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In 1998, Warner Bros. Feature Animation attempted to challenge Walt Disney Animation in the realm of big-budget, family-friendly animated features. While the Disney Renaissance was already winding down at that point, the studio had enjoyed unprecedented critical and commercial success throughout the 1990s with its groundbreaking, beloved animated films, such as Beauty & The Beast, Aladdin, and The Lion King. Everyone in Hollywood loves to come in second, so of course, other studios attempted to emulate the success of Disney throughout the 1990s, including Warner Bros. Pictures. The biggest example of this is Quest for Camelot, which has many hallmarks of an attempt to recreate the look and style of hit Disney animated features, but the result left something to be desired.
How Did Warner Bros. Try To Replicate Disney’s Formula With ‘Quest for Camelot’?
Quest for Camelot featured a fairly prolific voice cast for the time. Cary Elwes of The Princess Bride fame voiced the male lead, Garrett. Pierce Brosnan, amid his run as the newest James Bond, voiced King Arthur, and Gary Oldman, still in his Hollywood bad guy phase, voiced the villain Lord Ruber. Eric Idle and Don Rickles were the voices of Devon and Cornwall, the separate heads of a two-headed dragon, who acted as the film’s supportive comic relief.
As was customary during Disney’s Renaissance, the film was a musical, with songs written by Carole Bayer Sager and David Foster. Then rising country music star and teenage prodigy LeAnn Rimes performed “Looking Through Your Eyes,” which was made the lead single for the film and its soundtrack. Most of the Disney Renaissance films had pop versions of songs in their soundtracks, such as “Beauty & The Beast” as performed by Celine Dion and Peabo Bryson, or Elton John’s versions of “Can You Feel the Love Tonight” and “The Circle of Life” from The Lion King.
Much like the other Disney films of the 1990s, Quest for Camelot resembled a mish-mash of a musical, comedy, and a fable-like adventure tale, incorporating elements of Arthurian legend. The story followed the young teen and aspiring knight Kayley (Jessalyn Gilsig), who seeks to save the kingdom of Camelot and her mother Juliana (Jane Seymour) from Lord Ruber (Oldman), the rogue knight who betrayed King Arthur (Brosnan) and killed Kayley’s father, Sir Lionel (Gabriel Byrne). Kayley then embarks on a search for the recently lost Excalibur. Along the way, she meets and forms an unlikely partnership with the blind hermit, Garrett (Elwes). They are eventually joined by Devon (Idle) and Cornwall (Rickles) in their quest to find Excalibur and rescue Camelot.
Quest for Camelot is a fairly paint-by-the-numbers, formulaic, predictable animated adventure. It wants to reach the heights of Disney, but it feels more like another studio trying to mimic the Disney Animation style without an identity of its own. None of the songs or lyrics throughout the film are particularly memorable. They lack iconography and are not songs you’d want to sing along with in the car hearing them on the radio. While Disney Renaissance films would routinely add comic relief or wacky characters to liven up the experience for the kids, none of the comic relief characters were particularly funny. That said, Idle’s Devon does have the funniest and most suggestive line in the film when introducing himself and Cornwall to Kayley and Garrett, saying, “Frankly, we’re the reason cousins shouldn’t marry.” That has become a commonly recognized trope of sneaking a more adult, not-PG line or joke into an animated kids’ film.
In another instance of the film’s forced and unfunny humor, Lord Ruber uses a magic potion to mutate his soldiers and animals into bladed monsters. He combines a rooster with an axe, which becomes a talking mutant rooster named Bladebeak, voiced by Jaleel White. Eventually, Bladebeak turns on his new boss and reconciles with his chicken hen partner, and he does his own cringe-inducing iteration of Clint Eastwood’s famous monologue from Dirty Harry, saying, “Do I feel clucky? Well, do ya punk?!” Most of the film’s attempts at slapstick humor fall flat. Granted, these instances don’t always work in Disney Renaissance films either. Case in point: The talking gargoyles, Victor, Hugo, and Laverne in The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and how wishy-washy that film was about their shared existence.
Ultimately, the failure of Quest for Camelot is not surprising. It looks and feels like a cheap attempt to replicate the Disney formula, and it’s missing those crucial elements that made the classic Disney films of that era work so well. It is a musical, complete with a lead pop song single sung by a rising music star. Warner Bros. Feature Animation clearly wanted this to be its own Disney Renaissance-like classic with the way it resembles the films of that era. There are talented actors in the cast. It mixes action and adventure with comedy, drama, and romance, though severely toned down to be acceptable for young kids to watch. The film utilizes recognizable source material, in this case, Arthurian legend. Yet none of those elements come together to create something exceptional, classic, magical, and iconic.
Why Was ‘Quest for Camelot’ a Troubled Production?
The underwhelming final product of Quest for Camelot can likely be seen through its troubled production. According to a report by Jeffrey Wells published in February 1998 in The Record, The film’s original director, Bill Kroyer, and producer Sue Kroyer were fired by then Warner Bros. Feature Animation President Max Howard after production began, and there were said to be creative differences. It looks like the film underwent many changes during production. The story is loosely based on The King’s Damosel by Vera Chapman, but the final product bears little to no resemblance to the source material. According to Polygon, the film’s original story was meant to explore a young woman named Susannah who goes on a quest to find the Holy Grail to save her sister. In the film, the Holy Grail was changed to Excalibur, and the female protagonist is trying to save her mother rather than her sister. Howard was said to be the individual behind the change. Besides the film losing its original director and producer, other production members abandoned the project, which resembled a sinking ship.
An anonymous person described as a “senior associate” of the film informed Wells back in 1998, “The simplest thing I could say is that there were 20 people who had 20 different movies in their heads. From the top down, no one had the clarity of mind to say what this movie is. No one said anything.” Apparently, Quest for Camelot suffered from the lack of a singular, creative vision for the project, not to mention, interference from studio executives and an attempt to make a product by an executive committee. Additionally, it seems the success of The Lion King poisoned the proverbial well in the sense that everyone in Hollywood loves to come in second, so studios all tried to get their own version of The Lion King instead of recognizing why and how The Lion King became the success that it did. As the same individual told Wells in The Record, “The wave that The Lion King caught had been building for years. … You have to build to those things. Everybody’s too hungry. Studios should be finding their own niches.” This perfectly sums up what happened to Quest for Camelot. The movie is a product of the time of studios attempting to glum off the success of films such as the wild and overwhelming hit The Lion King in attempts to create their own.
The Aftermath of ‘Quest for Camelot’
Warner Bros. Feature Animation still had two more releases in the final years of the 1990s. They included an awful take on The King and I musical and Brad Bird’s The Iron Giant. While The Iron Giant was not a financial success in its initial release, the film did become recognized as an animated classic in later years. One major difference The Iron Giant shares with films like The King and I and Quest for Camelot is that it’s an original idea. The film is Bird’s vision onscreen and tells a great story. The film has its own identity and is not merely a Disney knockoff. It’s no wonder Bird would go on to bigger and better heights in later years. For now, Quest for Camelot remains a bit of an oddity in Warner Bros. Pictures’ catalog and animated feature films of the 1990s that weren’t part of the Disney Renaissance, yet very much wanted to be.
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