Movie Thoughts: The Great Mouse Detective (1986)

• Released: 26 July 2017
• Directed by: Ron Clements, Burny Mattinson, David Michener
• Running time: 1 h 14 min
• Rating 3.5/5

Synopsis

A mouse version of Sherlock Holmes tries to crack a case having to do with a girl's missing father and his arch enemy, a rat named Ratigan.

My Thoughts

This is one of those Disney movies I did have a VHS of as a kid (if you don't know what that is, you're too young to read my reviews), but only watched I believe thrice in total. The whole "small mouse world in our human world"-type of movies honestly didn't appeal to me until I checked out The Secret of NIMH in 2014 or so. And even now, after having watched more, I can safely say that that's still the exception. I didn't like The Rescuers or An American Tail, so I really doubted if The Great Mouse Detective would do it for me. 

Surprisingly, I quite liked this one. It's nothing grand or amazing, and I don't have a whole lot of attachment to it, but I ended up taking a liking to this movie nonetheless. I'm generally also not a person for Sherlock Holmes-type stories, so that's quite impressive.

What really made the movie for me wasn't the mystery (honestly, the plan of the main villain is kind of ridiculous and not in a fun way), but it was the journey to solving it and the characters. Especially the latter. 

Basil is a very fun character, incredibly full of himself but also one of the smartest dudes you'll ever come across. He can literally look at you and just tell all kinds of details about you without looking anything up. Quite impressive. Dawson I didn't like when I was young, but I actually found myself getting rather attached to in this movie. He's the more humble foil to Basil that also has a keen eye for details. Together they make a great team. Honestly, the only main character I couldn't quite get into as much is Olivia. I didn't dislike her as much as Penny from The Rescuers, but she still feels more like a generic little girl character than I would've liked. She does have her brief spunky moments, but other than that there's very little to her other than her goal to be re-united with her father.

The villain is quite great. I'd kind of forgotten what a fun yet totally depraved guy Ratigan was. He's very arrogant and smart, much like Basil, but instead uses his wit and scheming for nefarious ends. He and Basil have a fun (anti-)chemistry and while I did think his plan was lame as mentioned before, he does have some real things going for him. A threatening presence, his control over a cat (ergo a deadly superweapon to animals their size), him absolutely losing it when someone calls him by his species, his cunning, his amazing voice acting by Vincent Price, and his great character design. 

He's not one of my top five favorite Disney villains, but he's definitely up there with some of the greater ones, especially after the rather lame villains from the last five-six or so movies. Like, I like The Fox and the Hound a whole lot, but I do think Amos Slade isn't too great of a main villain. He does his job, but nothing more. Ratigan on the other hand has such a fun and disgusting presence and you eat up every minute of it.

The animation also finally seems to have completely ditched the sketchy style I dislike so much, which I'm very glad to see. There's also a scene filled with computer animation in the movie, with the Big Ben, which is one of the first if not the first case of this in a Disney movie. Overall, this movie looked visually pretty good, and I enjoyed the warm brownish color palette it had.

This is just a neat little mouse mystery movie. It's nothing all that grand, but it looks pretty great and has some likable main characters and a deliciously evil villain.