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      How ‘Maya and the Three,’ ‘Encanto’ and ‘Vivo’ Animate Latinidad

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      A warrior princess, an enchanted family and a kinkajou musician are changing how Latino stories are told — at least in animation.Take “The Lord of the Rings,” but make it Mesoamerican. Pepper the plot with pop culture references, and you have “Maya and the Three.”Originally envisioned by the creator Jorge R. Gutiérrez as a film trilogy, “Maya and the Three” began to take shape in 2018 when Netflix executives asked him to pitch an idea that he loved but didn’t think he could get made anywhere else.“What came out of my mouth was: ‘I want to make three movies in a row about a Mesoamerican warrior princess who’s going to save the world,’” Gutiérrez said. Now reimagined as a nine-episode animated mini-series, the result arrived Friday on Netflix, with a vocal cast studded with Latino stars, including Zoe Saldaña (Maya), Diego Luna (Zatz, prince of bats), Gael García Bernal (the Jaguar Brothers), Stephanie Beatriz (Chimi) and Rita Moreno (Ah Puch).As singular as it sounds, “Maya and the Three” is part of a recent trend that also includes the films “Vivo,” which came out in August, and “Encanto,” slated for release next month. All are animated stories by Latinos and about Latinos. All highlight the importance of women and girls to their communities and aim to counter Hollywood’s history of attempting to create unrealistically flawless characters of color (when it has created them at all).And all three aim to dazzle and charm viewers with their narratives and aesthetics while also honoring distinct cultures and creating more complex portrayals of Latinos — in part, by reveling in their characters’ imperfections.“When you’re only representing one film with one Hispanic character, that character has to be everything for everyone,” said Rebecca Perez, an “Encanto” animator. “And that’s not fair, because no one’s perfect. We all bring our broken pieces and our perfect pieces.”When it came to creating the heroes of “Maya and the Three,” Gutiérrez, who also directed the series, received similar advice from his wife, the animator and illustrator Sandra Equihua. (Gutiérrez grew up in Mexico City, while Equihua is from Tijuana.) Equihua designed the show’s lead female characters and served as a creative consultant.“Early on, as a male writer, I go: ‘I’ve never had a female protagonist. I’ve got to make sure she’s perfect,’” Gutiérrez said in a joint video interview with Equihua, both of whom were in Los Angeles. “And she literally went: ‘What are you doing? You’re Mary Sue-ing this thing. You are making her flat as a character because she has no flaws — all the male characters are so flawed, they’re way more interesting.’”Equihua had reminded Gutiérrez that he loved folk art because of its imperfections, and she pressed him to treat his protagonist the same way. So at times, Maya falters: She does bad things for good reasons.As a society, “we’re realizing that there’s more layers than being the naysayer, the crybaby, Miss Perfect,” Equihua said. “There’s more layers to us as girls, as women, and we wanted to make sure that Maya was as human as possible.”Part of that humanity is purely physical. Equihua designed Maya to look almost vase-like: She has broad hips, a stout build and strong legs. (She is, after all, a warrior princess.) The illustrator tries to base her characters on what Latinas really look like.“Not all of us have the thighs and the hips and everything, but a lot of us do,” Equihua said. “And it’s good to celebrate it and see that there’s diversity in shapes, and not all of us have long, long, long legs and thin, thin, thin, thin tiny waists. And it’s just glorious to see that she could run around and be powerful.”Rather than have a traditional quinceañera on her 15th birthday, Maya embarks on a quest outlined by an ancient prophecy. Alongside three great warriors, she must battle the gods to save her family, her friends and herself.