The Sweet Sadness of “The Rescuers”

The 1977 feature film, like many others of this era of Disney moviemaking, has more to recommend it that is commonly acknowledged.

There are some Disney films that loom large in the public imagination and have become household names: Sleeping Beauty, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Fantasia, Cinderella. These were the films of the golden age of Disney, when the man himself was at the helm, ensuring that his studio continued to bring the very best of family entertainment to the masses.

And then there are some, like The Rescuers, that seem to have been largely forgotten by the majority of the population. What’s more, unlike some of the other films from this particular era (the post-golden age of the 1960s and 1970s)— most notably The Sword in the Stone and Robin Hood — it hasn’t really enjoyed a resurgence in popularity among millennials, even though, as I can personally attest, it was present throughout the 1980s in the various clip shows that were a staple of Disney’s TV output in that decade.

This is all the more surprising considering the fact that, both at the time and in subsequent retrospectives, many see it as a bit of a bright spot, a return to form for a studio that seemed to have lost its way after Disney’s death. Now, I’ll be the first…