Trailer
Plot summary
Penny, a young orphan held on an abandoned riverboat at Devil's Bayou, puts a message in a bottle and sends it down the river. It washes up in New York City and reaches the Rescue Aid Society, a mouse organization housed in the United Nations. Miss Bianca, the Hungarian representative, takes the case and chooses Bernard, the society's stammering janitor, as her co-agent. At Morningside Orphanage, where Penny lived, an old cat named Rufus recalls a woman, Madame Medusa, who once tried to coax the girl into her car. In Medusa's pawn shop the two mice find that she and her partner, Mr. Snoops, are after a huge diamond, and that Penny is at Devil's Bayou watched by two crocodiles, Brutus and Nero.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Rescuers (1977)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Madame Medusa's appearance was based on Kahl's then-wife, whom he divorced in 1978. It was Kahl's last film for the studio and he wanted his final character to be his best, and he was so insistent on perfecting Madame Medusa that he ended up doing almost all of her animation himself.
- For the henchman the filmmakers adapted the character Mandrake into Mr. Snoops, whose appearance was caricatured from John Culhane, a journalist who had been interviewing animators at the Disney studios. Culhane claimed he was practically tricked into posing for various reactions, but said: "Becoming a Disney character was beyond my wildest dreams of glory."
- Cruella de Vil was considered for the villain, but Milt Kahl refused: "Oh, no no. We're gonna have a new character. I'm not gonna do Cruella," Mattinson recalled him saying, because he felt Marc Davis had animated Cruella beautifully and he was not going to take over his character.
- Due to the film's success, a sequel titled The Rescuers Down Under was released in 1990, which made The Rescuers the first Disney theatrical animated film to have a sequel.
- The Rescuers was the first collaboration between Disney's newly recruited trainees and the senior animators. It also marked the last joint effort by Milt Kahl, Ollie Johnston and Frank Thomas, and was the first Disney film Don Bluth worked on as a directing animator instead of an assistant animator.
- On February 13, 1976, co-director John Lounsbery died of a heart attack during production, and the animator Art Stevens was then selected as the new co-director.