“One of the themes in ‘Maya’ is the sacrifice that Latinas have to make: for their families to go on, for the countries to go on, for the culture to go on,” Gutiérrez said. “They’re the pillars that hold up the continent, and a lot of times it’s a thankless endeavor.”In “Encanto,” Mirabel, center, voiced by Stephanie Beatriz, lives in an enchanted Colombian town with her family.Disney/Disney, via Associated Press“Encanto,” a Disney film coming to theaters on Nov. 24, tells the story of the Madrigal family, which lives in an enchanted town in the mountains of Colombia. The family matriarch, Abuela (María Cecilia Botero), first arrived there after fleeing violence, losing her husband along the way.The enchantment, bestowed upon Abuela to protect her from harm, has given a magical gift to each child in the family — except Mirabel. But when she realizes that the enchantment itself is in danger, Mirabel sets out to save her family.Perez, one of the film’s animators, said that her Cuban grandparents came to the United States in very much the same fashion, packing their bags and giving up everything they knew. “I made very conscious choices to be present in every meeting, and be authentically me,” Perez said in a video interview from Burbank, Calif. “Even if it meant being a little uncomfortable — both me being uncomfortable, and the person I’m talking to, whether it be a director or producer, and expressing my point of view.“Always respectful, but the only way you’re going to get to a great place is to go through the bumps. Then you’re going to have honest conversations.”Perhaps without realizing it, Perez mirrored the experience of Mirabel Madrigal, the film’s bespectacled protagonist. In “Encanto,” conflict is resolved only through open, honest conversation between Mirabel and Abuela, bridging generational gaps amid a cloud of golden butterflies. The rest of the Madrigal family runs the gamut of body types, skin tones, hair colors, accents and magical powers.Like “Encanto,” the Netflix film “Vivo” includes details that the average viewer might miss. Someone who is part of the relevant culture, however, will instantly pick them up. In “Encanto,” Mirabel gestures to a present for her younger cousin by pointing with her lips, a classic Colombian gesture. In “Vivo,” a Dominican American mother drives a car with a bumper sticker: the Dominican flag inside an outline of the country.Carlos Romero, a story artist on “Vivo” of Dominican and Panamanian descent, loved the bumper sticker — he saw it everywhere growing up in the Bronx.“It’s all about absorbing all of that and making sure we’re doing right by their culture,” he said. It was also important, he added, to make sure that “people from those different countries can watch this and feel pride, too — and feel like, ‘Oh, yeah, that’s exactly someone I know,’ or, ‘That’s exactly what I’d say.’”“Vivo” is centered on a Domincan American tween (voiced by Ynairaly Simo) and a musical kinkajou (Lin-Manuel Miranda). SPAI/Netflix“Vivo” follows the unlikely adventures of a kinkajou named Vivo (Lin-Manuel Miranda), a musician from Cuba, and a girl named Gabi (Ynairaly Simo), an energetic Dominican American tween. When the two run away from home to deliver a long-lost love letter, Gabi’s mother, Rosa (Saldaña), becomes worried. Then she becomes upset.There was a lot of worry on set, Romero said, surrounding Rosa’s emotions. Was she too angry, especially for a Dominican American woman onscreen? Romero understood the desire to avoid stereotypes, he said, but he thought the portrayal was realistic: Any mother would furiously scour the city for her lost child.“We need to show them as dimensional characters that experience fear; they experience worry and anxiety for their kid, pride when they do good,” Romero said. “You shouldn’t be afraid of touching all the emotions because Latinos are dimensional people that should be portrayed realistically onscreen.”“And the more of them we get,” he added, “the less we have to worry about presenting them perfectly in our films.” More

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      Alan Horn, a top creative executive, is the latest high-ranking Disney departure.

