Home on the Range (2004)

This was a major disappointment. Not the absolute worst in the Disney catalog in my opinion, but definitely bottom five. The Disney company once had a goal of making great FAMILY entertainment. Well, this is almost throughout the entire movie purely for toddlers or very little kids. It does not have any appeal to the adult audience. It simply builds its humour on fart and burp jokes and poor slapstick comedy of a cartoon short. The animation is poor. If anyone told you that this was made by the most revolutionary company in the history of animation would you believe them? It was just lazy!But the most disappointing was the musical score. ALAN MENKEN WHAT WERE YOU THINKING! The man who brought you masterpieces like Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, The Hunchback of Notre Dame and The Little Mermaid! That really hurt to discover that such talent made such a below average movie score!If I should highlight anything at all it must be the villain Alameda Slim. His character is still stupid, but he engulfs himself so well in being stupid that it made him hilarious. He is able to hypnotize cattle by yodeling! It is presented in a musical number which cracked me up! Not worthy of the Disney label, but certainly it can distract your little kids for 76 minutes.

Home on the Range was so bad that it, for the first time in history, shut down the traditional hand-drawn animation at the Walt Disney Animation Studios. The talents and creative juices of the team that had brought you such films such as The Lion King or Beauty and the Beast were finally completely spent and this was their last pitiful attempt to scrape something together.And it shows. It feels more like a B-studio direct-to-video kind of nonsense than anything from arguably the greatest animation studio on Earth. Everything, from character designs to the actual characters to song numbers, is either laughably cheap or just so bizarre that you have to wonder what they were smoking at the time.Now, to the film's credit, it's not the worst animated film I've ever seen. The quality of animation is not as high as it used to be, but the backgrounds look nice, the characters move well - even if they are oddly designed - and the songs are merely bland instead of awful. Plus, there's pink elephants segment in the film. You know, like in Dumbo, when everything just goes bat guano insane, the colours try to give you a seizure and its glorious madness for a few minutes. I cannot truly hate a film that has a scene like that.But then, the story. It all starts with a cow making a breast implants joke. Just... let that sink in for a minute. That's how they start a Disney film. And believe it or not, it's downhill from there. Three cows are about to become homeless as their farm is to be sold due to debts. They have the bright idea to leave the farm in order to catch a notorious cattle stealing fugitive, whose prize money just happens to be the exact sum the farm needs. What a happy coincidence. Along the way numerous comic reliefs are met, hijinks ensue, the action scenes are so hard to follow that you stop bothering after the first one, more comic reliefs are met and in the end we all have our big happy Disney ending. Audience cheers because it's over, roll the credits.I don't know why this film became as bad as it is. Perhaps studio executives intervened, perhaps no one cared anymore, perhaps they actually thought they were making a good film. Impossible to say. Still, it is very close to being the worst Disney film I've ever seen. And I'm counting the direct-to-video sequels in that. Only see it if you want to say you've seen them all.

This is another excellent Disney film. Classic animation leaving a real warmth to the characters and settings. Familiar storyline too of cattle rustlers and farm foreclosures and unlikely heroes rising up to save the day.We love the voices especially Roseanne as the brash, bold and over the top lead character. Cuba Gooding Jnr does a great job interjecting humour as a sidekick horse rivaling the role of Donkey by Eddie Murphy.The soundtrack is amazing too with leading Country starts leading their songwriting skills to memorable catchy tunes.It was surprising to read so many negative reviews and wonder how many of them are adults as opposed to kids whom Disney make these movies for in the first place.As a family we love this film and have watched it over a dozen times.Highly recommended.

I'd been reading some stuff from/by others regarding this movie, I think maybe after it was released on VHS and DVD, if not while it was still played and shown in theaters. Originally having not seen the whole movie but just the preview when it was advertised and a clip of it on this site, I wasn't very interested in seeing this one and decided to wait for it to air on regular t.v. and catch it then. Well, a few years after it came out, it happened to be aired less than a month ago on the CW and I caught it then and there. Having finally seen it, I still don't really consider it among my favorite Disney traditionally animated films. I found it alright, but simultaneously, it's not one of the greatest. While I was watching it, I didn't quite get what most (if not some) people's beef (no pun towards the cattle intended) with it is, I probably read reviews about already before it was even brought to t.v. for the first time and might've forgotten about it. But I'm among those who see it as mediocre. There are others before it that have been done much better and Disney's Mulan is among those to it that I prefer.I don't think I can really add anything else that hasn't been covered by some of the other critics on here as to what went wrong and why it's a fail, but I'll try going over them too in my own words. First of all, one of the problems with this is a lack of sophistication, which I guess would or could be the best way to describe it. It's just not worldly enough to appeal to most of the teen and adult demographic and will only appeal to kids, if not even more so. It's not really as exciting for me as the aforementioned Mulan and in some spots, it's full of tedium, but not completely, as there have been some wacky and comical moments, such as with Buck the horse and when the cows were defeating the Willie brothers, Rico and Wesley. In those moments, some have mentioned that the movie is more reminiscent of something out of a Warner Bros./Looney Tunes cartoon than a Disney cartoon. Now somehow, that would've never come to my mind and I would've still missed it, even if it should be apparent since I'm well familiar enough with Warners material. But then again, maybe that's because I'd been learning more about the instances of animation companies/studios drawing (again, no pun intended) inspiration from, imitating or emulating others' typical/signature styles. I think it's horse-feathers that this had to be declared as the supposed last 2D cartoon flick by Disney and that the animation department shut it down, whether it was due to it being such a box office bomb, technological advances towards the now overrated 3D/CGI form, or both. Although fortunately and thankfully that would be redeemed by The Princess and the Frog half a decade later, which I still haven't seen in full, but plan to do so eventually. As much as I have always loved the medium, the current state of the cartoon industry has left me disenchanted and growing up, I had thought about entering the animation field to do the drawings, but then I reconsidered my aspirations due to not being patient enough for the long and grueling process, and it not being fast enough for me (as much as I love it). However, I'd be more interested in some certain, other aspects of it, such as writing and voice work. CGI has since overtaking the movie business, but thankfully, there's still plenty of traditional animation to be found on television. And I'm not the only one who feels this way about the animated film field being overtaken by 3D. Anyone who says that no one is interested in 2D anymore, others and I would beg to differ. Sorry, for going slightly off topic and going on a rant, but I had to vent and get everything out of my mind and off my chest. I can't take much more of this, I truly detest the state of the animated movie industry now. I never thought nor imagine things would ever come down to this, with one style replacing the other. Why can't both still co-exist? I don't like this one thing supplanting the other. I simply don't agree with this horse-feathers, nuts to that mess. If I were part of that aspect of the industry right now, I'd want to do both 2D and 3D, and would refuse to drop one for the other. Forget that mess, I probably would've had to quit if I couldn't do both. I want and would like to see variety again in that.Anyway, to get back on topic, next is the animation in this. Having been missing Disney's original, signature animation style for a while now and getting sick of the sharp-edged, angular look and flash (now I have a better understand of why some people dislike flash animation on t.v.), especially with most of the shows that aired on the Disney channel as of the last few years, I'm yearning for the old school style again. I presume that the plot/story-line isn't all that special. As for the music, I'm not really a big, straight-ahead country fan, hardly as it's not one of the top genres of music I follow that much, but I'm into the hybrid sub-genres (rockabilly, country-rock, cow-punk, etc.), but there are songs from other Disney features that I favor more. I think I've said enough about this and can't add anything else that hasn't already been stated by some of the other reviewers here and that's all I have to type now. I just wasn't feeling it all that much, it's not one of the better or the best, it's once again just mediocre.