Delayed Reaction: Home on the Range

Premise: Cows try to save their owner's farm by catching a wanted cow thief.

 

HO. LY. SHIT.

 

I've now seen all the Disney Animation Studio features since 1986 with the exception of 2011's Winnie the Pooh. I thought I had a good idea of how low the studio had sunk in the mid-2000's when I saw Chicken Little. As it turns out, the story cannot be complete until one has seen Home on the Range. I can't believe that the studio didn't go on hiatus and spend a few years to reset after releasing this. It is a truly god awful movie. It's clear from the Dinosaur to Brother Bear run that the studio was flailing some. They experimented with a lot of formulas. Mostly, those films were more forgettable than bad. Home on the Range is like Disney tried to apply the Dreamworks Animation formula to their traditional 2-D animation and realize too late that they didn't know how to do it. It's Shark Tale but in the classic Disney style.

 

I'm confounded by the middling reviews Home on the Range received at the time. Everyone seemed to say "It's a kids movie. Those are supposed to be loud and annoying with terrible jokes and poor storytelling from uninspired vocal performances." Had Disney fallen so far so quickly that their movies were being lumped into the "Kid's will watch anything" bucket? Time hasn't helped this movie either. Roseanne Barr was a weird choice for the movie in 2004, but it's downright toxic now. The strengths and weaknesses of the Disney Renaissance have crystalized over time. The Shrek-ification of animated movies in the early 2000s has since been abandoned. It was easier to think in 2004 that Home on the Range was just how all animated movies were supposed to be. Now we can look back and realize, no. There's no reason animated movies have to be that bad. Pixar proved that their success wasn't a fluke. They forced Dreamworks to step up their game with the likes of Kung-Fu Panda and How to Train Your Dragon. Laika Studios came on the scene soon after. CGI animation became easy and cheap enough for many other studios to set up animation shingles.

 

Seriously though, Home on the Range should be charged with war crimes. It has some of the cringiest wordplay I've ever heard in a movie. It is an insult to the intelligence of people at any age. I hated the voice cast. I hated the writing. The animation is ugly. The music is forgettable. It struggles to fill even 76 minutes, yet it also feels like it's an hour too long. I thought Chicken Little was as low as it could get. It still might be. I've blocked that movie out and I'm never watching either of these again to compare. I choose to believe that Disney Animation took a couple years off after Brother Bear to figure out their computer animation with the not very pretty but otherwise excellent Meet the Robinsons. That's the history I choose to believe is true.

 

Verdict: Strongly Don't Recommend