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      One of Hollywood’s senior statesmen announced his retirement on Monday, adding to a startling changing of the guard at the Walt Disney Company.Alan F. Horn, 78, will step down on Dec. 31 as chief creative officer of Disney Studios Content, a division that includes Marvel, Lucasfilm, Searchlight Pictures, Pixar, 20th Century Studios and Disney’s traditional animation and live-action movie operations. His position is not expected to be filled.“It’s never easy to say goodbye to a place you love, which is why I’ve done it slowly,” Mr. Horn said in a statement. “But with Alan Bergman leading the way, I’m confident the incredible Studios team will keep putting magic out there for years to come.” Mr. Bergman, a steady hand at Disney’s movie division since 1996, succeeded Mr. Horn as chairman of Disney Studios Content last year.Mr. Bergman, 55, called Mr. Horn “one of the most important mentors I’ve ever had.”Mr. Horn’s retirement adds to brain drain at the world’s largest entertainment company as a new generation of executives rise to power — led by Bob Chapek, who became chief executive last year. While not unexpected, the parade of retirements has contributed to an unsettled feeling inside the conglomerate, which is still recovering from an almost complete shutdown during the early part of the pandemic.Robert A. Iger, the executive chairman, is decamping in December. Alan N. Braverman, Disney’s top lawyer, and Zenia B. Mucha, its chief communications officer, plan to leave around the same time. Other departures have included Jayne Parker, who led human resources; Steve Gilula and Nancy Utley, who ran Searchlight, Disney’s art film studio; and Gary Marsh, a longtime Disney-branded television executive.Mr. Horn’s entertainment career has spanned nearly 50 years. He joined Disney in 2012 after being squeezed out of a senior role at Warner Bros. to make room for a new generation of managers. At Warner, where he expertly steered the Harry Potter and Batman franchises, he forged a strategy that ultimately swept through Hollywood — focusing on effects-filled franchise pictures, or “tent poles,” that resonate overseas.The growth at Disney’s movie division under his tenure was jaw-dropping. In 2012, Disney-distributed movies collected about $3.3 billion at the global box office. In 2019, the studio generated $9 billion in ticket sales. More

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      ‘The Addams Family 2’ Review: Wednesday Goes West

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      America’s creepiest family takes a road trip in this animated sequel, though their antics are far more kooky than spooky.In 2019, the Addams family returned to the big screen for the first time since the 1990s, this time in animated form. The macabre clan, directly styled after Charles Addams’s original New Yorker cartoon characters and voiced by a star-studded cast, railed against normalcy and blew up a lot of stuff. Now, in a new sequel, they’re taking that show on the road. Like it’s predecessor, “The Addams Family 2” is more kooky than spooky, offering much more to young children than it may to the adults accompanying them.This newest iteration opens at a science fair; Wednesday (Chloë Grace Moretz) has figured out how to implant her pet octopus’s intelligence into her dopey Uncle Fester (Nick Kroll). Though she captures the attention of the wealthy genius Cyrus Strange (Bill Hader), she merely earns a participation award, and her resulting melancholy makes her withdraw further from her parents.In an attempt to bond with their teenagers, Gomez (Oscar Isaac) and Morticia (Charlize Theron) take the family on a road trip to Death Valley, but their cross-country antics are waylaid when a pushy stranger (Wallace Shawn) insists Wednesday may have been switched at birth.The filmmakers (the “Addams Family” and “Sausage Party” directors Greg Tiernan and Conrad Vernon) are smart to focus on Wednesday for most of this plot. She is the wittiest character, and it’s difficult to imagine an actor better suited to voice her than Moretz. But where it could lean into the typically bone-dry Addams family humor, this film more often relies on poop jokes, explosions and the musical talents of Snoop Dogg. It’s sure to entertain little ones, but parents may find themselves itching for something more impish.The Addams Family 2Rated PG. Running time: 1 hour 33 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      The Next Act for Marcel the Shell (and Jenny Slate)

