The Great Mouse Detective was made at a moment when Disney Feature Animation stood on the precipice of one of its most successful periods ever. The 1990s would bring a string of hits, including The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, The Lion King, and more.
Before that Renaissance, however, the summer of 1986 saw the release of The Great Mouse Detective, as the Disney Studio continued to struggle in the twenty years following Walt Disney’s death and animation tried to maintain a foothold in movie theaters.
Luckily, Disney artists didn’t give up hope. Ron Clements, The Great Mouse Detective’s co-director, recalled with a laugh in a 1997 interview, “I remember saying, at one point, ‘If wrestling can become popular again, then so can animation!’”
And so, it did. New leadership came aboard at the Studio in 1984, with Michael Eisner joining as CEO and Jeffrey Katzenberg taking charge of Disney’s motion picture division.
At Disney Animation, much of the focus was on the ambitious, epic fantasy adventure The Black Cauldron. But while that film was in production, an alternative, smaller animated film, entitled Basil of Baker Street, was also underway.
In 1982, Clements, who would co-direct the film with someone who would become his longtime directing partner, John Musker, along with studio veterans Dave Michener and Burny Mattinson, proposed adapting the series of Basil of Baker Street books by author Eve Titus.
Eisner and Katzenberg were happy with the film’s early storyboards and gave it the green light, renaming it The Great Mouse Detective. That resulted in a now-infamous joke memo circulated at the Studio, renaming all of Disney’s classic films (e.g., Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs became “Seven Little Men Help a Girl”).
Celebrating its 40th anniversary this summer, The Great Mouse Detective is set in London in 1897 and tells the tale of Basil (voiced by Barrie Ingham), a mouse who lives in Sherlock Holmes’s house and emulates the famed sleuth. He partners with Dr. Dawson (Val Bettin, as a mouse version of Dr. Watson) to help a young mouse named Olivia (Susanne Pollatschek) find her father, toymaker Hiram Flaversham (Alan Young, the voice of Scrooge McDuck at the time).
Flaversham had been kidnapped by the nefarious Professor Ratigan (a take on Sherlock Holmes’ nemesis, Professor Moriarty), who plans to use the toymaker’s skills to overthrow the Queen.
The voice of Ratigan was none other than horror movie icon Vincent Price. Master animator Glen Keane, who would serve as the supervising animator for Ratigan, created a “backstory” to bring more depth to the villain.
Keane discussed this in the book, The Disney Villain by animation legends Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston, stating: “‘I wrote a history of Basil as a child and Ratigan as a child. What kind of kid was Ratigan? Why did he end up going this path? What was it like at home for him? In animating it, it just felt like you were spending some time with this guy – you weren’t just plopping down at this point in history as if there never had been years before.’”
In addition to a memorable villain, The Great Mouse Detective would also carry on the Disney tradition of music with composer Henry Mancini, who had created such famous film scores, as “The Pink Panther Theme” (1963) and “Moon River” from Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961). He not only wrote the score for The Great Mouse Detective but also contributed two songs (written along with Larry Grossman and Ellen Fitzhugh), “The World’s Greatest Criminal Mind” and “Goodbye So Soon.”
Another song in The Great Mouse Detective, “Let Me Be Good to You,” was written and performed by pop singer Melissa Manchester, as pub singer Miss Kitty Mouse.
The film also incorporated emerging technology for The Great Mouse Detective’s climax, which would feature a chase between Basil and Ratigan inside Big Ben. The moving gears and clockwork were brought to life through computer-generated imagery (CGI), allowing the filmmakers to combine it with hand-drawn character animation. This allowed for live-action-like camera moves that weren’t usually possible in the medium.
The Great Mouse Detective was released on July 2, 1986, receiving praise from critics. In The New York Times, Nina Darnton wrote: “In The Black Cauldron the Disney animators tried to combine their winning formula with some of the new, fast-paced cinematic devices children have become used to from adventure movies such as Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark. It was a technique that worked only to a limited degree. But in The Great Mouse Detective the Disney formula is used undiluted, and that is how it works best. The heroes are appealing; the villains have that special Disney flair – humorous blackguards who really enjoy being evil -and the script is witty and not overly sentimental.”
