Movie Thoughts: Robin Hood (1973)

• Released: 8 November 1973)
• Directed by: Wolfgang Reitherman, David Hand
• Running time: 1 h 23 min
• Rating 3/5

Synopsis

A clever fox named Robin Hood keeps taunting the greedy prince John and stealing from him to provide for the poor.

My Thoughts

A perfectly fine and inoffensive Disney movie. Seriously, I wish there was more to this one, but it's really just...fine, nothing more, nothing less. 

The story is just the simple Robin Hood story with some Disney twists on it that no doubt awakened a ton of furries. The visual design is neat with the fitting animal characters. There's some recycled animation, but not overly so and thus it doesn't really distract that much from the film. The characters are just fine, not very interesting but I don't dislike them, either.

Honestly, my main gripes with this movie was the inconsistency in the designs. The animation overall is fine (though it does still have the sketchy style I cannot stand) but there's just a ton of character design inconsistencies. The rings on prince John keep vanishing and disappearing. Sometimes he has a tail, sometimes he doesn't, and whether he has a fluffy tail tip also varies. Hiss has two types of tongues, one which is human like, one which is snake-like, and which one appears keeps changing on whatever is currently relevant. Sometimes Robin Hood and Maid Marian have brown irises, sometimes their eyes are pure black (not just on closeups, either). There were more instances like this, and it's honestly quite distracting. It doesn't look very consistent, for one.

While I complained last time (in my Aristocats review) about Edgar being an example of a pathetic villain that isn't even fun, I will give Robin Hood this: Prince John is a pathetic villain that works. He's not completely without his smart ideas, but it's his execution and lack of regard for Hiss that consistently is fucking him over. He's also very pathetic, but in a fun and whiny way, not boring like Edgar. 

So, yeah, overall, this is just a fine movie. I wouldn't go out to recommend it, but it's decent.