Trailer
Plot summary
In 1897 London, young Olivia Flaversham celebrates her birthday with her father, a gifted toymaker, until a bat with a peg leg and a crippled wing arrives and kidnaps him. Olivia goes looking for Basil of Baker Street, the famous mouse detective, and meets Dr. David Q. Dawson, a retired army surgeon newly returned from Afghanistan, who escorts her to Basil's house. Basil turns them away at first, then learns that the bat Olivia saw is Fidget, who works for Professor Ratigan, the criminal Basil has been chasing. Basil, Dawson and Olivia take Toby, Sherlock Holmes' Basset Hound, to trail Fidget to a toyshop.
Cast
- Susanne Pollatschekas Olivia Flaversham (voice)
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Great Mouse Detective (1986)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Sherlock Holmes speaks in the film in the voice of Basil Rathbone, who had died in 1967. Disney lifted his lines from a 1966 reading of 'The Red-Headed League', nearly 19 years after his death, and author Eve Titus had named the mouse hero Basil after Rathbone in the first place.
- New Disney boss Michael Eisner cut the projected budget from $24 million to $10 million and pulled the release forward from Christmas 1987 to July 1986, leaving the crew a single year to finish the picture.
- After Young Sherlock Holmes flopped, Eisner decided Basil of Baker Street was too English and renamed it The Great Mouse Detective. Animator Ed Gombert mocked the decision with a satirical memo renaming past Disney films, including Seven Little Men Help a Girl and The Girl with the See-through Shoes; those titles later became a Jeopardy! category.
- The two-minute finale inside Big Ben made this the first Disney feature to lean heavily on computer animation. Phil Nibbelink and Tad Gielow spent months building the clock's gears as wire-frame graphics, which were printed out, traced onto cels and colored by hand around the characters.
- Layout artist Mike Peraza talked director John Musker into staging the finale among Big Ben's grinding gears, an idea he took from the clock tower climax of Hayao Miyazaki's The Castle of Cagliostro. Peraza's team was given unprecedented access inside Big Ben but had to gather all their reference in one hour, because the bells chimed every quarter of an hour.
- Ratigan began as a thin, weasel-like rat. After Vincent Price was cast, animator Glen Keane redesigned him and gave him the build of Disney's own chief executive Ron Miller, a 6 ft 6 in former Los Angeles Rams footballer.
- The filmmakers watched the 1950 comedy Champagne for Caesar only to study Ronald Colman as a possible model for Basil, and came away deciding to cast his co-star Vincent Price as Ratigan. Price, 52 years into his career, agreed to audition, saying that if anybody but Disney had asked him, he would have been offended.
- Michael Eisner wanted Michael Jackson to voice a character who would walk into the tavern, confront Basil and sing; the pitch met an uncomfortable silence in the room and he dropped it, then proposed Madonna. Melissa Manchester finally wrote and sang 'Let Me Be Good to You', which forced already rough-animated scenes to be re-timed and re-animated.
Stills
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