Looking back, forty years later, many both inside and outside the animation industry also noted how The Great Mouse Detective set itself apart from other recent Disney output, and how the film was a glimmer of hope for the Studio’s future after two challenging decades.
Animator and animation historian Tom Sito notes this in his recent book, Drawing Life Back Into Animation: A Personal Journey Through the Toon Renaissance of the 1990s, writing: “While not exactly burning up the Box Office, the film was a success, both critically and financially. I myself was at another studio then. When I saw The Black Cauldron, I thought, well that is the end of that place. But, after seeing Great Mouse, I thought, well, whattya know? There is some life left in the old girl after all.”
Michael Lyons is a freelance writer, specializing in film, television, and pop culture. He is the author of the book, Drawn to Greatness: Disney’s Animation Renaissance, which chronicles the amazing growth at the Disney animation studio in the 1990s. In addition to Animation Scoop and Cartoon Research, he has contributed to Remind Magazine, Cinefantastique, Animation World Network and Disney Magazine. He also writes a blog, Screen Saver: A Retro Review of TV Shows and Movies of Yesteryear and his interviews with a number of animation legends have been featured in several volumes of the books, Walt’s People. You can visit Michael’s web site Words From Lyons at: 
About a year before “The Great Mouse Detective” came out, I saw a schlocky Golan and Globus horror flick called “Lifeforce” and was shocked to find that Henry Mancini had composed its musical score. I concluded that Mancini must have fallen on hard times and was willing to work for cheap. Seeing his name in the opening credits of “The Great Mouse Detective” only reinforced this conclusion. Far from “standing on the precipice of one of its most successful periods ever,” Disney feature animation in 1986 seemed to me to be in a state of terminal decline. If “The Black Cauldron” (which I loved) couldn’t turn the studio around in a decade when heroic fantasy was popular at the box office, what hope did something as old hat as a pastiche of Sherlock Holmes have? The 50th anniversary re-release of “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” a year later only drove home how far the studio had fallen.
I’m happy to admit that I was wrong about both Mancini and Disney, and with forty years’ perspective I can see that I was unduly harsh on “The Great Mouse Detective” as well. I remember being indignant about the sloppy animation of Basil’s violin playing, with his bow shifting abruptly from one hand to the other between shots. I still noticed it the last time I saw the film, but by then it seemed like a very minor nit to pick. It did amuse me that the elaborate apparatus constructed by Ratigan to execute Basil and Dawson resembled the old board game Mouse Trap, which I had as a child and could never get to function properly.
One thing I noticed upon my most recent viewing, but not the first one, is that there is a surprising amount of smoking in this movie. Both the hero and the villain are smokers, as well as many of the background characters. So has Disney digitally deleted all the smoking scenes for its streaming service and home video release in the United States, like Pecos Bill’s cigarette in “Melody Time”, or do they merely precede showings with a warning from the Surgeon General?
Glad I’m not the only one who noticed Ratigan’s death trap resembling the Mouse Trap board game! To the point where in my YTP of the film (made in 2015 as a tribute to Barrie Ingham), I had the 1995 Mouse Trap commercial jingle play as the trap activated (“It’s a zany action, a crazy contraption…”)
“The Great Mouse Detective” captures much of the flavor of the original Sherlock Holmes stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, yet as the mouse characters are not exact duplicates of their human counterparts but are only inspired by them, they emerge as personalities in their own right. This works very much in the film’s favor. In that regard, it is reminiscent of Disney’s Robin Hood animated film.
I started to read Basil of Baker Street in the late 70’s but realized at once that I barely knew anything about Sherlock Holmes. So instead, I read “The Hound of the Baskervilles” followed by the short stories of “The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.” Then I went back to the character’s origins in “A Study in Scarlet” and “The Sign of Four.” By the end of that summer I was a devoted fan of Sherlock Holmes and Conan Doyle. as well as detective stories in general. This opened up the gateway to Agatha Christie, Dorothy L Sayers, G. K. Chesterton, and many others. I considered resuming with Basil but by that time I was so caught up in the real thing that a parody hardly seemed worth the effort. So, it wasn’t until the release of “The Great Mouse Detective” that I got back to the work that had inspired my interest in detective stories.
