Home of the Range (2004)

Film: Home on the Range (2004)
Stars: Roseanne Barr, Judi Dench, Jennifer Tilly, Cuba Gooding Jr., Randy Quaid, Steve Buscemi
Director: Will Finn & John Sanford
Oscar History: No nominations
Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

With Disney+ now an option, I've been given the opportunity to start doing a film project (I'm always working on at least a dozen or so film projects) that I've been putting off for a while-trying to see all of the (currently 58) Walt Disney Animation Studios feature film releases.  It's weird, but even though I'm still missing 11, all of them come from two time frames-the post-Dumbo, pre-Cinderella period of the 1940's (where films like Saludos Amigos were the rage), and in the post-Tarzan, pre-Princess and the Frog era, where Disney was losing repeatedly to Pixar.  Not sure if you'd fall into the same camp (you can check here), but if I'm going to take on some of these films (and why not-it's cold out & who wouldn't prefer staying indoors with some calming animation?), I'm going to have to tackle these eras, and after Monday's Treasure Planet, I figured we might as well clean out the aughts first.  Which brings us to...

(Spoilers Ahead) ...Home on the Range!  For those of you who have forgotten, and I suspect that's a lot of you as this was not a hit when it was originally released, this is a very loose retelling of the Pied Piper story, but set in the Old West.  We have Maggie (Barr), a rough-and-tumble cow whose entire herd has been stolen by a cattle rustler named Alameda Slim (Quaid), who can woo cows by yodeling & hypnotizing them in the process.  Maggie goes to a kindly farm where she is teamed up with two other cows, prim Mrs. Calloway (Dench) and flighty Grace (Tilly), but initially resents them because she's been taken away from her home.  When they realize their farm is going to be up for sale, they set out to catch Alameda Slim to get the reward money to save the farm, but along the way they quarrel, and are competing with a horse called Buck (Gooding), who wants to impress his owner, a famed bounty hunter.  As the film continues, the three cows patch up their differences, and once Buck realizes the bounty hunter is double-crossing him, the four of them together catch Alameda Slim, save the ranch, and all live their days happily on the farm.

The film was arguably at one of the lowest points in the history of Disney.  The studio had had a string of films that flopped badly, and Home on the Range ended up being the last traditionally-drawn animated feature for five years from the studio, until Princess and the Frog sort of welcomed a new era for the studio (that would eventually lead to Frozen, arguably this era's peak).  It's easy to see why.  The film is reliant almost exclusively on you finding the charms of two adult cows winning, and neither Roseanne Barr nor Judi Dench are going to be the sort of actors that you could see a child latching onto, even a child that might have given something like Up a chance (despite this taking place on a farm, it doesn't have the "buy all of these animals in a happy meal" sort of cache that you'd think it would).

That said, it has its moments.  Barr is woefully miscast in the lead, her snarky brand of humor an awful fit for a Disney film (Roseanne Barr is a talented comedian, but as her public persona has shown, she's not great at remorse, which is essential to Maggie's journey).  Dench & Tilly are better, though again-there's not a lot to this fluffy plot, and Quaid's villain is kind of phoned into the movie.  The best part is the music, composed by Alan Menken and sung throughout the film by the likes of kd lang and Bonnie Raitt.  Considering the dearth of options that year, it's a bit weird that Menken couldn't get Raitt's haunting ballad "Will the Sun Ever Shine Again" nominated at the Oscars, but perhaps the stench off of this one meant Disney didn't want to spend more money on a campaign.  All-in-all, this is a relatively forgettable movie, though by no means the disaster it felt like at the time.