffers from a lack of creativity given the potential of the premise. For a cartoon about cows hunting down cattle rustlers, everything seems so formulaic. There are very few surprises and the characters seem to just go through the motions of the typical Disney animated fare.

Where it does succeed though is in the performances. Barr is delightfully acid-tongued as a cow with a tendency for showing off. Her timing is great and comments pointed, which only makes one wonder where she has been for the last few years.

Dench brings Mrs. Caloway a Victorian-era sense of composure and sophistication that is amusingly out of place in the Old West. Never mind how she got that British accent out there in the first place, Dench's ability to bring dignity to the role is a welcome plus.

Tilly is a strange choice for Grace but acquits herself admirably. She's both empty-headed and idiot savant, often at the same times, though her character is typically pushed to the background in favor of Maggie and Caloway's bickering.

The rest of the cast is likable as well, with Gooding Jr. lively as the horse full of himself but with his heart more or less in the right place. Quaid can be amusing at times as the yodeling villain, and even Steve Buscemi shows up in a small but memorable role as a slimy fence for Alameda Slim's stolen property named Wesley, whom Slim appropriately mispronounces as "weasely."

But despite the good performances and lively action, there's not much else at which the movie excels. The characters are all generic and based on archetypes. Who is Pearl and why should we care about her? Just because she dances around with her animals and they live in peaceful harmony with each other, we're supposed to just automatically sympathize with her plight?

Also, what does Alameda plan to do with the land when he gets it? The answer to these and other questions -- we don't know. The filmmakers just want us to accept the plot as is, which may present a problem to the older members of the audience.

But the kids will probably love it. It's simple and fun, and loaded with some lively country music performed by the likes of k.d. lang and Tim McGraw that is sure to bring a smile.

Compared to some of the lesser Disney offerings, "Home on the Range" is certainly a step up due to it's glib approach to Western convention, but as the coda to an animated legacy dating back to "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs," one wishes that the studio had chosen a beefier prize before putting their dynasty out to pasture.

Six out of ten stars. Not a bad cartoon, but as Disney's animated swan song, it's a bit of a disappointment.

The trailers - especially the trailer on the Finding Nemo DVD - suggested comedy to rival "The Emperor's New Groove," etc. The movie WAS amusing, but not what we've come to expect from recent animated films targeting adult audiences. However, my kids LOVED it, and the theater was full of hearty laughter from all the other kids as well.

"Home on the Range" is full of slapstick humor aimed at a young audience - THIS is a cartoon that remembers what cartoons are supposed to be. And there are plenty of amusing one-liners to keep mom and dad from being bored.

A good, old-fashioned cartoon... "You know, for kids!"

While the film wasn't a total dud a la "Treasure Planet," it's certainly no "Little Mermaid," or even "Emperor's New Groove," which I consider the best of the latest crop of cartoons for its hip sensibility. "Home on the Range" suffers from an unoriginal and unfunny script, although it is not tediously poor or Saturday-morning-cartoon simple. To begin, there is an overabundance of plastic-playset ready characters (literally a whole farm full): the trio of bounty-hunting heifers played by Roseanne Barr, Judi Dench, and Jennifer Tilly; the yodeling cattle rustler Alameda Slim (Randy Quaid) and his three bumbling nephews; the wannabe-hero steed Buck (Cuba Gooding Jr-- who ok'ed that name?); two lascivious bulls; a buffalo bouncer; a peg-legged jackrabbit; and a whole farmyard of pigs, chickens, a goose, and a surly goat. Oh, and Steve Buscemi shows up too, as a caricature of himself in a purple suit and a pencil moustache. Estelle Harris and Patrick Warburton (so memorable in "Toy Story 2" and "Groove," respectively), had brief cameos as well. There's no time for any kind of character development (not even with a sacred Disney "I Want" song), and the thinnest of premises has the cows hunting for Slim in time to get the reward money to save their farm. I was surprised not by the simplicity but by the unnecessary, unfunny bawdiness of the script (the movie opens with a shot of the Barr cow's ample udders, with her voiceover dryly remarking "Yep, they're real. Quit staring." Crossdressing, pee, and fat man jokes follow.) Alan Menken wrote a few snappy but unmemorable tunes (none of which are sung by the characters, but by the likes of Bonnie Raitt and k.d. lang) and a Coplandesque score. The film redeems itself in its art direction, which bursts with Disney color and retro UPA-style angularity. Especially in the opening scenes, a multiplane effect is used to further flatten, rather than deepen, this storybook world. It's an interesting and visually engaging concept that works well for the story. Backgrounds are intricately detailed with drybrush effects that call to mind "Sleeping Beauty;" if that film's art director, Eyvind Earle, had been called upon to paint the rocks and buttes of the American desert, it would have looked very much like this. It's quite stunning, actually, and the best art direction since 1996's "The Hunchback of Notre Dame." I especially appreciated a background detail in the town scene: one of the buildings was actually only a facade, held up by supports like on a backlot Western set. Similarly, sooner or later, not just critics but parents too will demand the Disney animated features to show that they have something behind that venerable name. "Home on the Range" will tide us over for now, but a renaissance of Disney is getting to be overdue. The Disney animation department (what's left of it), like it or not, needs to take a cue from Pixar and strive for family-friendly originality if they hope to maintain the integrity of the brand. ***