The character of Basil is of course named for the great Basil Rathbone, who for many, myself included, is the one and only screen Sherlock Holmes. Dr. Dawson is played in clear imitation of Dr. Watson as portrayed by Nigel Bruce. Not only are these two the inspiration for the characters as depicted in the movie, but the voices of the real Rathbone and Bruce can be heard when the great detective himself makes a cameo appearance as a shadow on the wall. Also of delight to a true Sherlock Holmes fan is the appearance of Toby the dog, who first shows up in “The Sign of Four.” Toby is the actual dog that Sherlock Holmes calls upon to help solve some of the cases, a genuine character from the original canon.
Much of “The Great Mouse Detective” is a tongue-in-cheek parody of the Holmes stories. While the actual plot is not based on any Conan Doyle material, several highlights of the novels and short stories are given a nod. Ratigan, as mentioned above, is delightfully villainous as voiced by Vincent Price, who in a sense steals the show. Even Queen Victoria, who is only peripherally referred to in the stories, makes an onscreen appearance in the form of Queen Mouse-toria, a nice tribute to the era in which the stories take place.
That said, the film does not require any prior knowledge of the source material, either from Conan Doyle or Eve Titus. It gives us a completely realized world of mice inhabiting the floorboards of Victorian England. And if it serves to inspire audience members to read the Sherlock Holmes books or even the Basil books, it’s a worthwhile effort.
(One oddity that puzzles me to this day is that whenever I mentioned that the singing lady mouse was the voice of Melissa Manchester, I would get a blank stare and the person would say “Who’s that?” I find it hard to fathom how I could have been the only person who had ever heard of Melissa Manchester. I still don’t understand how that could be possible.)
It should be noted also that the short subject that played ahead of “The Great Mouse Detective” was the classic Mickey Mouse cartoon “Clock Cleaners” which has a definite thematic tie-in to the feature. I saw the film in its original run with a close friend, likewise a Holmes fan, and that same friend and I went back within a week or so to see it again.
Forgive me for splitting hairs, but I think it is important to clarify that the turning cog animation was CG generated as wireforms and copied as outlines to cels, then hand-painted as normal.
Great sequence, but a nod is due to Lupin III: Castle Cagliostro, which achieved such a scene first, and without computer help.
I saw it when it was retitled “The Adventures of the Great Mouse Detective” on its rerelease in 1992. I was eight years old, and I thought it was one of the coolest movies I had ever seen up to that point. It wasn’t like the other Disney movies that were focused on princesses and fairy tales. Basil brought a lot of energy to the film, with his ego and attention to detail. He was unlike many of the other Disney leads. Ratigan is one of the most fun villains in Disney history (I actually have a Glen Keane rough drawing of Ratigan). The mood and atmosphere stuck with me, as did the exciting climax. One of the best Disney films ever made.
I was a Holmes fan from an early age, albeit never at the Baker Street Irregular level of dedication. Greatly enjoyed TGMD, which played as a spoof by those who “got” the stories and related lore.
Besides references to the originals (Basil parodies Sherlock’s first meeting with Watson; Toby the dog hails from “The Sign of Four”), we get nods to Basil Rathbone (a clip of his voice in character, plus Basil affecting a wharf rat disguise similar to one Rathbone sports in a movie), “The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes” (a smoking machine to generate ashes, here complemented with a machine copying shoe prints), and arguably the Broadway musical “Baker Street” (in which Moriarty sings a farewell to Holmes before leaving him with a ticking bomb, and the whole story is set against the queen’s anniversary).
Two television cartoons riffed on the detective: The anime “Sherlock Hound” presented the cast as dogs and frequently dropped in gimmicks from Doyle. Hardly a rigorous adaptation — Mrs. Hudson was a pretty young aviatrix, Moriarty a short-tempered dandy, and Holmes himself was uncharacteristically avuncular — but clearly they’d read the stories. “Sherlock Holmes in the 24th Century” unfreezes a frozen Sherlock, teams him with a robot who identifies as Watson and a tough-cop female descendent of Lestrade, and sets him on more or less fair-play mysteries. Here they explicitly based each case on a specific Doyle story, turning it into kid-friendly science fiction.
