MARTIN F. NORDEN
In 1994, the Walt Disney company created a stir in the entertainment industry when it announced its intention to produce two movies based on Victor Hugo’s 1831 novel, Notre-Dame de Paris: a live-action film and an animated musical. Though the company soon abandoned the idea of a live-action feature,1 it did follow through with its plan to create an animated film. Originally proposed in 1993 by Disney creative development executive David Stainton, who had been inspired by a Classics Illustrated comic-book retelling of Hugo’s story,2 the production was greenlighted by production executive Jeffrey Katzenberg, produced by Don Hahn, and co-directed by Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise.3 The company gave it a unique premiere on June 19, 1996, by presenting it on six giant screens in the Superdome in New Orleans shortly after an elaborate parade led by Disney corporate executives Michael Eisner and Roy Disney had wound its way through the city’s French Quarter. With much fanfare, the studio released the film nationwide two days later and around the world in the months that followed. Like most of its predecessors adapted from Hugo’s novel, the film bore the patently offensive title The Hunchback of Notre Dame.4
Since so much of this film centers on yet another moving-image rendering of one of literature’s most famous disabled characters, I propose to examine the representation of its pivotal figure of Quasimodo, his corporeality (his “gnarled envelope,”5 to borrow Hugo’s translated phrase), and his world from the general perspective of a relatively new field of scholarly inquiry: disability studies (DS), about which a few words need to be said. Akin to feminist studies and queer studies in its emphasis on the body as the locus of frequently conflicting discourses, disability studies has among its aims the deconstruction of disability representations in order to lay bare their underlying assumptions and strategies. DS scholars reject the two paradigms that have long governed the contextualization of disability: the Moral model, which equates disability with evil and/or punishment from a divine source; and the Medical model, which treats disability mainly in pathological, “problem-to-be-overcome” terms while privileging practitioners in the medical and rehabilitative fields. Disability studies scholars have instead championed a third paradigm: the Social model, which posits that a person’s disabled status is a social and cultural construction. Far from regarding people with disabilities (PWDs) as simplistic emblems of evil or divine retribution, or as hard-luck, embittered individuals forever dependent on well-meaning, able-bodied “experts,” advocates of the Social model argue instead that PWDs are a significant minority group that, like other minorities and women, has been subjected to alternating rounds of bigotry, paternalism, and indifference. Unlike the earlier paradigms, the Social model has a pronounced reflexivity (DS scholars are quite aware that it and the other models are socio-cultural constructions, too), and that quality helps make it a powerful tool for prying open cultural expressions that might otherwise go unnoticed and unquestioned. For example, a DS person might highlight a seemingly innocent utterance in a Disney press release—that Quasimodo is “an angel in a devil’s body”6—to underscore the point that remnants of the ages-old Moral model still permeate our culture.7
This chapter explores a number of intertwined concerns: identity issues, the longstanding stereotypes that inform the Quasimodo character, and the ways that other characters and indeed the filmmakers themselves objectify him. Of particular interest are the ways that other characters define Quasimodo and how he defines himself, the latter process of which is often revealed through his imaginary conversations and songs with three Notre Dame gargoyles. As much a study of filmmakerly attitudes as it is of the film itself, this chapter will show that the film seems to preach acceptance of society’s Others but is in fact an embodiment of bogus “political correctness.” Though the film seemingly argues on behalf of inclusiveness—as when the townspeople happily carry Quasimodo on their shoulders at the film’s conclusion, for example—he is still very much an isolated Other. For the vast majority of the film’s duration, there is no community for him of any sort except for his imaginary gargoyle friends. The movie appears to critique the view that “different” people should be kept separate and isolated, yet it simultaneously perpetuates it and, worse, wallows in it.
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The Disney film’s considerable variances from Hugo’s novel are reasonably well known and require no detailed accounting here.8 I begin the analysis instead with a discussion of the challenges facing the Disney production team, its responses to those challenges, and the bearing of the team’s solutions on the development of the film’s disabled character.
As numerous commentators have pointed out, Hugo’s dense, powerfully tragic novel—best remembered for its deafened, severely disabled bell ringer and his unrequited love for a Roma woman—hardly seemed suitable subject matter for a typical Disney animated musical. Disney has long been known for appropriating centuries-old source material, but almost always that material had taken the form of folk and fairy tales. Now, however, Disney had selected an exceptionally dark piece of classic adult literature with the daunting task of making it child-friendly.
The filmmakers themselves were quite mindful of the difficulties ahead. “We knew it would be a challenge to stay true to the material, while still giving it the requisite amount of fantasy and fun most people would expect from a Disney animated feature,” said co-director Kirk Wise. “We were not going to end it the way the book ended, with everybody dead.” Producer Don Hahn expressed a similar sentiment. “On its surface, ‘The Hunchback of Notre Dame’ as a Disney musical/action/adventure/comedy doesn’t exactly relate,” said he, adding that “we knew that there were many pitfalls: characters with disabilities, bigotry, gypsies and the Catholic Church.” Their general solution for taking care of the disabled character and the other so-termed “pitfalls” was unsettlingly simple, however; they elected to turn their film’s narrative into a variation on the Beauty and the Beast storyline.9
In retrospect, such a decision should not be surprising to anyone familiar with the filmmakers’ track record. The same producer-director-director triumvirate responsible for the Disney Hunchback—Hahn, Trousdale, and Wise—played identical roles in the creation of the multiple award-winning Disney animated feature Beauty and the Beast in 1991, and they doubtless believed that what worked well for them once would work well for them again.
