Impressively, it is also estimated that in the years since its release, The Lion King has “generated over $1 billion in profits” (Tengler 209). The two movies that followed immediately after The Lion King, however, returned much lower box office grosses, with Pocahontas achieving $346 million worldwide and The Hunchback of Notre Dame $325 million. Witnessing this comparative downturn during a period of growing competition within western animation, Disney’s executives would certainly have had cause to re-evaluate the studio’s production strategy.
In 1995 Pixar released Toy Story, providing a preview of what would quickly become the dominant form of mainstream animation. At the time of its release though, it was “too early to take seriously the possibility that the business landscape for Disney had just undergone a momentous change — that Disney might have unwittingly opened itself up to meaningful competition in animated feature films” (Price 156). Ultimately, writes David A. Price, “Disney still owned feature animation. It had always been so. It would always be so.
Disney would dominate computer animation as it had dominated cel animation.
Pixar would be the eager-to-please contractor. The stars and the planets seemed to be set in their courses” (156). Also at that time, Disney’s executives would have been aware that Twentieth Century–Fox’s animation department was developing a feature length hand-drawn animation film, Anastasia, that would likely debut in the same calendar year as Hercules. Furthermore, two former Disney animators, Don Bluth and Gary Goldman, had been installed as directors for Anastasia, indicating that Fox’s project would most likely draw on traditional Disney animation both stylistically and thematically.4 To what extent this competition influenced the immediate trajectory of Disney feature animation is impossible to say, but it is clear that the studio, with the production of Hercules, sought to produce something that would extend beyond the limits of conven-
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tional Disney filmmaking. Through its aesthetic progressiveness, and, decisively, its distinctive use of peplum convention, Hercules did just that.
Like Aladdin, Hercules actively acknowledged and embraced the “gaze” in a way that Disney had not done since its earliest cartoons (Wells Animation and America 110). This is most noticeable during, and immediately after, the “Zero to Hero” musical montage sequence. Disney’s musical sequences typically provide an opportunity for the otherwise restricted animators to embrace their creative impulses, though this artistic freedom is usually framed in such a way as to legitimize any departure from the established story world. Dumbo was the first Disney animated feature to contain such a sequence, with the “Pink Elephants on Parade” number diverging stylistically from the established story world. Crucially, however, Dumbo is seen to unknowingly ingest alcohol, thus framing the “Pink Elephants” interlude as a drunken hallucination. During the
“Zero to Hero” montage, visually, several anachronistic references are made to elements of contemporary material culture, such as American Express, branded soft drinks, Nike Air sports shoes, and, self-reflexively, Disney’s own commercial activities, in the shape of a “Hercules Store” filed with Hercules merchan-dise. However, instead of being confined to the musical sequence — which, by virtue of its gospel rhythm played against the film’s ancient Greek setting, is also acoustically anachronistic — these visual anachronisms spill comically into the surrounding story world.
An example of this can be seen when, after a failed attempt on Hercules’
life, Hades smashes a vase sporting his nemesis’ image, before turning to Pain, one of his minions, to issue an order. Hades is immediately distracted, though, when he notices that Pain is wearing a pair of “Herc Air” sandals. As Hades is berating Pain for his choice of footwear, a slurping noise interrupts him mid-sentence. A cut reveals Panic, another of Hades’ minions, finishing what resembles a Hercules-brand soft drink. This “loosening” of the Disney text, which has become increasingly pronounced in the years following Hercules’ release, acknowledges, according to Wells, “the increasing prominence of the cartoonal form and a greater trust in the public’s ability to embrace its intrinsic vocabulary” ( Genre and Authorship 110). Examples of this tendency are visible throughout Hercules, revealing the extent to which the film’s creative team sought to push the boundaries of conventional Disney storytelling. In addition to this, Hercules stands out in the Disney canon, not only through its self-reflexivity, but also because it unexpectedly, yet quite literally, re-animated the peplum filmmaking tradition.
