Robin Hood (1973)

Written by Larry Clemmons, et al.
Directed by Wolfgang Reitherman

Of the “older” classics, Robin Hood is the one I seem to be most familiar with. I’m not entirely sure why this is, because I’ve never owned a copy of it (I feel like we watched it in school a lot while I was growing up). As such, there was a nice nostalgia about rewatching it now, even though it’s not wholly perfect.

Story-wise, its a pretty straightforward adaptation of the Robin Hood story (at least, I assume. I’ve never read it, and while I’ve seen Kevin Costner’s Prince of Thieves a couple times (yawn), my biggest non-Disney exposure to the story is Mel Brooks’ Robin Hood: Men in Tights). The ending is less dramatic (no one dies in this story, the antagonists simply get sent to jail, breaking rocks, Les Misérables-style), but the overall broad strokes are there: Robin steals from the rich, he gives to the poor, he and Maid Marian are in love, and the Sheriff of Nottingham and Prince John are the local bad guys. Disney doesn’t stray from this all that much.

I always loved this scene as a kid

There’s a couple standout scenes (unfortunately, both happen pretty early in the film): Robin and Little John (the only Merry Man to survive into this adaptation) dress as Gypsies and rob Prince John right in front of his face, and Lady Cluck (a chicken…obviously) and Marian playing badminton and having some make-believe with the village kids (three rabbits and a turtle…obviously). The first scene has always struck me as fun: its just the kind of scene that kids love, in which the good guys fool the bad guys with such obviousness that its amazing the bad guys don’t get it. To get deep for a second, I think kids love that scene because they can so easily project onto it: the kids are Robin and Little John, their parents or teachers are Prince John and Sir Hiss (a snake…obviously), and the gold is…whatever the kids want (for me, it would have been cookies. I like food). The scene with Cluck, Marian, and the kids has just always felt very cute to me. It’s a great character scene, in that it’s the audience’s first time meeting Marian, and she spends the whole time having fun with a group of kids she just met. It’s a highly economical way of having your younger audience instantly root for one of your main characters (Robin gets a scene like this too, in which he gives a 7 year old rabbit a bow and arrow, which seems…unwise).

THEY’RE THE SAME CHARACTER

For a while, the animation seemed cleaner than some of the films that precede this one, but it starts to creep in again. Also, it seems like a lazy choice to simply recast prior films’ characters as “new” characters here (the biggest, most glaring example is Little John, who is simply Baloo with different colors). I know its a cost-cutting measure (that, and that this film is the most egregious in reusing old animation), but it ends up cheapening the whole film, which isn’t a good thing.

Alas, there’s still a bit of a soft-spot in my heart for the film. I mean, who doesn’t start to hum along when “Oo-De-Lally” starts to play?

FINAL GRADE: B-