Hahn readily acknowledged the similarity. “‘Beauty’ is the rural equivalent of ‘Hunchback,’” he said. “This is very much the urban Parisian story. We always joked that we should just do ‘Cyrano’ and get it over with. To complete the misshapen heroes of France stories.”10 The filmmakers anticipated critics’ and audiences’ perception of a kinship among the two films (indeed, a headline writer for the Los Angeles Times ungraciously referred to the new production as Beauty and the ’Back)11 and introduced some superficial changes to create distance between the productions. The films’ narrative and thematic resemblance, however, is unmistakable. As Los Angeles Times reporter John Clark put it, Disney’s Hunchback was very similar to Beauty in that it “was an animated musical that took place in France and featured a misshapen hero and a beautiful heroine. In both films, beauty is only skin-deep.”12
In the commentary track on the Hunchback DVD, Wise and Trousdale engaged in an exchange that sheds further light on their approach to the Hugo novel:
WISE: Gary and I realized that there are aspects of the story that were so archetypal, if you will, that it read almost like a fairy-tale.
TROUSDALE: When you strip the story down to its bare bones, you’ve got a monster who lives in a tower.
WISE: Yeah, locked in a tower by his evil stepfather.
TROUSDALE: A beautiful dancer and a knight on a horse. And just great—great kind of fairy-tale elements that were put together.
By reducing the Hugo narrative to a Beauty and the Beast level, the filmmakers thus fell back on one of the most enduring beliefs about “good” PWDs: that they possess an inner beauty that compensates for their less-than-perfect exteriors. Though presumably well-intentioned, such a simplistic belief represents stereotyped thinking at its most insidious precisely because it appears to be well-intentioned and therefore typically goes unquestioned. Films guided by this perspective almost always package the other characters’ eventual recognition of that inner beauty as facile and brief “feel-good” moments during the waning moments of the narrative. Such moments do little to ameliorate the damaging message often conveyed throughout the rest of the story: that PWDs are freakish if not animalistic entities that deserve to be shunned, feared, or humiliated.13
Such is the case with Disney’s Hunchback. Unlike the far more complex Quasimodos who inhabit the numerous live-action renderings of Hugo’s novel, Quasi (to use the film’s childlike diminutive) is clearly inscribed by the filmmakers as a good and worthy PWD. Like the other Quasimodos, however, he is frequently contextualized in beast-like terms.
This latter point is reflected in some subtle and not-so-subtle ways in the film. For example, the filmmakers wanted to suggest that Quasi has an active fantasy life inside the bell tower and had him create a tabletop miniature of the Notre Dame courtyard replete with figurines he modeled after actual people. The toy figure he created of himself is quite telling; it shows him down on all fours, as if he were an animal. Since Quasi is the creator of the figurine, the film thus implies that this is how he sees himself. Indeed, he confirms the point later in the film when he gazes at the beast-like figurine of himself and says very matter-of-factly “I am a monster” to his stepfather Frollo, who has conditioned him to think of himself in subhuman terms. Though Quasi certainly has his pro-social side, the filmmakers were quick to acknowledge that the character posed a special challenge; he lacked what Trousdale referred to as the “teddy-bear factor,” a quality that Hahn, Trousdale, and Wise had bestowed on Beauty’s Beast in abundance. They had to find a way of making Quasi, for lack of a better word, cuddlier.14
Having chosen a storyline that could not help but define its lead character in brutish terms, the production team was now charged with the task of developing a visual design for Quasimodo that rendered him reasonably sympathetic. In what should have been a sign of problems to come, the studio had enormous difficulty coming up with that general “look.” Entertainment Weekly writers Anne Thompson and David Karger reported that the animation team took nearly eight agonizing months to design what they termed a “kid-friendly” version of the film’s central figure.15 In a revealing comment, the film’s supervising animator, James Baxter, said that Quasimodo “had to be grotesque, downtrodden, and appealing at the same time”—a highly problematic combination of attributes, to be sure. Baxter went through a veritable mountain of preliminary sketches to little avail, a point confirmed by Kirk Wise. “We had a zillion different designs for Quasi,” said the film’s co-director. “There were some designs where he looked like a teenage guy with bad posture. There were other designs where he looked like one of the Seven Dwarfs.”16
The difficulties extended to the type of vocalization that Tom Hulce, the actor hired to give voice to Quasi, could provide for the character. Since the film was to be a musical with ample singing and dancing, its creators decided early on to efface several important identity factors in Hugo’s bell ringer: his profound deafness, brought on by a half-dozen years of bell-tolling, and his self-imposed uncommunicativeness. They wanted their Quasi to hear, speak, and sing perfectly well but could offer precious little guidance to Hulce about the character, at least, early on. With no clear sense of the direction that Quasimodo’s visualization and indeed his general concept were taking, the discouraged actor harbored thoughts of resigning from the production. “My job was to find all the parts of the character and let them live,” Hulce said. “I thought about suggesting that maybe we weren’t going to find it. But it finally fell into place. There was a sense of relief that maybe we weren’t going to have that conversation.”17
The production team eventually settled on a look and a vocal strategy that together emphasized the bell ringer’s youth. On its surface, such a decision might appear to have been inspired by a point made in Notre-Dame de Paris; Hugo identified Quasimodo’s age as about twenty, and so does the movie.18 The fact that the two Quasimodos share the same chronological age, however, tells only a small part of the story; it says nothing about the characters’ levels of maturity, the differences among which are vast. Hugo bluntly noted that Quasimodo, who had begun his bell-ringing duties at the age of fourteen, was already “grown up” by the start of the story; though an adult young in years, he had prematurely aged after having weathered more than his share of life’s travails.19 Disney’s Quasi, on the other hand, comes across as not much more than an awkward child with major self-esteem problems. Indeed, Charles Kimbrough, an actor who voiced one of Quasi’s gargoyle friends, likened him to a pimply teenager:
The Hunchback, without losing any of his power or creepiness, is almost like an adolescent, a young boy. Kids connect with that insecurity, particularly if you’re a little shy, if your acne is a little heavy, or you’re self-conscious or embarrassed to go out. The whole gist of the film is trying to get Quasimodo to get to the Feast of Fools, to get out, you know, and enjoy himself and really have a life. I think that hits kids where they live.20
The creation of a character who does not think highly of him- or herself is not especially unusual for Disney; in fact, the studio’s “exploration of the outcast, the person who has self-esteem problems,” to cite Disney animation head Peter Schneider, is rather commonplace. “If you look at all of the films over the last eight years, they all deal with that issue, whether it’s Ariel or the Beast or Simba,” said Schneider, concluding that “the goal is to find a place where you belong.” What makes it more of a DS issue, however, is the Disney team’s use of disability imagery to suggest those concerns. In other words, the filmmakers used Quasimodo’s physicality to imply that he is emotionally stunted. As supervising animator James Baxter put it, Quasi’s “being bent over was a metaphor for his wanting to hide.” The symbolic and metaphoric dimension of disability, which has had a long and inglorious history in literature and film, had found its way into another major cultural expression yet again.21
The film represents Quasi’s arrested development in other ways, most famously via his relationship with three animated gargoyles named Victor, Hugo, and Laverne. They are his only community for much of the movie, and that is not saying much; they are split-off chunks of his own imagination and represent his conscience, fantasies, etc., in a Calvin-and-Hobbes fashion. He is the only person to whom they speak (when other people are in the scene, the gargoyles are stone). When they therefore exclaim “You’re a surprise from every angle” and compare the shape his body to that of a croissant—to cite several of their more tasteless actions—they represent things that he thinks about himself. The gargoyles’ explicit and implied messages are troubling, to say the least, and go a long way toward undercutting whatever sympathies the filmmakers had created for its disabled character.
Film critics and media watchdog groups were quick to pick up on the film’s trivialization of disability issues and Quasi’s inability to sustain mature relationships. For example, Los Angeles Times chief film critic Kenneth Turan labeled Disney’s construction of Quasi “a problem,” elaborating that Hugo’s “great grotesque ... has been turned by Disney’s team of five writers (Tab Murphy, Irene Mecchi, Bob Tzudiker & Noni White and Jonathan Roberts) into a Sensitive New Age Guy, cuddly enough to be called Quasi by his intimates, burdened not by severe deformity or deafness but by that curse of modern times, lack of self-esteem.” In the U.K., the film had the dubious distinction of winning the “One in Eight” group’s Raspberry Ripple award for worst feature-film portrayal of a person with a disability, principally because it portrayed its PWD as a social outcast incapable of maintaining adult relationships.22
The Disney team’s decision to emphasize Quasi’s youthfulness also reflects a larger issue that has long haunted movie representations of disability: the infantilization of PWDs. When Patt Morrison of the Los Angeles Times suggested that the film turned “the tragically disfigured Quasimodo into just a funny-looking kid you might see on a telethon,”23 she was doubtless alluding, however crudely and obliquely, to the annual MDA Labor Day telethon long associated with Jerry Lewis. With its “Jerry’s Kids” imagery prominently on display, the MDA telethon has been the most conspicuous example of mainstream society’s tendency to contextualize PWDs, regardless of age, as children in need of nurturing and protection by able-bodied adults. Disney’s Hunchback is yet another example of that way of thinking.
The film’s dominant figure of Quasi is rooted in an exceptionally longstanding disability-related stereotype: the “Sweet Innocent,” a figure that embodies the deep-seated belief that PWDs must rely on mainstream society for everything. Often designed as a child or a maiden who is “perfect” in every respect except for an impairment, the Sweet Innocent typically, and effortlessly, brings out the protectiveness of most able-bodied people in his or her orbit. As I have noted elsewhere, adjectives that readily define the figure include humble, gentle, respectful, passive, cheerful, spiritual, virginal, pure, and pitiable.24 The literary world’s most famous example is Tiny Tim, and when Disney created Quasi it added a most unlikely figure to that stereotype collection.
The Sweet Innocent is only one—albeit the most prominent one—of a virtual pantheon of negative images that informs the characterization of Quasi. In many respects, he is a multi-faceted character, but each facet reflects some aspect of a longstanding disability stereotype. In other words, he is an uneasy amalgamation of problematic disability-related imagery. He has a bit of the “Comic Misadventurer” (a person who causes allegedly humorous problems, self-directed or otherwise, because of his/her disabled status) about him, and he also bears some resemblance to perhaps the most odious of disability stereotypes, the “Obsessive Avenger.” The Obsessive Avenger, typically an Ahab-like male who relentlessly seeks revenge on those he holds responsible for his disabling circumstances or other moral-code violations, was the principal stereotype that undergirded Lon Chaney’s representation of Quasimodo in the 1923 live-action version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame.25 In a sense, this stereotype anchors one end of the disability-stereotype spectrum while the Sweet Innocent holds down the other. In a move virtually unprecedented in the history of movie representations of disability, the Disney company in essence swapped the diametrically opposed images of the Avenger and the Innocent in the creation of its animated bell ringer.