It's the end the trail! After nearly eighty years of loyal traditionally animated service, the Walt Disney Company has decided to call it quits, at least for the foreseeable future. You might be asking, `Why now? Why not years ago?' … First off, this isn't the first time that the staple that made the Walt Disney Company what it is today has faced an almost certain death. In 1986, Disney Feature Animation Studio was on its way out the door with The Black Cauldron and The Great Mouse Detective underperforming at the box office and leaving the talented artists little hope … That's until new management came in, cleaned things up, and, with the help of Roy Disney, brought the animation unit back to its former glory with such hits as The Little Mermaid, Beauty & the Beast, Aladdin, and The Lion King. Yep, that Michael Eisner sure knew what he was doing … Who would have thought that the man who kicked started animation up again at Disney would be the one to kill it? That's the word of the day folks … business. With computer animated features clearly outranking traditional ones, its just common business sense. But one has to wonder, with both traditional animation and Pixar out of the picture, what is Eisner thinking? … If he's doing that at all.

The story follows a group of cows out to track down a criminal in order to collect the reward money to save their farm from being auctioned off to the highest bidder. Maggie is one head strong woman. She's rude, crude, and let's everyone know about it because she's doesn't give a hoot about what they say. She would rule the west … if she wasn't a cow. Unfortunately for her, Maggie's former home was auctioned off after the notorious Alameda Slim took off with their prized cow herd and left the owners with next to nothing. And just when things begin to look on the way with Maggie finding a new happy home at Patch of Heaven dairy farm, the bank declares foreclosure on the farm, leaving the owner three days to pay off the $750 in order to keep the farm. Unwilling to lose another home, Maggie leads a small group consisting of Mrs. Calloway and Grace, the other two bovine residents of the farm, to search for the cow thief but they aren't the only after the larcenist. There's also Buck, a horse with high aspirations but too much enthusiasm to back it up, and Rico, the mysterious bounty hunter who has a dark secret up his sleeve, as well. In the end, it's an all out of for truth, justice, and the bovine way! The story for Home on the Range is another prime example of a plot that looks interesting on paper but clearly doesn't go anywhere once it is projected onto the big screen. The problem is that there is no emotional investment in the characters. Granted this is a children's film and it's not intended to be rocket-science or anything like that but one can make the argument that this is a family film and if the adults don't get anything out of it, who's to say that this isn't anything more then a modest diversion.

What's becoming more of a rare oddity is the use of big name stars in animated features to drive movie-goers and though none of the cast of Home on the Range is necessarily going to have people lining outside the door in giddy anticipation, they are well-known … just how well-known depends on who you talk to. Roseanne Barr, famous for her hit television show Roseanne and more recently for her two cancelled TV programs, headlines the cast as Maggie the cow (Is there any use in inserting a joke here? All the good ones seem to have been used up). Here you have to be wondering what the cast director was thinking when they picked her up? The loud, obnoxious, and crude Roseanne was bad enough but a PG-rated version of her is even worse, if that can be imagined just from this description. Sure the kids may get a chuckle here and there from boorish antics but then so what? Cuba Gooding, Jr. voices the over ambitious Buck the horse but once again the audience is given a character they really don't care about. Buck is treated mostly as a joke with no clear sense of the justice system or what it takes to be a hero. If there was more of that in him, maybe we'd care a little more every time he seems to fail but we don't. The only real highlight in the voice cast, at least from a more mature perspective, would have to be Steve Buscemi, who makes a slight appearance voicing a pint-size partner of Alameda Slim. Why is it that this man seems to work no matter where he is placed?

Overall, Home on the Range is a disappointing and undeserving conclusion to the end of Walt Disney traditional animation and only showcases further evidence to why the genre is heading to the grave in the first place. How can traditional 2-D animation compete with the likes of Pixar with trap-holes like this? Not just on the level of visual graphics but at the story and character development levels as well. With Range, the audience is thrown head first into the plot and rushed to a predictable and dispassionate conclusion with no real emotional investment placed with the characters or the actions they take within the course of the film. Even the villain is a pathetic show … Yodeling? Who's the genius that thought that brilliant idea up? This isn't to say that all of Home on the Range is a pointless effort. The musical score as well as the songs are enjoyable highlights but, as with most other films, if the only amusement you find is the music then save your money and buy the soundtrack. All in all, Home on the Range marks the end of a roller coaster ride for traditional animation at Disney … One only wishes it could have ended on a better note then this.

My Rating: *** out of 5 (Grade: C-)

I really took a chance when I bought the DVD of "Home On The Range" because I had not seen it. It is not my normal practice to buy something that I am totally unfamiliar with. However, I was happily surprised. This movie was wonderful! My kids and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Roseanne provided a funny voice to one of the cows. Love her or hate her, the casting was perfect, like Ellen DeGeneres was for "Finding Nemo".

I read here on IMDb that "Home On The Range" is the last Disney film to be done with traditional animation. Maybe there are faster or cheaper ways of making these movies, but a great history is coming to an end. Kind of sad… I recommend this movie. While it may not be a masterpiece, it is a delight that is better than most Don Bluth or Dreamworks films.

I would give it *** out of four. Fun and funny stuff!