The Great Mouse Detective (1986)

(Disney Streaming, August 2021) The mid-1980s were not the best of time for Disney Animation Studios, but The Great Mouse Detective was something of a shot in the arm after the lack of success, critical or commercial, of 1985’s The Black Cauldron — and pointing the way to the renaissance sparked by The Little Mermaid three years. Later. Narratively, it does feel familiar — essentially a Sherlock Holmes remix featuring anthropomorphic mice, with a classic portrayal of mouse-Watson as a bit useless, and mouse-Holmes as the thinker who gets out of various scrapes. (The film takes pains to show that this isn’t an anthropomorphic world — the mice live in human-Holmes’s basement.)  There isn’t much to the plot or the running time at barely 74 minutes, although the film is notable for starting to integrate 3D computer imagery in an animated cartoon thanks to a climax set in the Big Ben clocktower. The Great Mouse Detective is not bad, but it did leave me wanting just a bit more — more of Watson being competent, more details about the mouse society underneath London and more substantial plotting. Still, the result is not too bad: it compares advantageously to many preceding Disney animated features, and to the less-than-stellar sequels that came out at roughly the same time. It’s fun, short and amusing to Holmes fans (albeit probably not as special now, considering the recent glut of Sherlockania in cinema and TV) and the animation quality is higher than some of the 1970s–1980s Disney films. The Great Mouse Detective is certainly not as memorable as other later Disney films, but it generally works.