Of course, it is not as simple as that. For starters, Disney’s Quasi is not cured of his impairments (a standard conclusion for most Sweet Innocent narratives, such as Orphans of the Storm, City Lights, and the numerous movie versions of A Christmas Carol), and he retains vestiges of the Obsessive Avenger image. With bulging forearms that would make Popeye envious, Quasi is endowed with an uncanny bestial strength often associated with the Avenger. He delivers several powerful kicks to Phoebus while hiding his unconscious rival under a table, for instance, and later, in a surge of preternatural strength, he bursts the chains that have been binding him to several pillars. Quasi also bears some resemblance to the larger-than-life “Supercrip” image, particularly in his spectacular rescue of Esmeralda and what Variety film critic Jeremy Gerard referred to as “his positively arachnoid agility on the walls and parapets of Notre Dame.” Indeed, Disney animation head Peter Schneider claimed the film “is about how we all want to be heroic. It’s that whole Superman idea that we all secretly harbor to save the day, no matter what we look like or who we are,” adding that “in this case, it’s a little problematic guy to society who gets that shot.” Nevertheless, the Sweet Innocent is Quasi’s dominant defining image.26
The Hunchback team hammered the point of Quasi’s childlike qualities from the very beginning, even down to the way that the film reveals the bell ringer’s background information: via a puppet show offered to a gathering of Parisian children. The puppet show quickly transforms into a flashback that transports the audience to a time twenty years earlier. Quasi is introduced as a literal infant, though ironically he is not visualized beyond the level of an anonymous bundle wrapped in swaddling clothes. The audience can only assume certain things about his appearance based on the horrified reaction and utterances of his soon-to-be stepfather, Frollo. He calls the infant “a monster,” and when the Notre Dame Archdeacon stops him from dropping the child down a well, he replies: “This is an unholy demon. I’m sending it back to hell where it belongs.” This prelude—a powerful piece of animation that features the death of the Roma woman who had been caring for the infant—haunts the remainder of the film.
When the film finally shows Quasi, he has reached the age of twenty. He lives alone high up in the Notre Dame bell tower, with only three stone gargoyles for companions. The film initially shows him engaged in a tender act; he encourages a baby pigeon, which has refused to leave its nest, to fly with the other pigeons. He gently handles it and asks it if today will be the day that it flies. The baby bird appears quite nervous until a flock of pigeons has flown by. It then perks up quite a bit. “Go on,” Quasi says to it. “Nobody wants to be cooped up here forever.” The pigeon happily flies off and joins the other birds, just as Quasi, to whom one of his imaginary gargoyle pals utters the same line later on, joins the “flock” of Parisian townspeople on their way out of the courtyard at the end of the film. An isolated creature—and, pointedly, a baby—the pigeon quickly comes to symbolize Quasi and his own dilemmas.
Consciously or not, the film’s production team accentuated Quasi’s youthful side by tempering its Beauty and the Beast storyline with a variation on the Oedipal scenario. Analysts taking a Freudian psychoanalytic perspective could easily argue that the emotionally-stunted Quasi has developed an attraction toward the maternal and unobtainable Esmeralda while simultaneously engaging in an intense rivalry with a paternal figure split into two halves: “good father” Phoebus and “bad father” Frollo. When Quasi clasps his hands over those of Phoebus and Esmeralda near the end of the film, he is doing more than simply giving them his blessing; he is also signifying that he has resolved his Oedipal crisis. From such a perspective, there is little wonder why Quasi cannot have a mature relationship with Esmeralda; he is, despite his years, just a kid.
Film critics had no trouble picking up on Quasi’s childlike dimensions. John Horn of the Associated Press noted that “Hulce, who toyed around with several Quasimodo voices, finally settled on a form of speech that makes the character sound like a bashful young man.” The New York Daily News’s Jami Bernard, who raved about the film, suggested that Quasi was “the lonely kid who sticks out like a sore thumb.” The lines he speaks—“I am deformed ... and I am ugly”—are, in Bernard’s words, “the lament of a child no one will play with.” Bernard also noted that “To make the creature [sic] just this side of adorable, the animators have drawn him as a virtual child, with a toddler’s awkward gait, a baby’s smushed nose, his fang like a first tooth coming in.”27
The people who created Quasimodo likewise saw him as an outcast child. Kirk Wise sagely observed that “I think everybody at some time in their life has felt like Quasimodo. Children are keenly aware of what it’s like to be left out. So kids immediately warm up to him.” As a press release makes plain, the Disney publicity machinery shared this perspective: “Quasi is a bit like a child who just wants to go to the party but is having a real problem with his parents. Clearly, he’s someone who’s had a very limited experience of life. And even though he’s had to deal with lots of abuse, he has an indomitable spirit and refuses to be put down.”28
Given the utterances and actions of the people responsible for the film, it should come as no surprise that Hunchback’s imagery is, to put it mildly, problem-fraught. On the one hand, the Hunchback team leaders gave lip service to a number of generalities that implied that theirs was an enlightened film on issues of difference, tolerance, and inclusion. “I think it’s wrong for us to say that the only hero you can see in a Disney film is a handsome or beautiful hero,” said Hahn. “Sitting here in 1996, you can have a hero that unconventional, and Quasi falls into that category.” Added Wise: “This film promotes positive values. Compassion, understanding of people different than yourself. It has an anti-hypocrisy message. Everyone sometime has felt like Quasi for one reason or another.”29 On the other hand, the Disney studio did itself and its audiences a major disservice by refusing to work with disability consultants during the film’s development despite multiple requests. The company had set a precedent not long before when it agreed to consult with Native American experts on its 1995 film Pocahontas following complaints about its stereotyping of Arabs in Aladdin (1992). In the case of Hunchback, however, the company vigorously rejected proposals to collaborate with disability experts. In perhaps a reflection of the outdated Medical-model view that disabled people are a bunch of hard-luck individuals and not a cultural minority, it insisted there was no need for such consultants.
