God Help the Outcasts: Gender and Religious Symbolism in Disney’s the Hunchback of Notre Dame
In 1996, the Walt Disney Company released their animated reimagining of Victor Hugo’s 1831 novel The Hunchback of Notre Dame. During its brief theatrical run the film generated equal parts critical acclaim and popular controversy. Despite the Disney Company’s push to make the film “religiously neutral”[1] many felt that the “religious content”[2] had been ill handled. Thus it could be deemed unsurprising that after the film’s release to home video it quickly faded into obscurity. Oft cited as the reason for the fade are the themes and plotlines that most, including Disney, considered overly dark for their younger audiences.
None of this would be considered odd if one were to consider the source material. Victor Hugo’s novel served as a love letter to the architecture of the Notre Dame Cathedral and a harsh critique of the Catholic Church. It also offered a complex and frequently contradictory view on the human worth of the physically and mentally disabled, women, ethnic minorities, and others considered ‘socially undesirable.’
Both Hugo’s novel and the later Disney adaption present an examination of religion and a treatise about the worth of those who fall outside the norm. Both also rely heavily on gender and race to provide plot impetus. The axis of this impetus is Esmeralda.
Esmeralda thus provides a crystallizing focus for the differences between the novel and its animated film adaption. Hugo’s novel sets her as a kind of progressive-switch bait. Initially shown as a virtuous heroine despite her status as a hated ethnic minority and a street dancer of lower class, she’s later revealed to be ethnically white and originally of a high class before she was kidnapped. When her virtue is called into question in the last half of the book, the issue is only resolved by her eventual martyrdom. The Disney adaption rebels against both this interpretation of the character and the usual protests made by critics about the passive, ethnically white, disempowered women of the Disney oeuvre.
[1] Mark Pinsky, The Gospel According to Disney: Faith, Trust, and Pixie Dust (Lousville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2004), 172-173.
[2] Pinsky, The Gospel According to Disney, 168.