![]() They’d give parents something to chuckle at while sitting through a kids’ movie. ![]() (Williams did 14 hours of riffing for that one.) But Disney’s animators had the speed and the imagination to turn all of Williams’ bits into psychedelic visual gags, making his jokes literal and adding to the sensory-overload feeling of Aladdin. Earlier in 1992, Williams had played a bat named Batty in the eco-themed cartoon flop FernGully: The Last Rainforest, and that hadn’t really worked. Burt Reynolds, not exactly in the prime of his career, played Charlie, the movie’s canine hero, and Bluth did everything in his power to make Charlie look as much as possible like Burt Reynolds. Vincent Price was in The Great Mouse Detective.īut before Aladdin, the only animated film that also really worked as a star vehicle was probably 1989’s All Dogs Go To Heaven, a movie from the Disney defector Don Bluth. ![]() Dom DeLuise, Madeline Kahn, and Christopher Plummer all had supporting roles in An American Tail. Kurt Russell was in The Fox And The Hound, too, but he was only just getting past his own child-star years. Mickey Rooney starred in 1981’s The Fox And The Hound and 1985’s The Care Bears Movie, though he was decades past his child-star heyday. That border blurred a bit in the ’80s, as known character actors took cartoon roles. But for the most part, movie stars were the people on camera, and voice actors did the unglamorous work of giving life to moving drawings. Every once in a while, you might get someone at least identifiable, like Louis Prima in The Jungle Book or Roger Miller in Robin Hood. Instead, the movies relied on voice actors, versatile and talented specialists who could do just about anything and whose faces were utterly unknown to the viewing public. The film itself was the star.įor decades, animated films didn’t need movie stars. (The most famous actor in the cast was probably Angela Lansbury, who was in the middle of her 12-year run on Murder, She Wrote and who played the teapot.) Beauty And The Beast didn’t need stars. ![]() Beauty And The Beast had done all this without the benefit of movie stars. Beauty And The Beast was a genuine phenomenon, a box office juggernaut that also sold millions in merch and soundtrack albums and became the first animated film ever to be nominated for Best Picture. Hook made money, but it didn’t do the kind of business that TriStar had hoped for, partly because the movie opened a mere two weeks after Disney’s Beauty And The Beast. In 1991, Steven Spielberg tapped Williams to play Peter Pan in his big-budget dream project Hook, a truly terrible movie. The Fisher King, which wasn’t exactly accessible, had at least made its money back. Good Morning, Vietnam and Dead Poets Society had both been tremendous hits for the Disney-owned Touchstone Pictures. He’d been nominated again as the inspiring English teacher in Peter Weir’s Dead Poets Society in 1989 and as the homeless man searching for the Holy Grail in Terry Gilliam’s The Fisher King in 1990. He’d riffed his way through Barry Levinson’s Good Morning, Vietnam in 1987, and he’d been nominated for an Oscar for it. At the time, he was one of the biggest stars in Hollywood. Williams’ endlessly schticky performance in Aladdin is exactly what Disney wanted.
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