Before the movie opened, an executive at rival Universal Studios predicted potential difficulties. “This could be a tough one. Basically you have a child held captive. Then there’s that whole handicap, societal misfit aspect,” said the executive. “But you know Disney, if there’s a way to sell it, they’ll figure it out. They’ve certainly tread this path many times before ... and quite successfully.” Disney executive Peter Schneider was just as sanguine. “We know that someone will always take issue with something,” he said. “But we just deal with that when it comes along. We never grapple over whether someone will take issue with something or not. It’s all about telling the tale.”30 Or, perhaps more accurately, it’s all about the Disney juggernaut making money.
In response to Disney’s announcement that it would produce an animated film based on Hugo’s novel, Paul Spudich, a San Franciscan with kypho-scoliosis, organized a letter-writing campaign to protest Disney’s decision and specifically asked the company to change the film’s title. “Absolutely not,” replied Disney spokesman Howard Green, who went on to note that “we will do something that is very sensitive to the concerns of handicapped people, or the physically challenged, or whatever the correct term is these days.” The directors themselves clearly had no intention of changing the title. “There were questions asked by unnamed people about whether we should call it ‘The Hunchback of Notre Dame’ because ‘hunchback’ is a hurtful word,” said Trousdale, who left little doubt about his perspective after posing a follow-up rhetorical question: “You’re going to call it ‘The Differently Abled Bell Ringer’?” Trousdale’s colleague Wise likewise failed to recognize the hurtfulness of the term: “I think most people eventually understood that you call more attention to it by changing it than you would by not changing it.”31 As though that’s a bad thing.
A Disney executive who directly responded to Spudich was Sanford Litvack, the company’s Executive Vice President in charge of Law and Human Resources. “Far from depicting the central character as loathsome or unlovable,” he wrote in a letter to Spudich, “our draft screenplay tracks the story of a person who at first feels and is made to feel he is deformed, but learns that he has great value as a human being. Although he is shown at the outset as being treated wrongly and cruelly by the world, he demonstrates that he is noble, a hero, as he and the world learns [sic] that it is who you are inside, not what you look like, that matters.”32
Unsatisfied with Litvack’s response, Spudich wrote back and asked to examine the script. This time, Litvack stonewalled him. “I want to assure you that it is not the intention of this company—and never was—to hurt people with disabilities,” he wrote. “We are not, however, in a position to share with people outside the company advance previews of our stories or screenplays since, as I am sure you can appreciate, the entertainment business is fiercely competitive.” In light of the film’s musical number “A Guy Like You” (which, among other things, shows Quasi looking into a mirror that immediately shatters and the gargoyles, representing his imagination, holding a wienie roast while Paris burns), Litvack’s concluding statement was ludicrous: “We are confident that our adaptation of the French classic work will treat the characters and issues in a dignified manner.”33
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Why all this concern about a movie and its representations, one might ask? After all, aren’t we simply talking about, as Alfred Hitchcock once said, only a movie?
Yes, it’s a movie, but it’s so much more than that; for disabled people, movies such as The Hunchback of Notre Dame are harmful and divisive expressions that reinforce negative beliefs that can lead to further discrimination. “Deformity, whether it be a hunched back or less disfiguring handicaps, is hardly a topic for Disney’s ‘fun and games’ approach to reality,” wrote Carole Henkoff, a New Jersey woman with multiple sclerosis. Other PWDs elaborated on this general point. “The portrayals put forward by Disney contribute to the attitudinal barriers that keep many disabled people from being accepted into communities,” wrote Alana Theriault, a Berkeley-based woman with scoliosis. “What does this movie say about those of us with disabilities?” queried Kathi Wolfe, a Falls Church, Virginia, freelance writer who is legally blind. “It says our only friends are stone gargoyles, that we are never ordinary people but only monsters or superheroes; that no matter how heroic we are, we will never have a loving, romantic relationship.” She added “I and others with disabilities fear that the release of this film and Disney’s accompanying marketing blitz will increase the ridicule encountered by both disabled children and adults.” The late Paul Longmore, a San Francisco State University professor who had a curved spine and paralyzed arms as a result of a bout with childhood polio, said, “I have had children recoil from me because they have seen movies that taught them to fear or pity anyone who looked like me. Unfortunately, Disney’s Hunchback may increase these negative attitudes.”34
Sadly, the concerns of Henkoff, Theriault, Wolfe, Longmore, and other PWDs about Disney’s Hunchback turned out to be justified. Particularly troubling was a British Film Institute report that the term “hunchback,” which had largely fallen out of use in the United Kingdom, made an unwelcome comeback in the six months following the release of Disney’s film in that country; people with kyphosis or scoliosis were now having that disparaging term flung at them again. Worse, the U.K. witnessed an upsurge in physical attacks on PWDs. The British Scoliosis Society complained to Nicholas Scott, the Minister of Disabled People, that people with scoliosis had been the targets of more than one hundred assaults in the months following the release of the Disney film, whereas none had occurred in the six months prior.35 There seems little question that the film helped fan the flames of prejudice and discrimination.
