Two Of Quest For Camelots Songs Managed To Ape Disney While Creating Something Unique

Welcome to a new bi-weekly column called When Good Songs Happen To Bad Movies, in which I look at pretty well done songs that just so happened to debut in more subpar features.

Animation, like many other aspects of Hollywood that spawn success, seems to be a fertile ground for imitation, as seen by the surplus of fairy tale skewing animated features that were released in the wake of Shrek's phenomenal success or the insane amount of CGI animated films released in 2006 thanks to the success of Finding Nemo three years earlier. The 90's followed this sort of trend to a tee, with The Lion King's humongous box office managing to get every movie studio to create their own animation company to churn out would-be animation blockbusters.

Most of these studios only churned out one or two efforts before succumbing to bankruptcy (Fox Animation Studios, for instance, was shuttered after only making Anastasia and Titan A.E.), and Wanrer Bros. efforts to create their own animation powerhouse was no exception, though it's existence at least not only lasted longer, but also started prior to The Lion Kings release. Rover Dangerfield in 1991 was their first effort, and it seems to be the template for all future movies (sans The Iron Giant) the the studio made in terms of critical reception and box office results.

One such future endeavor was Quest For Camelot, which is pretty much the poster child for another aspect most of these non-Disney animated features in the 90's had: they shamelessly aped the formula of famous Disney features from that particular decade. Musical numbers, wise-cracking sidekicks, celebrity voice actors, fairy tale environments were prominent in these films, unless Brad Bird was in charge. The trouble was, those elements inherently weren't why people liked Disney's animated movies; features like The Lion King and The Jungle Book are still beloved entities to this very day thanks to great stories, voice acting and other crucial elements of filmmaking. Just plugging into place various tropes without a good story and hoping for the next Hunchback of Notre Dame was a fools errand.

Quest For Camelot pretty much forgot that and just went through the motions of being a generic mid-late 90's Disney animation rip-off, with two of the blandest protagonists ever to grace the screen in the form of Kayley and Garrett. To the films credit though, the latter character actually has a pretty great song entitled I Stand Alone. It makes use of two notable aspects of his personality (namely, he's blind and lives secluded in the forest) and then uses them as a basis for a song that champions his own freedom.

The animation depicting the various plants and organisms that Garrett, Kayley and some odd bird with an axe for a face (whose voiced by Urkel, for some ungodly reason) encounter in the forest during the tune is quite lively, which also works as an accurate description for the lyrics within this song. They're so full of actual personality, which (most of) the rest of the movie lacks so dearly. For the rest of the movie, Garrett could easily be mistaken for a plank of wood in terms of distinctiveness, which makes it all the more shocking how effective this musical number is. Within these lyrics, I actually get why Garrett chooses to be separated from the rest of the world, and such information has been conveyed in a memorable manner. That's pretty much the basis for any quality musical number, which I Stand Alone can proudly claim itself as.

However, that's not the only time the tune in this film manage to rise above the quality of the enterprise as a whole. The other song within Quest For Camelot that find similar success is one done by the films obligatory sidekick, a two-headed dragon whose individual craniums have distinct personalities. These two, going by the names of Cornwall (Don Rickles) and Devon (Eric Idle), are constantly bickering, which stems from a traditional snob vs. slob dynamic (three guesses which of those archetypes each actor plays). Sometimes it's amusing in the film, mostly it's forgettable, but the duo's major musical number, If I Didn't Have You, is at least an energetic piece of musical divergence.

Like in I Stand Alone, the animation is a major factor as to why the sequence works, as the more restrained art style of the movie is eschewed for this sequence so that numerous pop culture references (such as Sonny & Cher, The Lion King, Friday The 13th, etc.) can be depicted. This at least leads to some moments of humorous absurdity, such as a line of dancing eggs, that work as both successful moments in their own right and as a nice breather of the more stuffy yet chaotic atmosphere of the rest of the movie. The lyrics aren't especially notable, but Idle and Rickles deliver them decently enough to help make the scene one of the highlights of the entire film, which is, as if you couldn't tell already, lackluster overall. But at least in these two musical numbers Quest For Camelot, while not matching Disney's best moments, at least did something right, which is more than can be said for the likes of, say, Space Jam.