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      The internet’s favorite mollusk is the subject of a new film. In the process of making it, she realized, “I was doing something that actually was very personal.”TELLURIDE, Colo. — Jenny Slate is at a loss for words. It’s Friday night at the Telluride Film Festival and the actress has just deplaned from her first flight in 17 months, still foggy from quarantine, a period when she became the mother of two distinct but equally profound projects: a brand-new baby girl and a feature-length movie she spent a decade creating.Slate is here because of her voice work on Marcel the Shell, the unlikeliest of internet sensations. No bigger than a nickel, this stop-motion mollusk with a single googly eye and shoes pilfered from a Polly Pocket doll set the web afire when she and the filmmaker Dean Fleischer Camp uploaded a three-minute video to YouTube back in 2010. That short, which illustrated Marcel’s quiet optimism — “I like myself and I have a lot of other great qualities” — generated immediate interest, ultimately garnering more than 31 million views in all. (Two more shorts followed in 2011 and 2014.)Marcel’s voice is distinct from Slate’s other animation work, whether it’s Harley Quinn in “Lego Batman” or Tammy Larsen in “Bob’s Burgers.” (She voiced Missy Foreman-Greenwald in “Big Mouth,” until 2020 when she stepped down, saying, “Black characters on an animated show should be played by Black people.”) Marcel has a high-pitched, melancholic timbre that could make you cry as easily as laugh. (“Some people say my head is too big for my body and I say, ‘Compared to what?’”) And it was so infectious, it prompted appearances on the late-night talk show circuit, two best-selling books, memes, tattoos and offers for television shows and commercial sponsorships.But Slate and Camp, who first created Marcel as a married couple but are now involved in other relationships, were so protective of Marcel that rather than take an easy payday — offers Slate admits would have helped them when they were struggling artists — they spent the next decade turning him into a feature film.It was a painstaking process that involved a troop of animators and designers. Friday night marked the culmination of all that work when “Marcel the Shell With Shoes On” had its world premiere. The 90-minute mockumentary tracks an emerging documentary filmmaker, Dean (Camp), who moves into an Airbnb only to discover the one-inch Marcel, along with his memory-challenged grandmother Nana Connie (voiced by Isabella Rossellini) and his pet lint, named Alan, grieving after a mysterious tragedy has taken the rest of their community from their cozy abode.Jenny Slate and Dean Fleischer Camp at work on the film. Alan Del Rio Ortiz and Michael RainesSlate compares the process of making the film to watching one of those science videos of a flower blooming in fast motion.“You just wake up one morning and there’s a flower and it’s blue,” Slate said. “That’s what this feels like.”Slate, a bit shyer and more reserved than you would expect, is still contemplating her post-pandemic life. More content than when she and Camp first created Marcel as a funny bit for a friend’s comedy show, Slate says she no longer feels the need to make people laugh (not even her therapist) and is less interested in pleasing others, an emotion she believes is the result of the “love infinity loop” she is currently experiencing with her infant and her fiancé, Ben Shattuck.“We were in process for so long and this character has had so many different functions for me,” she added. “At first, I think I just needed to prove to myself again that I’m funny. And then I realized that I was doing something that actually was very personal to me. So making the movie was trying to show this very interior part of myself. I just can’t believe that it worked.”And worked it has. The Hollywood Reporter called it “a sweet, uncomplicated film whose message about self-compassion and community feels especially prescient.” And IndieWire deemed it a critic’s pick, naming it “the cutest film about familial grief you’ll see all year, perhaps ever.”“Marcel” is one of a handful of films debuting at Telluride that is looking for a buyer. And despite it being in the works for nearly a decade, it’s one of many films at the festival, including Mike Mills’s “C’mon, C’mon,” Joe Wright’s “Cyrano” and Peter Hedges’ “The Same Storm,” that feel like a response to our current mood of anxiety and alienation. “I’m really pleased that the film is arriving at this moment,” said Camp, who argues that the serendipitous timing suggests that “we were already feeling increasingly isolated and vulnerable even before Covid hit.”Back in 2010, when Marcel first emerged, Slate said, she was “waiting to get fired from ‘Saturday Night Live,’” which she worked on for one unhappy year. Yet the voice that activates Marcel was one she never used on the sketch show.“I felt like I had done every voice that I could have done in order to save myself there and then suddenly, this voice that I had never done before, came out of my mouth,” she said. “Looking back on it, it was a real choice to use it just for myself, privately. This wouldn’t have belonged on ‘S.N.L.’ anyway and it was this very lovely opening to a belief that there is a world outside of the tiny, narrow hallway that contains what you perceive as your own failure.”Marcel and his grandmother, left, voiced by Isabella Rossellini. Gabrielle RussomangoTo make the film, Slate and Camp spent a year and a half recording improved audio sessions. Then their co-writer and editor, Nick Paley, and Camp dedicated an equal amount of time turning those snippets of improv into screenplay form. That eventually became an animatic (audio with music and storyboarded visuals) they could watch and screen for test audiences to make sure it all worked before they shot the live action and then, finally, the stop-motion animation. “Ultimately, we sort of backed into an indie version of the Pixar process,” Camp said.Yet, the basic premise always remained: Marcel had lost the majority of his shell family because of an argument involving humans.