The Body: Regulating Signification in Hercules
Robert A. Rushing postulates that “one might plausibly define a peplum as an action-adventure film set in mythological antiquity centered on a spec-
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tacular (and frequently eroticized) male body” (241). Although Ron Clements and John Musker, the directors of Hercules, embraced the muscularity of their eponymous character, they had to find a way to reconcile this sexually-connotative body image with Disney’s censorial approach to sexuality and sexual maturity.5
The regulation of Hercules’ sexuality echoes what was a common tendency in peplum filmmaking. From the outset, peplum movies featured hyper-muscular characters as a core constituent of their spectacle; however, such sizable performers risked “making the ordinary male body look defective, inferior (in short, symbolically castrated)” (Rushing 241). Taking Cabiria as a starting point, Rushing notes how the movie “uses the same tactic that later peplum films do to assuage the male viewer’s potential anxiety: the bodybuilding hero is actually marked as a kind of neuter sex, asexual, and actually at the service of the heterosexual romances of the other characters” (241). While Hercules is not consciously depicted as a neuter sex (the main romance in the film is his), the very fact that he is depicted through animation renders him asexual. Not only does his condition as an animated product serve to strip him of any conventionally constructed sexuality, but also the very fact that he is animated potentially endows him with what Sergei Eisenstein termed “plasmaticness.”
Defined in the context of Disney’s early animated shorts, Eisenstein saw animation’s plasmaticness as a “rejection of once-and-forever allotted form, freedom from ossification, the ability to dynamically assume any form” (21). It is this hermeneutic freedom, however, that makes the interpretation of masculine bodily culture and sexuality, as depicted in Hercules, problematic.
Masculinity is depicted in a largely uncomplicated manner by Disney in the animated features released prior to Hercules. Before Sleeping Beauty (after which point Disney went through a phase of favoring anthropomorphized characters to humans), masculinity is defined in terms of noble chivalry and romantic appeal, typified by characters such as The Prince ( Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs), Prince Charming ( Cinderella), and Prince Philip ( Sleeping Beauty). In the films of the 1990s, when human characters made a return, depictions of masculinity remain relatively simplistic, albeit with the added binary between hegemonically conservative masculine characters, such as Eric ( The Little Mermaid), John Smith ( Pocahontas) and Phoebus ( The Hunchback of Notre Dame), and characters exhibiting exaggerated hyper-muscular masculinity, such as Triton ( The Little Mermaid) and Gaston ( Beauty and the Beast). Masculinity in these later films, despite being depicted as a social construction, nonetheless remains “shaped by and filtered through the patriarchal and conservative meta-narratives that dominate the Disney culture industry” (McCallum 117).
Narratologically, Hercules could be seen to extend this tradition, depicting a heteronormative construction of masculinity that culminates with Hercules verbalizing his love for Meg, all of which works to contain any overt sexual signification. Visually, however, because Hercules’ body is literally sculptured,
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reflecting the synthesis of renowned caricaturist Gerald Scarfe’s conceptual artworks with Clements and Musker’s Greco ambitions fo
r the movie, the protagonist’s sexuality is less easily contained. Stephen Rebello and Jane Healy note this in The Art of Hercules: The Chaos of Creation: The Greek ideal says that lines carry movement. Lines should flow, not float, should be anchored in beginnings and endings. Check out Hercules’ arm muscle. To sculpt muscle definition, one enormous, flowing line — rather than many internal, short lines— suggests dynamic strength, not sinewy beefiness. A simple, powerful body shape, long and lean in the Greek ideal, denotes his great strength. Such details as the tiny swoop line that defines his knuckles, the triangles to suggest kneecaps, the curlicue that denotes a dimple complement the boldness. Similarly, his hair is confined to only a simple few Art-Deco like lines to suggest a mass of curls. These lines are influenced by the simple graphic patterns of Greek border design [143].
By adopting this style, the film creates a space in which viewers familiar with the art of ancient Greece might, rather plausibly, associate Hercules’ stylized depiction with the sexualized and often homoerotic scenes that populated such artworks. This connotation clearly problematizes the conservative and heteronormative masculine sexual identity that the film’s narrative seeks to establish.
While this construction of masculinity clearly conflicts with Disney convention, this transgressivity, and the regulation of it, was a core ingredient in traditional peplum filmmaking.
