Classic Fantasy movies: The Rescuers

Oldie but goodie

May 16, 2025

Categorization: Fantasy

Where watched: Disney Plus

I have to start this post by giving credit where credit is due – if you have children under ten and are desperate for a few minutes of me time on a Saturday morning when you are roused at an ungodly hour by said children, Disney Plus is king. My kids are only allowed to watch TV on weekends (loosely defined, i.e. Friday is a weekend, sick days and public holidays are weekends), so I really let them go to town on Saturday mornings, and Disney provides quality programming with a variety of movies appropriate for different ages (at the time of writing this post, my youngest is watching Encanto for the fourth time, which is not my favorite movie -it is just so boring- so this is prime blog-writing time).

Another brilliant thing about Disney Plus that I just discovered is that you can access long-forgotten movies from the Disney production house archive. On last week’s bright and early Saturday morning (ugh), my kids asked to “watch something new”, specifying that they wanted something “from Disney, not from Netflix”, which, because Netflix is primarily for TV shows, means they wanted a new movie. I did a quick brain scan to try to recall what Disney movies they haven’t seen yet, and for some reason I remembered the movie The Rescuers. I vaguely remembered it was about mice rescuing a child, which sounded vaguely child-appropriate, so I searched for it in the Disney Plus catalogue. I wasn’t too hopeful that I would find it, as I had not seen it being promoted in any of the Disney Plus home screens or in the landing pages’ little rolling slides for various animated movies, but I used the search function, and voilà! There it was!

I have to say now that Netflix beats Disney on this point, because Netflix is rather brilliant at reviving interest in old, long-forgotten movies by including them in the rolling slides under various categories. Which is a shame, because Disney has a lot of (and I think, a lot more) brilliant older content that deserves to be remembered.

Anyway, where was I.

So for this movie The Rescuers, I did put down my laptop and my phone and pay full attention, as I was curious to see how this movie had aged over the years. It was released in 1977! More than 50 years ago… amazing. I realized then that it had already been an old movie when I had watched it in the 90s, but then, back in the 90s, we didn’t get a new Disney movie every 6 months (try every 2 years if we were lucky), and each release was a big freakin’ deal, so movies took a longer time to age.

Those were the good old days, weren’t they? I miss the feeling of excitement that a new Disney movie had just come out in cinemas, it was such a grand production and the family would really make a whole big thing out of going to the theater to see this new movie, and every random franchise would be milking the release and promoting it like crazy… like I remember buying a mug shaped like Scar’s face from Pizza Hut or something when The Lion King came out. My brother got Simba. Good times.

Sorry, strayed off-topic again. Anyway.

The Rescuers movie starts with a little girl tossing a bottle into the ocean and some mice finding it washed up onshore. Then, one of my favorite scenes starts up – the mice are going to the office in the United Nations headquarters in New York! Very amusing for an adult (which I sadly am) seeing human UN delegates coming into the office and mice plopping out of their briefcases and entering their own little UN office called the Rescue Aid Society. Disney captured my interest at that point and didn’t let go until the movie’s end.

And the rest is really quite a simple plot – the Rescue Aid Society sends two mice representatives, a glamorous Eva Gabor mouse in pink fur and a chubby janitor mouse, to rescue the little girl who sent the message in the bottle. The girl had been kidnapped by a “trashy” lady (the movie’s words, not mine), and the mice had to go and rescue her.

But the magic of Disney back in the day was that they could turn this simple plot into something completely wonderful. I watched with fascination at how lovingly this movie was made more than any other aspect. Every bit of it looked beautifully and painstakingly hand-drawn (which it was!), and every wiggle and shake and nose-whisker twitch of these cute little mice climbing up and down boxes and getting chased by alligators or whatever, looked so... realistic, for lack of a better word. Like, that is precisely how mice would walk arm-in-arm in the rain, tails sticking out of raincoats, if they had to walk to an orphanage in the dead of night to find clues about a missing child’s disappearance.

And the trashy lady was amazing! I loved how Disney rendered this “Medusa”, all slinky with scary green eyes and she even somehow moved like a snake. She was such a brilliant villain that for days after my youngest would pretend that Medusa was at the door and coming to get her – at which point I would reassure her that her mama and papa would never let this scary lady take her and put her down a hole.