“We always liked that the overflow of the emotionality from the human world had caused this major disruption in the shell world,” said Slate, adding that the creation of Nana Connie was long part of the plan. “The idea was what do you do when your life as you know it has been broken apart, and the only person that remembers it would be starting to not remember at all.”It’s that poignancy and heartbreak that gives the movie its center. It’s also the creative project that Slate is most proud of. Nowadays she sings songs to her daughter in Marcel’s voice. (She believes he is a better singer than she.) And though she doesn’t know what is next for this sweet but stubborn avatar of herself, it’s clear Marcel has burrowed himself deep inside her.“I always think of Marcel as my truest self, and what I would really like to be like if my ego, and the trappings of being a woman in patriarchy, didn’t get in the way.” More

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      ‘Evangelion’ Director, Hideaki Anno, Explains How He Finally Found His Ending

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      Hideaki Anno is concluding the story of Shinji Ikari and company in a film due on Amazon this month but says, “There might come a time when I meet them again.”Finally.Hideaki Anno’s “Evangelion: 3.0 + 1.0: Thrice Upon a Time,” which begins streaming on Amazon Prime on Aug. 13, is the film that anime fans have awaited for 25 years. The fourth and final theatrical feature in the “rebuild” of his landmark 1995-96 television series, “Neon Genesis Evangelion,” brings the epic adventure to a definitive conclusion.A compelling, complex work that mixes mecha battles with apocalyptic Christian symbols, Jewish mysticism and teenage angst, “Evangelion” (pronounced eh-van-GEH-lee-on, with a hard G) ranks among the most widely discussed TV series in anime history. Its influence is extensive and includes Japanese animated fantasies and Guillermo del Toro’s 2013 sci-fi adventure “Pacific Rim.” And fans continue to debate its significance, subtext and details.“My influence on other creators isn’t something I think about when I’m working on a film,” Anno told me in an interview. “I decide what to make based on what I’m best suited for and what interests me most at the time. The ‘Evangelion’ project repeatedly came up, so I made the new theatrical movies. I don’t think that kind of opportunity will occur again.”In the series, which takes place in the not-too-distant future, humanity is locked in a mortal struggle with bizarre, staggeringly powerful creatures known as Angels. The only effective weapons against them are the Evangelions or Evas, gigantic cyborgs guided by psychic teenagers. The hero is Shinji Ikari, an alienated 14-year-old who is drafted by his brutal father to pilot the Eva 01.“Evangelion: 3.0 + 1.0: Thrice Upon a Time” concludes the saga begun in 1995.Hideaki Anno/Khara, via Amazon Prime VideoDespite its popularity, “Evangelion” never had a satisfactory ending. The original series failed to resolve the intricate plot, with its theological and ontological overtones. Shortly before “Evangelion” aired, Anno wrote that he had created it after four years of severe depression when he was “a wreck, unable to do anything” and that “the story has not yet ended in my mind.”“I don’t know what will become of Shinji or (the other characters), or where they will go,” he wrote.Anno was clearly not satisfied, as he continued to look for a conclusion, recutting the last episodes and reworking them in the feature “Death & Rebirth” (1997) and again in the second 1997 feature “The End of Evangelion.”In 2002, Anno announced plans for a four-feature “rebuild,” a reimagining of the story, unconstrained by the financial and technological limits he had originally faced. “Evangelion: 1.0 You Are (Not) Alone” (2007) was a flamboyant retelling of the first six television episodes. “Evangelion: 2.0 You Can (Not) Advance” (2009) and “Evangelion: 3.0 You Can (Not) Redo” (2012) took the characters and story in completely new directions. Nine years later, “Thrice Upon a Time” brings the saga to a surprisingly upbeat conclusion.Speaking from Tokyo via Zoom and a translator, Anno said, “For the rebuild series, I intended the first ‘Evangelion’ movie to be similar to the TV series, the second would gradually change the story, and third and fourth would be totally different. From the first, I didn’t intend to do the same thing as the TV series.”