Daffy Duck’s “Deduce You Say” is broad enough to play to non-fans, but nonetheless nails the cliches of the stories (Daffy’s random cry “I’m brown as a nut and thin as a lath!” is actually a Watson line from “A Study in Scarlet”) and movies thereof. Columbia’s “Case of the Screaming Bishop” is mostly kind of dumb, yet has some amusing moments before full dopiness sets in. “The Famous Adventures of Mister Magoo” did a single episode with a non-canonical plot, casting Magoo as Watson.
There was a series of Australian animated films, based on the four novels Doyle wrote about Holmes and starring the voice of Peter O’Toole. Very earnest and not very good.
Those films starring Peter O’Toole were put out by Burbank Films Australia, founded in the 1980s to make animated adaptations of English literature, mainly Dickens but later branching out to include Doyle, Kenneth Grahame, and Lewis Carroll. As you say, not very good. By the ’90s Burbank had become a “mockbuster” outfit, cranking out their own cheap versions of “Pocahontas”, “The Hunchback of Notre Dame”, and “Mulan” close on the heels of Disney’s. Their only production based on an original story was their final one, “Jungle Girl and the Lost Island of Dinosaurs”, which I’d love to see remade by a more competent studio.
I first discovered The Great Mouse Detective as a teenager though I knew of the film long before I saw it for the first time due to having seen a preview for it on my childhood VHS copy of The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad and owning a Disney Storybook collection that featured a story based on the movie. As much as I sometimes wish I had the 1999 VHS release growing up, my discovery of it somehow came at the right time, and even now years later, it’s one of my top 10 personal favorite Disney movies of all time. The fact that it came out the same year as Don Bluth’s An American Tail and was even successful enough to give Disney the confidence to give new life to its animated movies really makes it a hidden gem that’s worth revisiting every time.
(note: part of a certain Britannica article below)
“Big Ben, tower clock, famous for its accuracy and for its massive bell. Strictly speaking, the name refers to only the great hour bell, which weighs 15.1 tons (13.7 metric tons), but it is commonly associated with the whole clock tower at the northern end of the Houses of Parliament, in the London borough of Westminster. The tower itself was formally known as St. Stephen’s Tower until 2012, when it was renamed Elizabeth Tower on the occasion of Elizabeth II’s Diamond Jubilee, celebrating 60 years on the British throne.”
A few years ago, I saw Ron Clements do a talk at the Ohio University School of Arts and Designs (his son and his family live in Columbus) where he gave a presentation on his recent short “I’m Hip” (which, unfortunately, wasn’t nominated for “Best Animated Short”). I had him sign my copy of Jim Fanning’s “Drawing 100 Years of Disney Wonder” and had him sign his name in the section on drawing Basil of Baker Street next to the finished drawing of “The Great Mouse Detective”.
Still salty this Sherlock Holmes-like adventure starred a miniature master of deduction…….. yet had almost 0 deduction on screen. And we know who the villain is from super early on. And half of his plan. Where is all the mystery solving? And the cut ending makes me cry. Basil does not use his intellect to distract Ratigan. He just wins and the villain dies……….. because of luck. Truly shameful. And the audience were distracted by the quality animation to question the writing.
Good grief. Let me put it this way: If it weren’t for this film, Walt Disney Animation would’ve closed. After the failure of “The Black Cauldron”, apparently, Mike thought the future of animation was television and was just going to let the then fledgling Walt Disney Television Animation (which was already having success with “Gummi Bears”) be the sole animation studio of the company. Fortunately, the production team convinced him to greenlight the film under a small budget and show that the animation studio had some magic left. Thankfully, it was successful and Walt Disney Animation continued to operate.
Andrew, remember please that this was a movie marketed for children, and “Big Kids” like myself. I think the Disney writing team that adapted Eve Titus’ story BASIL OF BAKER STREET downplayed some of Basil’s more clever deductions to make the story more easily understood by kids. I don’t think it was “dumbed down” for them, however. Years later, I found some of the stories in the series by Ms. Titus and I thought they were great fun to read. I still think too much “mystery solving” would have cut down on the entertainment level of the film adaption. MAYBE it could have used a little more in the story, but I thought the adaption, Vincent Price’s great performance and the animation was just terrific, as well!