As I hope this essay has shown, the animated Hunchback is politically correct cinema at its worst. It seems to preach tolerance of society’s Others while criticizing attempts to segregate and isolate them, yet it relies on age-old stereotypes and other forms of outdated thinking about PWDs to propel its narrative. I very much agree with Annalee Ward’s remarks about the significant dissonance that exists between the film’s surface story and its subtext:
The overt messages of the film are strong: “It is what’s inside that matters,” but the subtext does not always support this idea. It is that conflict between the overt and the subtle that makes for a confusing and morally ineffective film; the subtext obfuscates the main theme by making it more complex and, in some instances, working against it. For example, the message that Quasi has character where it counts—inside—is countered by the message that people are afraid of him and cheer when he is pilloried and subjected to cruel tauntings and being pelted with rotten vegetables. The film thus illustrates, right or wrong, that looks do matter—at least initially.36
If there is anything resembling a “happy ending” or a saving grace to the rather dismal scenario surrounding Disney’s Hunchback of Notre Dame, it comes from an unlikely source: the film’s direct-to-video sequel, The Hunchback of Notre Dame II (2002). Produced by Disney’s TV animation division, the unit responsible for the inexpensive, lower-quality productions geared toward the 4-to-8-year-old crowd, Hunchback II was released simultaneously with the DVD edition of the first Disney Hunchback film. Clocking in at a mere 68 minutes and featuring rather flat songs, a cut-rate villain, and a timeworn story about a crooked traveling circus, the film nevertheless accomplishes something that hardly ever occurs in Hollywood disability-themed films; it raises the very distinct possibility that its disabled character might have a fulfilling romantic life. Quasi meets Madellaine, a young woman who dreams of becoming a famous tightrope walker but has been forced into servitude by the corrupt owner of a circus. She is initially repulsed by Quasi’s appearance, but after she sees that he has a way with children (he and Zephyr—the young son of Esmeralda and Phoebus—are fast friends) she finds him more appealing. After the requisite number of misunderstandings and moments of jeopardy, and much to Disney’s credit, Hunchback II concludes by creating the strong impression that its disabled character is not doomed to a life of isolation. The only thing pitiable about the film from a DS perspective is that it was directed only toward very young children. Nevertheless, the kids who saw it got the message that disabled people can indeed lead lives full of acceptance and love—and not just platonic love—and that’s an important start.
1. Disney’s plan to produce two films based on the Hugo novel is noted in Kirk Honeycutt, “Disney Double for ‘Hunchback,’” Hollywood Reporter, 19–21 Aug. 1994, 41. Disney may have dropped the live-action project because competing companies TNT and Todd-AO/TAE Productions had announced similar productions.
2. Published in 1944, the Classics Illustrated comic book based on the Hugo novel went through numerous printings and featured a variety of cover designs. Number 18 in the CI series, it was adapted by Howard Hendrix and illustrated by R. Crandall and George Evans.
3. With any Disney film, there is always a question of authorship beyond the general level of the studio itself. It is widely acknowledged that Disney production executive Jeffrey Katzenberg exerted enormous influence during the studio’s animation “rebirth” in the late 1980s and gained notoriety for micromanaging productions during his tenure. At the time of Hunchback’s development, however, Katzenberg was involved in a very messy split with Disney and went on to help form a rival company, DreamWorks SKG. His departure left a significant void in executive oversight, and as a result Hahn, Trousdale, and Wise enjoyed an unusual degree of autonomy while making their film. As Wise noted at the time of the film’s release: “We actually got to make a lot of huge creative leaps with very little executive attention, which was kind of fun.” It is therefore reasonable to assume that Hunchback is far more the product of its producer-director team than were the Katzenberg-era Disney films that preceded it. For more information on the Katzenberg departure and its ramifications for the Hunchback team, see John Clark, “With Katzenberg Gone, It’s a Whole New World,” Los Angeles Times, 16 June 1996, 86.
4. In Japan, where the term “hunchback” had been banned from television for years because of its offensiveness, the film’s title was changed to The Bells of Notre Dame. However, Disney used the closest approximations of “hunchback” in the titles of the versions marketed to French- and Spanish-speaking audiences: Le Bossu de Notre Dame and El Jorobado de Notre Dame, respectively.
5. Victor Hugo, The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, trans. Catherine Liu (New York: Modern Library, 2004), 148.
6. Disney’s Hunchback of Notre Dame Press Kit, 29, as cited in Annalee R. Ward, Mouse Morality: The Rhetoric of Disney Animated Film (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002), 69.
7. For a sampling of the many scholarly works that have addressed the various models noted in the text, see Lennard J. Davis, ed., The Disability Studies Reader, 3d ed. (New York: Routledge, 2010); Tobin Siebers, Disability Theory (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008); Rosemarie Garland Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996); Ann Pointon and Chris Davies, eds., Framed: Interrogating Disability in the Media (London: British Film Institute, 1997); Hector Avalos, Sarah J. Melcher, and Jeremy Schipper, eds., This Abled Body: Rethinking Disabilities in Biblical Studies (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2007); and Mike Oliver, Understanding Disability: From Theory to Practice (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996).
