Hercules: Critic Reviews

A Disney fable savvy enough not to let its sincerity get in the way of its zippy multimedia charm.

On any level, earthly or otherwise, the ingenious new animated Hercules is pretty divine.

Furiously fast and fiendishly funny.

[An] insipid, lifeless, animated feature.

Chock-full of celeb cameos, puns and contemporary camp, the movie is annoyingly hip.

Jumps into the ancient legends feet-first, cheerfully tossing out what won't fit and combining what's left into a new look and a lighthearted style.

It's a winning tall tale, cleverly told and wonderfully voiced...

Pretty appalling.

Hercules has the dubious distinction of being the least-enchanting cartoon Disney has fashioned in over a decade.

This is a bright movie, in both senses of the word.

Light on its feet and continually amusing, this free-spirited show-biz version of Greek mythology ranks with the best of modern Disney animation.

The most flat-out childish film of the Disney Renaissance: this is both its great triumph and ultimately the reason that it's so hard to care about it all that much.

Amusing, yes. Fluffy, definitely. But with no more staying power than those Hercules action figures that were already resigned to Odd-Lot by last Christmas.

Prepare to spend the summer stepping on plastic satyrs and winged horses.

Scarfe's pointed faces are smoothed out to a drab degree, yet not so they become characters as warm as Disney is capable of.

Another benchmark achievement for the Aladdin team of Musker and Clements.

One of the best of the modern Disney animation efforts to date.

Remind one of My Little Pony...mental pictures of all the plastic "Hercules" toys that soon will be littering floors and crippling barefoot adults.

while all the customary ingredients are at hand -- the dreamy hero, the curvaceous heroine, the comic sidekick, the smarmy villain -- the magic is missing this time out. ...a minor addition to the Disney pantheon.

Disney's 35th animated feature may be based on a timeless tale, but it's no classic.

It entertained me much more than I thought it would.

The animation is kinetic and witty; computer effects are integrated to good effect without overwhelming the hand-drawn figures.

Hercules fires off mythology in-jokes and pop culture references at a speed that would dizzy the Animaniacs.

Woods as the ever-exasperated Hades is the comic highlight, bringing an acrid wit to the proceedings, thereby balancing out some of the over-the-top feel-good elements indigenous to the genre.