Camp Strategies: Subtext in Hercules
Peplum filmmaking has a long history of camp interpretation. Although the hyper-muscular male body of peplum cinema is often configured so as to lack sexual significance, in many instances, it becomes a site of homoerotic tension as a product of camp identification:
The most striking feature of the later cycle of peplum films, for modern audiences at least, is how easily the asexual bodybuilding hero— or the film as a whole —can appear to be homosexually suggestive (part of what Americans call “camp,” the ironic enjoyment of bad or vulgar culture, especially as it appears to offer meaning that were probably not intended by the original authors) [Rushing 241].
Although this Sontagian interpretation, this “love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration,” is based on live-action peplum filmmaking, it is equally applicable to Hercules (Sontag 275). In Tinker Belles and Evil Queens: The Walt Disney Company from the Inside Out, Sean Griffin demonstrates how, by reclaiming the work of the animator, a position often obscured by the Disney studio’s artistic and industrial ideologies, it is possible to reveal a camp subtext in Hercules. Focusing on the work of Andreas Deja, a supervising/lead animator at Disney since the early 1990s, Griffin writes: “Openly gay, Deja has announced in various interviews that his sexual orientation has had its effect on the char-
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acters he draws” (141). Besides his work on the male villains Jafar ( Aladdin) and Scar ( The Lion King), Deja has supervised the creation of three hypermus-cular characters: Triton, Hercules, and Gaston. Although Triton, Hercules, and Gaston are designed (slightly) differently, “all three spectacularize the male body in a way rarely seen in Disney animation prior to The Little Mermaid”
(Griffin 142). Viewing Gaston as Deja’s magnum opus in this context, Griffin observes how “his hairy chest, flexing muscles and stomping around in boots takes on a level of absurdity, ridiculing the hyper-masculinity that Gaston represents” (142). Reacting to the “‘body fascism’ that became a noticeable aspect of urban gay culture by the 1980s,” Deja designed Gaston to symbolize the absurd narcissism of such behavior (Griffin 142). In his study, because Griffin is primarily concerned with legitimizing the reading of homosexual subtexts within Deja’s work at Disney, it is understandable that he chooses to focus his analysis on the exaggerated Gaston rather than sculptured Hercules. However, Griffin’s decision to ignore the role of gym culture and bodybuilding in Hercules is surprising.
As noted earlier, Hercules does not start the movie as a muscle-bound hero; instead, he builds his developed physical appearance only after meeting Philoctetes (“Phil”), who Zeus refers to as “the trainer of heroes” ( Hercules).
This bodily ambition is playfully acknowledged when, immediately before Hercules enters a two-minute montage sequence that sees him transform from a lithe adolescent to a muscle-bound young adult, he poses purposefully behind an immense headless statue. Furthermore, during the montage sequence, Hercules and his companions restore a dilapidated amphitheatre (a site associated with athletic expression), after which Phil turns personal trainer to guide Hercules through step-up, press-up, and single-leg squat repetitions until the sequence concludes with an upwards tilting shot revealing a now hyper-muscular Hercules. After the tilt shot comes to rest in a medium shot of Hercules, we see Phil attempt to measure his protégé’s bulging bicep, but as the muscle flexes, to Phil’s surprise (and delight), it snaps his tape measure.
This visual metamorphosis not only supports Griffin’s subtextual identification of a commentary on male body fascism and gym-culture in Deja’s work, but it also overtly acknowledges the bodybuilding tradition that was central to the Italian peplum cycle of the late 1950s and early 1960s. The American bodybuilders featured in many of the Italian pepla were not cast because of their acting prowess; rather their appeal lay in their “size and shape, frozen in moments of maximum tension” (Dyer 167). Filmed holding “a boulder aloft,
[or] in a clinch with a lion, these and many other set-ups incorporate not only the posing vocabulary of bodybuilding competitions but also the mise-en-scènes of such non-narrative forms as physique photography and the strongman acts”
(Dyer 167). Although Hercules’ progression from adolescent to muscle-bound adulthood occupies only a small role in the movie, this early chapter in his life provided the basis for a spin-off show: Hercules: The Animated Series.
