Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 #162 The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996)

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According to Disney+, the 1996 animated musical Hunchback of Notre Dame is rated G on the grounds that it “contains tobacco depictions.” 

I do not remember anyone in Hunchback of Notre Dame smoking but that’s probably because I was too distracted by its ATTEMPTED INFANTICIDE, ANTI-ROMANI GENOCIDE, PHYSICAL AND EMOTIONAL ABUSE, HORRIFIC RACISM, RELIGIOUS HYPOCRISY AND HEAVY INTIMATIONS OF SEXUAL VIOLENCE. 

I would argue that those elements are ultimately more disturbing and likely to traumatize children than a character smoking a cigarette in the background. I’m not entirely sure how a movie as grim as Hunchback of Notre Dame got away with a G rating beyond Disney’s power and the fact that Disney animated musicals have always been G.

Look at this cutie! He even has suspiciously good posture!

Hunchback of Notre Dame Disneyfies the shit out of an unrelentingly bleak, incontrovertibly adult story. In Disney’s revisionist telling, Quasimodo is a shockingly well-adjusted twenty-year old misfit who is adorably rather than disturbingly disfigured. 

In the Victor Hugo novel that very loosely inspired the film Quasimodo is half blind and half deaf but in the Disney version he has the reflexes of Jason Bourne and the agility of a world-class gymnast.

Good old lovable, upbeat Quasimodo spends the film doing Parkour as he flips and glides and leaps around the Notre Dame cathedral as if he has wings on his feet. You might think that spending twenty years in solitude because your evil, abusive, manipulative adopted father thinks the world would shun you for being a repulsive reminder of the universe’s unrelenting cruelty would make someone a Gloomy Gus. 

Not our Quasimodo! He’s SHOCKINGLY well adjusted for an emotionally abused, disfigured orphan, possibly because he has a trio of wisecracking talking anthropomorphic gargoyles named Victor, Hugo and Laverne  to keep him company and provide a steady stream of guffaws. 

The sassiest of the three gothic stone wisenheimers is voiced by Jason Alexander, who injects a whole contemporary Seinfeld sass into a story that takes place in fifteenth century Paris. 

Hunchback of Notre Dame goes out of its way to make the story family friendly but a whole lot of darkness slips in all the same, making this one of the grimmest and weirdest films Disney has made, animated or otherwise. 

The bracing bleakness begins with malevolent Judge Claude Frollo, Paris’ Minister of Justice, murdering an innocent Romani woman and attempting to kill her disfigured infant. 

Before the bad judge can kill the innocent infant he is interrupted by the archdeacon of the Notre Dame cathedral, who tells him to raise the boy as his own as penance for murdering his mother. 

Frollo keeps Quasimodo locked away from the world in the Notre Dame cathedral, where he toils as a bell-ringer and dreams of escaping his gothic prison and the prison of his body. 

Hunchback of Notre Dame re-imagines Quasimodo less as the tragic embodiment of fate’s cruelty than a pure-hearted dreamer who just wants a chance at happiness, to be part of the crowd instead of a hopelessly solitary figure. 

Quasimodo decides to leave the Notre Dame cathedral and explore Paris’ wonders for the Festival of Fools, a Mardi Gras-like parade of depravity and perversity full of wild costumes, decadence and demented high spirits. 

It’s a topsy turvy, upside down bacchanal where everything is reversed, so Quasimodo is crowned King of the Festival for having what the crowd assumes is a mask of the ugliest face. 

Amusement turns to horror, however, when the revelers realize that Quasimodo isn’t wearing a mask, so he is tied down and abused verbally and physically and pelted with rotten vegetables. 

Frollo has an opportunity to end the abuse but lets it continue as a way of punishing the cursed bell-ringer for disobeying his orders and venturing out into a cold, cruel world full of hate and judgment. 

Thankfully Frollo finds a friend and champion in Esmeralda, a Romani street dancer whose beauty and grace make her an object of both lust and murderous rage for Frollo. 

Demi Moore was at the height of her popularity when Hunchback of Notre Dame was released thanks to hits like Ghost, A Few Good Men, Indecent Proposal and Disclosure. It was the same year Moore was paid 12.5 million dollars for Striptease so it perhaps unsurprising that Hunchback of Notre Dame re-makes Esmeralda in the movie star’s image. 

Esmeralda looks like a darker-skinned version of Moore and moves like Moore in Striptease, right down to her mastery of the splits. Esmeralda might just be a sexier dancer than the one Moore played in Striptease, and that character was a stripper in a nudity-filled hard-R sex comedy, not a G-rated Disney cartoon. 

In a weirdly representative sequence in this G-rated Disney cartoon for children, Frollo looks at Esmerelda lustily and with evil intent and hisses, “I was just imagining a rope around that beautiful neck!” 

Frollo definitely wants to murder Esmerelda the way he murdered Quasimodo’s mother and tried to kill Quasimodo as a baby but it is equally apparent that he wants to sexually assault her as well. 

This is not subtext. This is text. It’s indelibly established that Frollo has a dark psychosexual obsession with Esmeralda and will do anything to possess her sexually despite his oft-stated hatred of the Romani people and desire for them to die en masse. 

Frollo was reportedly inspired by Ralph Fiennes Nazi in Schindler’s List, particularly his sexual obsession with a woman who belongs to a group he otherwise considers subhuman and wants eradicated.

What makes Frollo so terrifying, beyond the murder, attempted infanticide and racism, of course, is the way that he wraps up his ugly, unGodly impulses in the oily language of piousness and paternal concern. 

On the run from Frollo and his men, Esmerelda enters the Notre Dame cathedral and claims sanctuary within its sacred walls. In the Notre Dame cathedral, Esmeralda befriends the lovestruck Quasimodo, who lusts for Esmeralda, but cannot compete with Captain Phoebus, a noble and righteous guard voiced by Kevin Kline. 

Victor Hugo’s novel ended with Esmeralda being publicly hung and Quasimodo disappearing after killing Frollo but that, my friends, is a stone cold bummer so the Disney version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame gives the grim proceedings a Disney ending. 

Captain Phoebus and Esmeralda find love in each other’s arms and Quasimodo leaves his womb/prison and heads out into the world a free man.

Hunchback of Notre Dame is a very strange movie but it’s precisely the tension between the ugliness and brutality of the source material and the sunniness of Disney formula that makes it so compelling. 

I’m not sure what could have convinced the otherwise cautious and safe folks at Disney that there was a family-friendly, G-rated musical to be made from Vincent Hugo’s gloomy exploration of hatred, sin and hypocrisy beyond its intensely cinematic setting. 

Hunchback of Notre Dame masterfully combines hand-drawn character animation with early CGI that makes fifteenth century Paris a dazzling universe onto itself at once beautiful and terrifying. 

By 1996 the Pixar revolution had just begun with the game-changing release of 1995’s Toy Story but Hunchback of Notre Dame illustrated just how much could be done with traditional animation, particularly when fused with state-of-the-art, cutting edge CGI techniques. 

Hunchback of Notre Dame is a weird fucking movie, a hypnotic combination of sunshine and never-ending darkness, goofy high spirits and doom and gloom. Disney probably should not have gone anywhere near a book like The Hunchback of Notre Dame but I’m glad this gorgeous, glorious aberration exists all the same, as there’s nothing like it, in Disney’s canon of animated classics or outside it. 

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