The son of the Greek Gods Zeus and Hera is stripped of his immortality as an infant and must become a true hero in order to reclaim it.
Directors: Ron Clements, John Musker
Stars: Tate Donovan, Susan Egan, James Woods, Danny DeVito, Bobcat Goldthwait, Matt Frewer, Hal Holbrook.
Frank Gatson Jr. ... dance choreographer: video reference crew
borrowed dvd
8 songs in the Soundtracks, Music by Alan Menken, Lyrics by David Zippel.
I did enjoy a lot of the contemporary humor overlaid on these ancient characters.
Although DD was very recognizable, his voice fit his character well.
JW voice was a little distracting for a while, but then I accepted it. His character, Hades, was designed by the animator who did Pink Floyd's The Wall ('82).
I recognized HH, and BG. I'm surprised I didn't recognize MF; good job Matt!
The film lost me with the epic action sequences. I'm counter-impressed with sweeping movement in animation, especially now that they're using CGI more. Per the featurette, the 30 heads for the hydra was one application, and creating a crib from a cloud was also CGI. They describe making 2 paintings, and the computer fills in the intermediate steps. So CGI is very far along by '97; I've forgotten how many years they said this was in production. Probably not super speedy compared with what's done now.
It's hard to like the "strong" female character (Meg), since she was working for Hades most of the time. But she actually rescued Herc when he was without his super powers, so that was cool.
Rated 7.3 (174,406)
Disney, dir. Clements & Musker; 6
Update 5.Dec2020: Today this would be a 5 for me. All the modern references were just too annoying, and DD & JW were far too distracting. I don't remember the original Hercules myth well enough to know if his identity crisis is new to this story, but it doesn't ring true to me. I won't change the rating yet.