“My influence on other creators isn’t something I think about when I’m working on a film,” Anno said.Hideaki Anno/Khara, via Amazon Prime VideoThese four films showcase Anno’s skill at using new computer-graphic technology to create more powerful iterations of his original visions. In the TV series, when troops attacked the Angel Ramiel, it destroyed the humans and their weapons in a series of unremarkable explosions; in “You Are (Not) Alone,” the audience can almost feel the heat when the Angel reduces the tanks and missiles to glowing slag.In the rebuild, Anno also delves deeper into the fragile psyche of his flawed, traumatized hero and the eccentric personalities around him. When Anno described his approach to the characters, he spoke with an intensity that crossed linguistic boundaries.“In animation, nothing is real. But I wanted to bring more of a sense of reality into this made-up world — I wanted to make the characters more human,” he explained. “There’s a gap between what people say in real life and what they truly mean. In animation, unless the characters are intentionally lying, they always say what they mean. I wanted to reverse that: When the characters in ‘Evangelion’ speak, they don’t necessarily say what they mean. I wanted to add this human behavior to animation.”“People feel Shinji is an unusual hero,” he continued. “I think that’s due to the sense of reality I brought, drawing on my experience and knowledge. But Shinji and the other characters are not just a reflection of me; they include elements of the personalities of all the artists on the creative team.”The hero, Shinji Ikari, in the television production.Khara/Project Eva“Neon Genesis Evangelion” is among the most influential anime series ever.Khara/Project EvaThe original “Evangelion” was a huge hit that helped reverse a slump in the Japanese animation industry: When the final episode was broadcast in March 1996, more than 10 percent of all televisions in Japan were tuned to it. “Evangelion” remains popular, with hundreds of millions of dollars in sales of videos and related merchandise. The newer features continued that success: “Thrice Upon a Time” opened in Japan on March 3 and played for more than 135 days in theaters there, earning more than 10.22 billion yen (about $93 million) — despite the pandemic.Reflecting on that continued popularity, Anno said, “As a creator, I want to make things that are entertaining but have depth. I didn’t want our show to be some escape-from-reality type of entertainment, I wanted people who watched it to feel encouragement to live their own lives.”Anno is shifting to live action for his next project. In April, the Toei Company announced he would direct “Shin Kamen Rider,” part of the 50th anniversary celebration of that popular superhero franchise. It’s planned for release in March 2023.When asked how it felt to bid farewell to “Evangelion” after more than 25 years, Anno concluded, “I don’t feel a need to see Shinji and the other characters any time soon. But that doesn’t mean I don’t want to see them ever again: There might come a time when I meet them again.” More

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      In ‘Monsters at Work,’ the Scary Part Is the New Business Model

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      Twenty years after Pixar debuted the original “Monsters, Inc.,” Disney+ is bringing a cast of new monsters to the small screen — and putting Mike and Sulley in the managers’ office.You’ve got to feel sorry for Tylor Tuskmon.After finishing at the top of his university class and receiving the business career offer of his dreams, Tylor arrives for his first workday to find that the company’s chief executive has just been jailed. The new leaders have adopted a radically novel approach and no longer need his furiously studied, exquisitely honed talent. He’s going to have to start at the bottom — literally — with the basement maintenance crew. More

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      ‘The Boss Baby: Family Business’ Review: Pacifier Be With You

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      It’s more of the same in this sequel to the 2017 comedy featuring the voice of Alec Baldwin.Grab your briefcases: The boss baby has returned in “The Boss Baby: Family Business,” directed by Tom McGrath, another infant adventure that hits the same notes as the original, and has little to show for it.The former boss baby, Ted (Alec Baldwin), is now a rich businessman in a big-boy suit. His brother, Tim (James Marsden), has his own family, though he worries about his daughter Tabitha (Ariana Greenblatt), an A-type who opts for handshakes over hugs. Tim gets recruited for a mission by his younger daughter, Tina (Amy Sedaris), another boss baby. With the help of some new magical baby formula, Ted and Tim transform back into their younger selves and go undercover in a school for gifted children that has an evil secret.At some point Tim asks Tabitha if she wants to hear the story about how he and baby Ted saved the world again, but she passes. “It was a good story, wasn’t it?” Tim tries, but she says, “Well, it didn’t really make a lot of sense.” “The jokes were good, right?” Tim asks. Tabitha makes a noncommittal noise.At least the film is self-aware? Aside from that, the imaginative but nonsensical narrative threads leave a minefield of plot holes in their wake. There are some good laughs throughout, though none feel particularly novel. And the continued attempts to make corporate culture into something cute and funny by adding a pacifier seems out of touch with how harshly we criticize toxic workplaces now.A baby in a suit? Always cute. Recycled gags? Not so much — this “Boss Baby” just didn’t get the memo.The Boss Baby: Family BusinessRated PG. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. In theaters and on Peacock. More

