Esmeralda and Phoebus in The Hunchback of Notre Dame. © Walt Disney Pictures.

In a mad hope that I could convince someone to cut the gargoyle number before Hunchback opened in movie theaters, I wrangled a phone interview with directors Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise. They adamantly defended the gargoyle sequence, insisting that it was "deliberately anachronistic," and since gargoyles were fantastic creatures anyway, that seemed to give "a crazy license for them just to go nuts for a minute." Dramatically, they said, it also set Quasimodo up for the disappointment he was about to encounter in the next scene. They seemed peeved at my suggestion that the number might have been inspired by thoughts of a Broadway version, and said Broadway was their last concern while working on a film, when their only care was making the best film possible. Why, I asked, did gargoyle Hugo have to be so obnoxious, since no one else in the film, even the villains, were really obnoxious? They said they believed Hugo was in a Disney tradition of "loudmouth sidekicks" of which they offered the examples of Baloo in Jungle Book and Jimmy Cricket in Pinocchio. Hugo reminds me more of Lampwick in Pinocchio, so much so that during the climactic (genuinely touching) moment in Hunchback , when a little girl reaches out to touch Quasi, I felt like warning her, "Don't get mixed up with him; he hangs out with really bad friends." In any case, the directors suggested I wait until the film came out on video or laserdisc, and then I could just cut out or skip over the abominable gargoyle sequence.

I should have guessed by the way the gargoyles are being pushed in the print ads and other promotional materials that at some level "Disney" suffers from a real lack of confidence in the true excellence and virtues of their Hunchback of Notre Dame--even though the same team did produce a Best Picture Oscar nominee without any obnoxious anachronisms. Or is it just a triumph of an MTV era sensibility that doesn't shrink from snatching images and ideas from any source, and doesn't care if the mood and tempo changes completely every five minutes, with no unity or direction beyond the pleasure of the moment? In either case, it's sad, because without the gargoyles, Disney's Hunchback of Notre Dame would have been a great film; with the obnoxious anachronisms it becomes an average compromised committee-assembled piece of commercial mishmash. Too bad.

Quasimodo atop the cathedral in The Hunchback of Notre Dame © Walt Disney Pictures.

William Mortiz teaches film and animation history at the California Institute of the Arts.