Movie Type: Family-Oriented Adventure, Comedy Western
Main Cast: Roseanne, Judi Dench, Jennifer Tilly, Cuba Gooding, Jr., Randy Quaid
Release Year: 2004
Country: US
Run Time: 76 minutes
MPAA Rating: PG
Plot
Disney presents the animated musical Western Home on the Range, featuring an original musical score by Alan Menken. The Little Piece of Heaven family farm is about to go under and outlaw cattle rustler Alameda Slim (voice of Randy Quaid) sets his sights on it. Three dairy cows -- tough Maggie (voice of Roseanne), leader Mrs. Calloway (voice of Judi Dench), and naïve Grace (voice of Jennifer Tilly) -- team up to save the farm. Along with ambitious stallion Buck (voice of Cuba Gooding Jr.), helpful rabbit Lucky Jack (voice of Charles Haid), and other helpful barnyard friends, the cows set out to capture Alameda Slim and collect the reward money. However, a vicious bounty hunter (voice of Charles Dennis) is also after Slim. The film features vocal performances by Bonnie Raitt, k.d. lang, and Tim McGraw. ~ Andrea LeVasseur, All Movie Guide
Review
This is the way Disney's hand-drawn animation department ends -- not with a bang, but a whimper. Like a veteran ballplayer continuing to suit up after the onset of arthritis, Home on the Range stumbles in at just over 70 minutes, a pale shadow of the giants that revived the studio's clout in the 1990s. It may feature a handful of plucky cows, but the film was far short of a cash cow, returning only $50 million domestically on its reported $110 million budget. It's not that Home on the Range is bad, so much as colossally unimportant. It's easy to see why Disney rarely strays from fairy tales or other stories in the public domain, because this saga of three cows protecting the farm from Old West archetypes and other varmints is small and flavorless. Save a few angular landscapes and sharply designed characters, the animators seem to have given up on being inventive, knowing that their jobs would not survive this project. Home on the Range does have a wickedly metaphorical undercurrent, as the plot involves the closure of numerous farms and ranches -- the end of the old way of doing things. But Home on the Range would only entertain the youngest tykes even if it had been CG. Seeing as how the film is aimed at such an infantile demographic, it's all the more strange that they slapped a PG rating on what amounts to a totally inoffensive piece of insignificance. Happy trails, Disney, until we meet again -- if we ever do. ~ Derek Armstrong, All Movie Guide
David Cutler - Art Director, David J. Steinberg - Associate Producer, Mary Hidalgo - Casting, Matthew Jon Beck - Casting, Dennis M. Blakey - Coordinator, Will Finn - Director, John Sanford - Director, H. Lee Peterson - Editor, Alan Menken - Composer (Music Score), Alan Mencken - Composer (Music Score), Alan Mencken - Songwriter, Glenn Slater - Songwriter, David Cutler - Production Designer, Alice Dewey Goldstone - Producer, Tim Chau - Set Designer, Will Finn - Screen Story, Robert Lence - Screen Story, Sam Levine - Screen Story, John Sanford - Screen Story, Michael LaBash - Screen Story, Mark Kennedy - Screen Story, Will Finn - Screenwriter, John Sanford - Screenwriter, Marlon West - Visual Effects Supervisor, Cristy Maltese - Background Artist, Mark Hester - Supervising Sound Editor
