If the Disney team had set out to craft a cartoon response to the ongoing attacks against the company by socially conservative critics, it could not have come up with a more devastating one than its new animated feature.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Dec 18, 2024

In its teeming, riotous crowd scenes, its awe-inspiring views of the streets and spires of medieval Paris, its astonishing animation in fights and dances and its spellbinding storytelling, The Hunchback of Notre Dame adds up to a miracle of animation.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Dec 18, 2024

This is often a stunning, even groundbreaking, piece of work that can only be compared to Beauty and the Beast with its breathtaking detail and atmospheric shadows and light.

| Original Score: A | Dec 18, 2024

Disney's most powerful animated film since Bambi. Add a dose of the dash and sass that made Aladdin soar and you have a film that 20 years from now should be considered an authentic masterpiece.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Dec 18, 2024

The Hunchback of Notre Dame offers a pleasant surprise for people who were wondering how the studio could make a story about suffering and bigotry into a fun family film.

| Original Score: 4.5/5 | Dec 18, 2024

It's not what Victor Hugo had in mind, yet it works magnificently.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Dec 18, 2024

Richly layered and sweeping in scope, The Hunchback of Notre Dame is at once proud and pensive.

| Original Score: A | Dec 18, 2024

Despite the same-song stuff, the film beams along the edges. As in previous Disney creations, it's the edge-of-frame characters that add spice and saucy counterpoint.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Dec 18, 2024

The Hunchback of Notre Dame is now a Disney cartoon, for Pete's sake. What that means is that its makers are so fixed on the infantilization of their audiences that they can't begin to conceive that children of all ages could deal with certain truths.

| Dec 18, 2024

It's a bell ringer -- evidence that animators no longer feel torn by the need to pander and the desire to educate.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Dec 18, 2024

Artistically, it's a triumph, definitive proof that traditional hand-drawn cel animation and computer-generated imagery can not only co-exist but combine to create something magical.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Dec 18, 2024

As it turns out, the skepticism that greeted the news Disney would be making an animated musical based on Victor Hugo's epic classic was well founded. Like the story's tragic hero, this ambitious, lavishly designed retelling is deformed.

| Original Score: 2.5/5 | Dec 18, 2024

Disney's The Hunchback of Notre Dame is colorful and technically beautiful, but it isn't likely to stick in children's minds any longer than their shoes will stick to the theater floor.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Dec 18, 2024

In the hands of the Walt Disney Studios, the darkness of The Hunchback of Notre Dame is virtually gone but the moral uplift is busting out all over. It's a big, bouncy, Broadway-styled entertainment now.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Dec 18, 2024

This exceptionally inventive movie mixes a timely message into its broad comedy, triumphant music and daring animation.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Dec 18, 2024

The script is one of the most intelligent ever produced by Disney, encompassing many themes unusually bold for the studio.

| Dec 18, 2024

Disney is almost certainly needling its right-wing critics. Few of whom could quibble with the level of artistry.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Dec 18, 2024

It's a movie that, in seeking to broaden the appeal of Disney animation, makes considerable demands on younger children. But in doing so, it yields higher rewards.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Dec 18, 2024

Frankly, for all its animated visual splendor, this "Hunchback" plays a lot like the blueprint for a live-action Broadway show that's probably already in rehearsal.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Dec 18, 2024

What makes this claptrap plotting work so wonderfully, however, is Disney's approach, a dark and seductive panorama that brims with subtext.

| Original Score: B+ | Dec 18, 2024