8. See http://www.statemaster.com/encyclopedia/The-Hunchback-of-Notre-Dame-(film) for an accounting of key differences. See also Ward, 58–61.
9. Wise cited in Anne Thompson and David Karger, “Playing a Hunch,” Entertainment Weekly, 21 June 1996 http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,293046,00.html; Hahn cited in Todd Camp, “’Hunchback’ Shows a Different Side of Disney,” Fort Worth Star-Telegram, n.d., n.p., reprinted in http://www.frollozone.org/interviews.html.
10. Hahn cited in John Clark, “A Quasi Original,” Los Angeles Times, 16 June 1996, 6.
11. See the subtitle for Clark, “Quasi,” 6.
12. Clark, “Quasi,” 6.
13. For more information on the visibly different person—the “freak”—in popular culture, see Rosemary Garland Thomson, ed., Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body (New York: New York University Press, 1996); Robert Bogdan, Freak Show: Presenting Human Oddities for Amusement and Profit (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988); and Rachel Adams, Sideshow U.S.A.: Freaks and the American Cultural Imagination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001).
14. Trousdale cited in Clark, “Quasi,” 6.
15. Thompson and Karger.
16. Baxter cited in Thompson and Karger; Wise cited in Clark, “Quasi,” 6.
17. Hulce cited in John Horn, “Will Disney’s ‘Hunchback of Notre Dame’ Scare Young Children?” Associated Press, as published in Lawrence Journal-World, 20 June 1996, D-6. Hulce’s relief upon seeing the final Quasi designs says something about his expectations; he found the animation to be “much less monstrous—I was surprised how tame he was.”
18. The Disney version is one of the exceedingly few adaptations to follow Hugo’s lead on this point. The principal actors who have played Quasimodo in live-action films—Lon Chaney, Charles Laughton, Anthony Quinn, Anthony Hopkins, Mandy Patinkin—were all forty or older when they did so.
19. Hugo, 146.
20. Kimbrough cited in Jeanne Wolf, “Taken for Granite,” TV Guide, 6 July 1996, 36.
21. Schneider cited in Clark, “Quasi,” 6; Baxter cited in John Cutter, “Hunchback Quasimodo Has a Real-Life Disease,” St. Petersburg Times, 9 July 1996, D-1.
22. Kenneth Turan, “Quasi-Adult Quasimodo,” Los Angeles Times, 21 June 1996, entertainment sect., 1. For more information on the Raspberry Ripple awards and the “One in Eight Group” that bestows them, see http://www.prnewswire.co.uk/cgi/news/release?id=24074.
23. Patt Morrison, “These Stories Are Classics for a Reason,” Los Angeles Times, 21 June 1996, F-10.
24. Martin F. Norden, “Tiny Tim on Screen: A Disability Studies Perspective,” in Dickens on Screen, ed. John Glavin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 196.
25. For a brief study of the Chaney film, see Martin F. Norden, The Cinema of Isolation: A History of Physical Disability in the Movies (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994), 89–92. Further discussions of the general disability stereotypes noted in this essay occur throughout the Norden text. Laurie E. Harnick provided a useful tracing of Quasimodo’s cinematic evolution in her “Lost and Found in Translation: The Changing Face of Disability in the Film Adaptations of Hugo’s Notre Dame de Paris: 1482,” in Screening Disability: Essays on Cinema and Disability, ed. Christopher R. Smit and Anthony Enns (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2001), 87–95.
26. Jeremy Gerard, rev. of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Variety, 17 June 1996, n.p.; Schneider cited in Judy Brennan, “Disney Defense Dept.: A ‘Hunch’ There May Be Criticism,” Los Angeles Times, 2 June 1996, 22. As questionable as Quasimodo’s representation is—the beastly connotations, the Sweet Innocent quality, etc.—it could have been much worse. Floyd Norman, a Hunchback animator, noted a number of scenes that had been dropped from the final film. They included, in his words, “Brenda Chapman’s wonderful introduction to the mysterious Quasimodo lurking in the shadows. Children in the streets of Paris tell scary stories of the ‘monster’ in the bell tower, and the audience eagerly anticipates the first appearance of the Hunchback.” Norman also noted that he “storyboarded a wacky pub sequence where Quasimodo, disguised as an ‘ugly woman’ is hit on by a drunken patron. Eventually, the hunchback reveals himself and the drunk swears off booze forever.” Norman cited in “Toon Tuesday: Looking Back on Disney’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame—Part Deux” jimhillmedia.com/blogs/floyd_norman/archive/2008/11/18/toon-tuesday-looking-back-on-disney-s-the-hunchback-of-notre-dame-part-deux.aspx.
27. Horn, D-6; Jami Bernard, “This ‘Hunchback’ Is a Hump Dinger!” New York Daily News, 21 June 1996, n.p.
28. Wise cited in Horn, D-6; for the publicity quote, see disney.go.com/vault/archives/characters/ quasimodo/quasimodo.html. Wise’s final sentence is of course open to debate. In this same article, Horn notes that Quasi’s appearance and public humiliation scenes “sent some tearful 4-year-olds bolting for the lobby” during early screenings. As for the press release, I can’t help but wonder if its author was using the phrase “put down” to imply that Quasi was comparable to a sickly or troublesome animal about to be “put down” by a veterinarian.