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      ‘The Hunchback of Notre Dame’ at 25: ‘The Most R-Rated G You Will Ever See’

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      How did the ratings board overlook songs filled with lust and damnation? “Maybe we bamboozled them with gargoyles,” one filmmaker said.They know exactly what they got away with.“That’s the most R-rated G you will ever see in your life,” said Tab Murphy, a screenwriter of Disney’s animated “The Hunchback of Notre Dame,” which was released 25 years ago this month.“Thousands of dollars must have changed hands somewhere, I’m sure,” joked Gary Trousdale, who directed the film with Kirk Wise.However it came about, a ratings board made up of parents decided that a film with a musical number about lust and hellfire and a plot that involves the threat of genocide against Gypsies was appropriate for a general audience.Maybe the reason had to do with the studio: Nearly all of Disney’s hand-drawn animated movies had been rated G up to that point. Maybe it was the marketing, which presented “Hunchback” as a complete departure from the dark Victor Hugo novel on which it was based, reframing it as a carnival with the tagline “Join the party!” Maybe the higher-ups at Disney exerted pressure, convinced a PG rating would hurt the box office take. (“It was a G rating or bust,” Wise said.)But the fact that what is arguably Disney’s darkest animated movie earned a rating on par with “Cinderella” reflects the subjectivity of the rating system — and how much parents’ tastes have changed over the years.“PG today is the equivalent of what G was in the 1990s,” Wise said.Trousdale added, “Nowadays, you can’t even smoke in a G film.”But one scene in particular defies explanation.“That ‘Hellfire’ sequence?” Murphy said, referring to the Stephen Schwartz-Alan Menken song sung by Judge Claude Frollo about his conflict between piety and lust for Esmeralda. “Come on, man. Come on.”Talking gargoyles were added to lighten the story.DisneyMURPHY HAD LONG WANTED to adapt the 1831 Gothic story of Esmeralda, a beautiful Roma girl who captures the hearts of several Parisian men, including Quasimodo, a bell-ringer with a severe hunchback whom Hugo describes as “hideous” and “a devil of a man.”But then he realized what he’d gotten himself into.“I was like, ‘Oh, God, I don’t want to write a singing, dancing, watered-down film that turns this amazing piece of world literature into a typical Disney movie,’” he said.But, he said, it was to the credit of Walt Disney Company executives at the time, Roy E. Disney and Michael D. Eisner, that they took a hands-off approach.“I was never told to stay away from this or that or you can’t do this,” he said. “They were like, ‘You write the story you want to tell, and let us worry about our brand.’”Of course, the Hugo novel, in which many major characters die at the end, was “too depressing” for a Disney film. So Murphy had to get creative.He decided the story would focus on the colorful fantasy world Quasimodo imagines while stuck in his bell tower. There’d be a festival. Talking gargoyles. A hero to root for.Instead of Quasimodo (voiced by Tom Hulce) being whipped on the pillory, he’s pelted with vegetables and humiliated at the Feast of Fools. Hugo’s troubled archdeacon, Claude Frollo (Tony Jay), became an evil magistrate. Disney did not want to take on the church, Trousdale said. Unlike in the novel, Esmeralda (Demi Moore) is saved by Quasimodo and the dashing Phoebus (Kevin Kline), the rebel captain of the guards. All three live happily ever after instead of dying, as both Quasimodo and Esmeralda do in the book.But, Wise said, there was always one looming issue they had to deal with: Frollo’s lust for Esmeralda.The screenwriters had to figure out how to deal with Frollo’s lust for Esmeralda. Disney“We knew that was going to be a really delicate topic,” he said. “But we also knew we had to tell that story, because it’s key to the central love rectangle.”At first, Murphy tried to tackle it in words.“I’d originally written a monologue for that scene that was filled with lots of subtext showing that his anger was all about his forbidden lust for her,” Murphy said. “But then Stephen and Alan said, ‘We think that can be a great song.’”Six months later, a small package from Schwartz, who wrote the lyrics, and Menken, who composed the score, arrived at the Walt Disney Studios in Burbank, Calif. Inside was a cassette with a new song.Murphy, Trousdale, Wise and Don Hahn, the film’s producer, gathered in an office, popped the tape into a cassette player and pressed play — and realized what they were hearing.In a crashing percussive number, Frollo, backed by a choir chanting in Latin, agonizes over his lust and his religious faith and his hatred of the Roma.