The Rescuers Down Under

The studio’s first animated sequel in cinemas broke with the original by design. The songs went, on the grounds that they would slow the pace, and Hendel Butoy and Mike Gabriel looked instead at live action work by Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock and David Lean. For the eagle Marahute, Glen Keane studied 6 birds at the Peregrine Fund in Boise, plus a stuffed eagle and a skeleton. The crew enlarged the bird, shrank its head, lengthened neck and wings, and slowed the wingbeats to 25 or 30 percent of an eagle’s speed. Carrying 200 feathers, she was costly enough to appear only at the opening and close, some 7 minutes in all. Jim Jordan, who voiced Orville in the first film, died in 1988, so Roy E. Disney suggested writing Wilbur as his brother, the names nodding to the Wright brothers. It was also the first feature Disney inked, painted and assembled entirely by computer, though the marketing never mentioned it. Opening against Home Alone on 16 November 1990, it came fourth and lost money, yet took the animation prizes of the Los Angeles and Dallas-Fort Worth critics. A good fit if you want to see where digital production of hand drawn animation began. Not for anyone coming back for the songs of the first film; there are none.