Walt's Precocious Progeny

By RICHARD CORLISS

In the beginning was Walt. With Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), Disney established the rules of the movie-fantasy universe and anchored it in the fears and wonders of childhood. But Disney's success turned the innovator into a caretaker at the mausoleum of his own style. After his death, the studio limped along on audio-animatronic pilot, while the true heirs of the true Walt--canny kids like George Lucas, Steven Spielberg and Jim Henson --updated the old master's tricks and made pots of dough. Now a new generation of Disney artists, some young enough to have made Star Wars, Close Encounters and the Muppets their boyhood models, has produced a cartoon feature in the old Disney tradition. And Henson and Lucas have teamed for an ambitious flight of fantasy that plays like computer-age Walt.

In The Great Mouse Detective a mouse chanteuse performs what may be the first tentative striptease in the Disney canon. Otherwise it's business and pleasure as usual. Keen-witted Basil of Baker Street and his colleague Dr. Dawson search for a girl mouse's father, a toymaker abducted by the evil rodent genius Professor Ratigan. The movie's scene-stealer is a peg-legged bat named Fidget, who gets laughs when someone stomps on his foot ("My only foot!"). Later Basil and Dawson are trussed up on Ratigan's killer mousetrap, a Rube Spielberg device that jump-starts the filmmakers' ingenuity and accelerates the plot toward its nifty climax. Nothing as weighty as the art of animation is at stake here--just some clever cartoonists having a holiday on mice.

If The Great Mouse Detective is aimed at children and their indulgent parents, Labyrinth (written by Monty Python's Terry Jones) means to beguile precocious adolescents of all ages. With nods to L. Frank Baum (The Wizard of Oz) and Children's Author Maurice Sendak, Labyrinth lures a modern Dorothy Gale out of the drab Kansas of real life into a land where the wild things are: deaf-and-dumb doorknobs, feral party animals that toss their heads like volleyballs, a terrier-faced knight and his sheep-dog steed, a silly sage with a talking bird growing out of his head, and an orange-haired hybrid of a buffalo and a gorilla, who walks like Charles Laughton's Hunchback of Notre Dame and talks like Grover on Sesame Street.

Such fanciful creatures are diversions as a lonely teenager (Jennifer Connelly) wanders the labyrinth in search of the castle where a malefic king (David Bowie) has detained her year-old brother. The maze, of course, is adolescence, and its dark lord is Bowie, the charismatic Kabuki sorcerer who offers his ravishing young antagonist the gilded perks of adult servitude ("Just let me rule you, and you can have everything you want"). With their technical astonishments, Director Henson and Executive Producer Lucas have been faithful to the pioneering Disney spirit. In suggesting the thrilling dilemmas that await a wise child, they have flown worlds beyond Walt.