Home on the Range Movie Review

As the last hand-drawn animated feature from Disney, Home on the Range provides a bittersweet eulogy for the traditional animated art form that Disney pioneered, showing that while its spirit may be willing, its cartoon flesh is still far too weak to compete with its computerized competitors. A quaint little comedy about three adventurous cows taking on a cattle rustler, Home on the Range's small scale makes it more appealing than such bloated predecessors as Treasure Planet and Atlantis: The Lost Empire, but it lacks the spark and wit that made Disney's last in-house hit, Lilo & Stitch, such a phenomenal crowd-pleaser. As such, it straddles the fence between B-list knockoff and prestige product: it's better than something you might find on the Disney Channel, but it ain't gonna get its own ride at Disney World.

The movie's flat, lackluster animation in parts might induce some to point triumphantly and say, "This is why only Pixar should make cartoons!" But in all honesty, Home on the Range is kinda cute and not an entirely terrible way to spend less than ninety minutes. The heroine of this Range is Maggie (voiced by Roseanne) a "show cow" who finds herself dispatched to a new home after her owner's cattle herd is mysteriously rustled off. To Maggie's luck, though, her new barnyard is a bucolic little dairy farm called Patch of Heaven, run by a little old lady named Pearl (Carole Cook), who treats all her animals like family. (One assumes she's vegetarian.) The alpha cow of Patch of Heaven, fusty Mrs. Calloway (Judi Dench), takes umbrage at Maggie's showboating antics and coarse behavior, but finds her an unlikely ally when an eviction notice shows up, threatening everyone's livelihood. Soon, Maggie and Mrs. Calloway team up with third cow Grace (Jennifer Tilly) to catch the mysterious cattle rustler Alameida Slim (Randy Quaid). Mrs. Calloway and Grace want the $750 reward in order to keep Patch of Heaven from becoming a Patch of Repossession; for Maggie, however, it's personal – Slim was the one who rustled her former home.

The Southwest "locations" for Home on the Range, with their Texas plateaus and John Ford-like vistas, unfortunately beg comparison with the similar backdrops for Warner Bros.' Wile E. Coyote-Road Runner cartoons and come up wanting. Flatter than a post-anvil Mr. Coyote, the scenery is Range's worst quality, never engaging enough for either young eyes or adult sensibilities. However, despite a patchy start with too many cute little farmyard critters, the movie picks up steam when the three intrepid cows start trekking across vast valleys to capture their prey, aided by hyperactive stallion Buck (Cuba Gooding Jr., antic as ever). The cows aren't that great to look at (their noses are awfully pointy), but the personalities of all three shine through. Unsurprisingly, Dench is by far the best, but Tilly gives Grace's New Age sensibility ("I'm sensing some anger issues") an unexpectedly nice comic spin.

Still, despite its assets, this Home probably won't find a place in the Disney canon, and its one big musical number – a tongue-tying little ditty sung by Quaid called "Yodel-Adle-Eedle-Idle Oo"-- is its own worst enemy. A big-time production number that features Alameida Slim hypnotizing thousands of cattle with his mesmerizing yodeling, the sequence brings to mind nothing less than the landmark "Be Our Guest" from Beauty and the Beast. Both share the same composer – the prolific Alan Menken – and far too many distressingly similar qualities, down to the psychedelic multi-colored cows subbing for dancing silverware. (Think of it as a progression of some kind, from cutlery to main course.) By begging comparison to the brightest light in Disney's last home-grown animation renaissance, Home on the Range inadvertently points up its own shortcomings and in the end, it's just an okay sirloin trying to pass for filet mignon.