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Generic Hybridity: Hercules: The Animated Series
The mixing and hybridizing of genres was a recurrent storytelling strategy employed by the peplum filmmakers of the 1950s and 1960s. Dyer writes: Hercules, Maciste and the rest appear in numerous other situations, far removed from their original stories. The whole of the ancient world was drawn upon; new fantasy lands were invented; even the post-classical world was not out of the question, Maciste showing up, for instance, in thirteenth-century Asia ( Maciste alla corte del Gran Khan), in seventeenth-century Scotland ( Maciste all’inferno) and Russia ( Maciste alla corte dello Zar) as well as in non–European ancient worlds, for example, Africa ( Maciste nelle miniere del re Salomone) and Central America ( Maciste il ven-dicatore dei Mayas) [166].
Furthermore, it is this theme of generic hybridity that has underpinned much of the preceding discussion, with Hercules representing a filmic space in which the generic traditions of Disney feature animation and the peplum both collide and combine. Although understandings of film genre are necessarily fluid, reflecting the competing and changing cinematic, cultural, and societal influences that shape their development, the practice of combining multiple genres within a single containing story-world can still prove problematic. While Hercules explored peplumic tropes within a Disney idiom, the film’s overarching narrative helped reconcile these competing genres. When this story world was extended through Hercules: The Animated Series, however, the show’s heightened cartoonality resulted in a series that focused on Hercules’ adolescent years, one which frequently — and knowingly — disregarded the temporal and spatial parameters established in the movie.
“Hercules and the Golden Touch,” for example, offers a parodic take on the James Bond franchise. First, important information is established through an introductory theme song (sung by the Muses), which mirrors the typical opening arrangement of a Bond movie. Following this, Hercules visits Icarus to acquire some essential secret agent technology, referencing Bond’s reliance on Q. Additionally, Hercules can be heard to paraphrase two of Bond’s most iconic phrases, first asking for grape juice, “crushed, not strained,” before
introducing himself to his female companion as “Lees, Hercu Lees” (“Hercules and the Golden Touch”). Although referentially divergent, “Hercules and the Golden Touch” does not provide any significant temporal or spatial reconfiguration of the landscape established in the original movie. Contrastingly, “Hercules and the Arabian Night” relocates much of the action beyond the already established Grecian space. In this episode, Jafar, after arriving in the underworld, attempts to orchestrate, with the help of Hades, the mutual destruction of their long-time adversaries: Aladdin and Hercules. Consequently, much of the resulting conflict spills over into Agrabah.
The absence of an overarching causality in Hercules: The Animated Series, while representative of the cartoon genre as a whole, decentralizes the peplumic
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tradition as one of the focusing generic paradigms within the series. Instead, referentiality and generic hybridization become the governing principles in Hercules: The Animated Series. On a broader level, this hybridity is perhaps most indicative of the developments that had begun to occur within the studio’s animation at the turn of the millennium. During this period, with the movies Tarzan, Fantasia 2000, The Emperor’s New Groove, Atlantis: The Lost Empire, Lilo and Stitch, Treasure Planet, Brother Bear, and Home on the Range, the studio’s animation diverged, both artistically and narratologically, from Disney tradition to include genres such as science fiction and the Western, and locations such as outer space and the Incan empire of ancient South America.
Conclusion
Ultimately, Hercules represents a “Disneyfication” of peplum filmmaking rather than an innovative redevelopment of this genre within the animated medium. This is not to say, however, that Hercules represents a typical Disney animated feature; instead, as noted earlier, the fact that the film embraces or supports several key peplumic traditions (such as the muscular male hero, camp subtext, and generic hybridity) marks the movie as a particularly divergent feature in Disney’s theatrical oeuvre. As a case study though, Hercules is revealing on two counts. First, it highlights how two genres that are perceived to be inflexible, the Disney animated feature and the peplum strain of sword and sandal filmmaking, can, in fact, combine and even develop through generic synthesis. Second, by analyzing the crucial peplumic themes of masculine bodily culture and camp sensibility via Hercules, it has been possible to prepare a new critical space — that of animation — in which to address sword and sandal filmmaking.
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