The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996) Review
The Hunchback of Notre Dame is one of the darkest films Disney has ever released and one of the most thematically ambitious animated features in the studi. Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise directed.
Director: Kirk Wise
Kirk Wise co-directed Beauty and the Beast with Gary Trousdale, and it became the first animated film nominated for Best Picture. The ballroom sequence combined hand-drawn characters with a computer-generated background at a time when that had never been attempted at scale.
They followed it with The Hunchback of Notre Dame, which is startlingly dark for a Disney feature, with a villain whose motivation is explicit lust and a song about damnation.
Atlantis: The Lost Empire was the last of the partnership’s features and its commercial failure contributed to Disney abandoning hand-drawn animation.