29. Hahn cited in Camp; Wise cited in Thompson and Karger.
30. Schneider and the unnamed Universal executive cited in Brennan, 22.
31. Green cited in “Disney Says No to Disability Consultants,” One Step Ahead, 16 Jan. 1995, 4; Trousdale and Wise cited in Clark, “Quasi,” 6.
32. Sanford M. Litvack, letter to Paul Spudich, 6 Oct. 1994.
33. Sanford M. Litvack, letter to Paul Spudich, 8 Dec. 1994.
34. Carole Henkoff, “Disney’s ‘Hunchback’; Not Quite Fun and Games,” New York Times, 28 July 1996, 2–31; Alana Theriault, “Don’t Need Your Pity,” San Francisco Chronicle, 1 July 1996, n.p.; Kathi Wolfe, “Disney’s Feel-Good ‘Hunchback’ Offends Disabled,” Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, 7 July 1996, n.p.; Longmore cited in Wolfe.
35. “Distorted Images?” http://www.bfi.org.uk/education/teaching/disability/introduction/ distortedimages.html.
36. Ward, 77.
Adams, Rachel. Sideshow U.S.A.: Freaks and the American Cultural Imagination. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001.
Avalos, Hector, Sarah J. Melcher, and Jeremy Schipper, eds. This Abled Body: Rethinking Disabilities in Biblical Studies. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2007.
Bernard, Jami. “This ‘Hunchback’ Is a Hump Dinger!” New York Daily News, 21 June 1996, n.p.
Bogdan, Robert. Freak Show: Presenting Human Oddities for Amusement and Profit. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988.
Brennan, Judy. “Disney Defense Dept.: A ‘Hunch’ There May Be Criticism.” Los Angeles Times, 2 June 1996, p. 22.
Camp, Todd. “‘Hunchback’ Shows a Different Side of Disney.” Fort Worth Star-Telegram, n.d., n.p., reprinted in http://www.frollozone.org/interviews.html.
Clark, John. “With Katzenberg Gone, It’s a Whole New World.” Los Angeles Times, 16 June 1996, p. 86.
______. “A Quasi Original.” Los Angeles Times, 16 June 1996, p. 6.
Cutter, John. “Hunchback Quasimodo Has a Real-Life Disease.” St. Petersburg Times, 9 July 1996, sect. D, p. 1.
Davis, Lennard J., ed. The Disability Studies Reader. 3rd ed. New York: Routledge, 2010.
“Disney Says No to Disability Consultants.” One Step Ahead, 16 Jan. 1995, p. 4.
“Distorted Images?” http://www.bfi.org.uk/education/teaching/disability/introduction/ distortedimages.html.
Gerard, Jeremy. Rev. of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Variety, 17 June 1996, p. 16.
Harnick, Laurie E. “Lost and Found in Translation: The Changing Face of Disability in the Film Adaptations of Hugo’s Notre Dame de Paris: 1482.” In Screening Disability: Essays on Cinema and Disability, edited by Christopher R. Smit and Anthony Enns, 87–95. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2001.
Henkoff, Carole. “Disney’s ‘Hunchback’; Not Quite Fun and Games.” New York Times, 28 July 1996, sect. 2, p. 31.
Honeycutt, Kirk. “Disney Double for ‘Hunchback.’” Hollywood Reporter, 19–21 Aug. 1994, p. 41.
Horn, John. “Will Disney’s Hunchback of Notre Dame Scare Young Children?” Associated Press, as published in Lawrence Journal-World, 20 June 1996, p. 6D.
Hugo, Victor. The Hunchback of Notre-Dame. Translated by Catherine Liu. New York: Modern Library, 2004.
“The Hunchback of Notre Dame.” http://www.statemaster.com/encyclopedia/The-Hunchback-of-Notre-Dame-(film).
Morrison, Patt. “These Stories Are Classics for a Reason.” Los Angeles Times, 21 June 1996, p. F10.
Norden, Martin F. The Cinema of Isolation: A History of Physical Disability in the Movies. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994.
______. “Tiny Tim on Screen: A Disability Studies Perspective.” In Dickens on Screen, edited by John Glavin, 188–198. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
Oliver, Mike. Understanding Disability: From Theory to Practice. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996.
Pointon, Ann, and Chris Davies, eds. Framed: Interrogating Disability in the Media. London: British Film Institute, 1997.
“Quasimodo.” disney.go.com/vault/archives/characters/quasimodo/quasimodo.html.
Siebers, Tobin. Disability Theory. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008.
Theriault, Alana. “Don’t Need Your Pity.” San Francisco Chronicle, 1 July 1996, n.p.
Thompson, Anne, and David Karger. “Playing a Hunch.” Entertainment Weekly, 21 June 1996 http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,293046,00.html.
Thomson, Rosemarie Garland. Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997.
______, ed. Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body. New York: New York University Press, 1996.
“Toon Tuesday: Looking Back on Disney’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame—Part Deux” //jimhillmedia.com/blogs/floyd_norman/archive/2008/11/18/toon-tuesday-looking-back-on-disney-s-the-hunchback-of-notre-dame-part-deux.aspx.
Turan, Kenneth. “Quasi-Adult Quasimodo.” Los Angeles Times, 21 June 1996, entertainment sect., p. 1.
Ward, Annalee R. Mouse Morality: The Rhetoric of Disney Animated Film. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002.
Wolf, Jeanne. “Taken for Granite.” TV Guide, 6 July 1996, p. 36.
Wolfe, Kathi. “Disney’s Feel-Good ‘Hunchback’ Offends Disabled.” Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, 7 July 1996, n.p.