Home on the Range
It started with a mouse. It ends with a cow and a whimper.
All signs point to "Home on the Range" as being the very last hand-drawn feature cartoon that the Walt Disney Company will ever make. CEO Michael Eisner, who has been quoted as saying "2-D is dead," spent 2003 gutting his cel-animation departments in Orlando and Burbank and sending the few artists he didn't lay off to computer-toon class.
For the first time in decades, there are no traditional animation features in the Disney pipeline. What began nearly 70 years ago with "Snow White" and "Pinocchio" will apparently come to a halt with a 75-minute movie about a yodeling cattle rustler and the three barnyard bovines who bring him to justice.
If that depresses you, well, your 6-year-old will have a pretty good time before the film evaporates from his or her brainpan by nightfall.
Sprightly, fast-paced, and distinctly minor, "Home on the Range" stars Roseanne Barr as a prize dairy cow (must . . . resist . . . cheap . . . jokes) who arrives at the Patch of Heaven farm just as the surrounding cattle ranches are being cleaned out by a rustler named Alameda Slim (voiced by Randy Quaid).
The reward for his capture is $750, which is coincidentally the same amount needed to save the farm from the auction block. Maggie, being a Type A sort of cow, decides to capture the villain and heads into the badlands accompanied by the ditsy Grace (Jennifer Tilly) and the frosty queen-of-the-barnyard, Mrs. Caloway (Judi Dench).
Yes, that's right: Dame Judi Dench. Adding to the air of vague miscalculation, former Texas governor Ann Richards lends her voice to the character of a dance-hall hostess, and Cuba Gooding Jr. plays a horse named -- oh, dear -- Buck.
Buck has visions of being a kung-fu fighting, spaghetti-Western dynamo, but to catch up with the bad guys he first needs to be saddled by whispery bounty hunter Rico (Charles Dennis). The scenes where Buck "auditions" to be ridden are the film's most frantically amusing for small fry, and dispiriting for those who remember that nanosecond, after the "Jerry Maguire" Oscar and before "Snowdogs," when Gooding had some self-respect.
Other characters include Slim's three idiot nephews, a Peter Lorre-lookalike secondary villain voiced by Steve Buscemi, a peg-legged jackrabbit (Charles Haid), and a buffalo who acts as Slim's bouncer (Lance Legault). "Range" is overstuffed, in other words, not to mention underwritten and, in spots, downright surreal.
Slim's secret weapon, it turns out, is a yodel that can hypnotize cattle into following him anywhere; this leads to a musical number -- titled "Yodle-Adle-Eedle-Idle-Oo," in case you're filling out next year's Oscar ballot -- in which green, purple, and pink cows form lysergic geometric patterns. Did someone slip something into the punch bowl at the animation department's farewell party?
That sequence is visually arresting, at least, and much of "Home on the Range" is a pleasure to look at: The farm scenes have the pastel glow of a 1950s Golden Book. But while Alan Menken's songs are as catchy as ever, it's been a long, slow descent from the grace and spirit of "The Little Mermaid" to this. Where a Disney movie once used songs to deepen the characters or dazzle the audience, now they're just stunt interludes for such marquee names as Bonnie Raitt, k.d. lang, and Tim McGraw to move units of the soundtrack CD.
Barr, Dench, and Tilly work hard for their laughs and get them, but there's nothing in the least surprising about their bickering and reconciliations: The corporate formula has had any dents of individuality hammered out of it long ago. Young children will find it all brand new, of course, and "Home on the Range" should pass through them harmlessly, like a swallowed marble.
But even older kids will understand that
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