The Hunchback of Notre Dame - Victor Hugo [266]
The year 1939 is often remembered as the grandest moment in American cinema with the release of such renowned films as Gone with the Wind, The Wizard of Oz, Stagecoach, and Wuthering Heights. Yet even with this stiff competition, Dieterle’s Hunchback garnered Oscar nominations for sound and Alfred Newman’s score.
Exceedingly popular is Disney’s 1996 animated feature The Hunchback of Notre Dame, featuring the vocal talents of Tom Hulce, Kevin Kline, and Demi Moore. Directors Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise, who explored a nearly identical theme in Disney’s Beauty and the Beast (1991), struggle to carry off a production interesting to both children and adults. Hulce (best known for his vir tuosic performance as Mozart in 1984’s Amadeus) lends his voice to Quasimodo, playing him more youthfully than his predecessors. When “Quasi” finds himself pelted with objects at the Feast of Fools celebration, the fiery Esmeralda (Moore) comes to his rescue, forever endearing herself to the hunchback. Kevin Kline portrays the film’s other hero in love with Esmeralda: the punning Phoebus, captain of the Guard. Together they lead a heroic crusade against prejudice and persecution.
Typical of Disney’s safe approach to classics is a chorus of three gargoyles, animated to provide a bit of forced comic relief. And not surprising is the removal of Hugo’s bleak-hearted pessimism from the tale’s conclusion. However, the animation, aided by some computer-generated imaging, is wonderful, particularly the pleasingly dark landscapes and Notre Dame’s intricate architecture. Disney’s Hunchback of Notre Dame was nominated for an Academy Award in the Original Musical or Comedy Score category for its roster of songs by Alan Menken and Stephen Schwartz.
Comments & Questions
In this section, we aim to provide the reader with an array of perspectives on the text, as well as questions that challenge those perspectives. The commentary has been culled from sources as diverse as reviews contemporaneous with the work, letters written by the author, literary criticism of later generations, and appreciations written throughout the work’s history. Following the commentary, a series of questions seeks to filter Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame through a variety of points of view and bring about a richer understanding of this enduring work.
Comments
FOREIGN QUARTERLY REVIEW
Notre Dame de Paris has already, within a few months of its publication, run through several editions; and as long as a taste remains for the extraordinary, or perhaps it should be called the tremendous, such works must be popular. They appeal to an appetite which is shared by the peer with the peasant. Victor Hugo is not a writer in whose hands the power of moulding the human sympathies is likely to be idle. He is eloquent, his fancy is active, his imagination fertile; and passion, which gives life and energy to the conceptions of a writer, and which, acting upon ideas as fire does upon the parched woods of America, sets the whole scene in a flame, is in him readily roused. Hugo may be called an affected writer, a mannerist, or a horrorist, but he can never be accused of the great vice, in modern times, the most heinous of all—dullness. A volume of Hugo is an active stimulant.
—July 1831
THE ATHENÆUM
It is especially in Notre Dame de Paris—a terrible and powerful narrative, which haunts the memory with the horrible distinctness