“This burning desire,” he sings in the film, rubbing her scarf sensuously against his face, “is turning me to sin.” (Schwartz sang the part on the demo.)“I swear to God, everyone’s jaw slowly started to drop open,” Murphy said. “At the end of it, Kirk reached over, clicked off the cassette player, sat back, crossed his arms, and said, ‘Well, that’s never going to make it into the movie.’ And it did!”Initially the filmmakers imagined Frollo’s lust would be subtext. Instead he wound up singing about his “burning desire.”DisneyTHOUGH IT WAS NEVER STATED EXPLICITLY, Wise said a G rating was the expectation.“The studio felt anything above a G would threaten the film’s box office,” he said. “This was before ‘Shrek,’ or movies that made a PG rating in animation commonplace.”A G-rated film, according to the Motion Picture Association of America system, which was introduced in 1968, “contains nothing in theme, language, nudity, sex, violence or other matters that, in the view of the Rating Board, would offend parents whose younger children view the motion picture.” Some snippets of language, it says, “may go beyond polite conversation but they are common everyday expressions.”“We never thought we’d get away with the term ‘hellfire,’” Trousdale said.The first cut of “Hunchback” indeed didn’t pass muster for a G — but it wasn’t the use of the word “hell” or “damnation” that the board took issue with.It was the sound effects.In the “Hellfire” number, imagined as a nightmarish, hallucinogenic sequence, Frollo is tormented by hooded, red-robed figures that reflect his slipping grip on reality.“This burning desire,” he sings, gazing at a dancing Esmeralda figure in his fireplace, “is turning me to sin.”The ratings board was uncomfortable with the word “sin,” Trousdale said. But the sequence was already animated, and the soundtrack recorded, so they couldn’t change the lyric.Then Hahn came up with a solution: Make the “Whoosh!” when the hooded judges rush up from the floor a little louder so it would drown out the “sin.” It worked, Trousdale said.The sound effects seemed to trouble the ratings board more than the language in the “Hellfire” sequence.DisneyBut what ultimately got the film its G rating, Wise said, was a change so tiny that “you’ll never believe this.”In the scene where Frollo sneaks up behind Esmeralda and sniffs her hair, the ratings board thought the sniff was “too suggestive,” he said.“They were like, ‘Could you lower the volume of that?’” he said. “And we did, and it got the G rating.”NEITHER THE POSTERS nor the trailers hinted at the darker themes.“There was definitely a huuuuuge effort to emphasize the lighthearted aspects of ‘Hunchback,’” Menken said, laughing.The film’s tagline? “Join the party!”“Maybe that was the right campaign for the studio to get people in the theater,” Hahn said. “But I’m sure I wouldn’t do that today — I think there’s a truth-in-advertising responsibility that perhaps we overlooked back then.”When the film, which cost $70 million to make before marketing, opened on June 21, 1996, it was a bit of a disappointment at the box office, grossing about $100.1 million domestically. Trousdale said they did get some pushback from parents’ groups about the G rating.“They were saying ‘You tricked us; you deceived us,’” he said. “The marketing was all the happy stuff and ‘Come to the Feast of Fools; it’s a party!’ with talking gargoyles, confetti and pies in the face. And then that wasn’t the film, and people were really pissed off.”Parents’ groups complained that the marketing emphasis on talking gargoyles and other fun elements was misleading.DisneyTom Zigo, a spokesman for the Classification and Rating Administration, which administers the rating system, said that he could not speak about the specifics of the “Hunchback” G, but that it was “very possible” that a movie rated 25 years ago would receive a different rating today.Hahn, Menken, Murphy, Trousdale and Wise all agreed there would be no chance of the film getting a G rating today — or even, Murphy suggested, being made at all.“Disney was willing to take some chances in that movie that I don’t think they’d take today,” he said. “That’s a PG-13 in my book.”Yet the movie has stood the test of time — Frollo, Wise noted, feels like a “very contemporary” villain in the #MeToo era — and remains a favorite among young adults who rewatch and discover references they missed the first time around.“I’ve read posts on fan pages from a few fans in their mid-20s and 30s who were pretty young when they saw this,” Trousdale said. “They’re like, ‘Yeah, this just messed me up when I saw it as a kid, but I still love it.’”Menken said “Hellfire” pushed the envelope more in terms of what Disney does than any song he’s ever written.“Maybe, in retrospect, ‘Hunchback’ was a bridge too far,” he said. “But God, am I glad they took that bridge too far.” More