I also love Disney for not being afraid to create a safe space for children to mentally work through grown-up concepts. In The Rescuers, the missing child is an orphan, and there is a scene in the movie where the child is crying on her bed because it was adoption day and another little girl got chosen instead of her because “she was prettier”. OK, I am not sure this is how adoption works in this day and age, but the concept of being an orphan – this itself is already a lot for a kid to unpack. I had to pause the movie and explain to my kids what being an “orphan” meant, and what an “orphanage” was, and why the little girl was so sad. I was a bit hesitant to at first, and I’m not sure why I was. Was I afraid that my kids would be too sad? And if they were... so what? I mean, it’s just reality that some kids lose their parents and become orphans, isn’t it? Every kid is going to discover what the word "orphan" means eventually, and after thinking it through, I came to the conclusion that to have a parent explain it is a lot less scary than finding out from any other source, be it school or friends or whatever.

And yes, I could see my young daughter tear up at the thought of this little girl not having any parents to take care of her, and I did need to give up my arm to her for the rest of the movie as she would not let go of it. However, understanding the "orphan" concept made it that much more satisfying and joyful to her when at the end of the movie, the mice successfully rescued the little orphan girl and she had gotten adopted by a new mama and papa.

And I think this is why I enjoyed The Rescuers so much more than Encanto. Its plot is high stakes enough for an adult to enjoy as much, albeit for different reasons, as a child can. This was Disney’s genius back in the day.

Can I also just add one funny thing – aside from loving the movie itself, my kids LOVED the super old school song “Tomorrow is Another Day” from The Rescuers soundtrack, which plays when the rescuing mice are flying on an albatross on their mission to save the little orphan girl. I really have no idea why… the very first bars of this song scream 80s to me (although technically it would have been the 70’s, wouldn’t it), and not really in a way that aged quite well. However, my kids insisted on adding it to their Spotify playlist, so now I have the dubious pleasure of listening to it on repeat in the car whenever we are off to do errands.

A couple of days later after the success of The Rescuers and its addition to our roster of family Classics, I put on The Rescuers Down Under for my kids and sat back, fully expecting to enjoy this movie even more. I mean, it came out in the 90’s right? It should be an upgrade to and even more relatable than the previous movie.

It turns out that some things do not get better with time, and one example was The Rescuers franchise. I don’t know if it was diminishing returns, or something, but all the jokes in The Rescuers Down Under just landed flat for me. I mean, sure there was more excitement in the movie, the plot proceeded at a faster pace, there were more “ action” moments, and there was a very cute little rescuing Australian mouse to boot, but I don’t know. This movie just didn’t hit me the way the first movie did. I guess… maybe the emotional stakes in the first movie were higher? In the first movie, you could really feel the loneliness and joy and fear and courage of the little girl, exemplified in the beautiful song “Someone’s Waiting For You”, which plays while the little girl gazes up at the sky waiting to be rescued, after she had tried to run away from the trashy lady’s crocodiles. In the second movie, the little boy who was kidnapped was brave and clever sure, but quite one-dimensional in that respect. The movie did not even give him any joyful reunion with his mother at the end, which makes it feel a bit like “Someone was not Waiting For You”. There was no beautiful closure like in the previous movie, the boy just flew off into the sunset with the mice after escaping the bad guy’s clutches.

Did this movie herald the bend of modern movies in general to cater to audiences looking for “action” movies, rather than just good movies? I mean, from a direct comparison of the two The Rescuers movies, I think so.  And I think it is a damn shame. There are a ton of action movies out there. There aren’t enough good movies.

I don’t really know if my kids made the same unfavorable comparison as I did, I didn’t ask them directly. However, I do know that my kids talked about the first The Rescuers movie for days after we watched it the first time, and asked to watch it again for the next succeeding three nights. My daughter would also make up pretend scenarios about escaping from Medusa (the villain in the first The Rescuers movie) for days after. However, after we watched the second The Rescuers movie, I heard not a peep about it from them afterwards. It was as though they had forgotten about the movie after watching it. It didn’t help that the second movie had no soundtrack worth mentioning, either.

I do wonder how other people and their kids compare both movies, however, so if you have thoughts, do let me know.

Tags: classic fantasy movies