For anyone who can hazily remember watching this as a kid, you can probably only remember how scary it was.
And how good the songs were. But none of us really knew what we were singing about during ‘Hellfire’.
Because there was some serious subtext that went over our heads. Maybe our parents picked up on some of these disturbing facts about The Hunchback of Notre-Dame .
Frollo has a super creepy crush on Esmeralda.
The song ‘Hellfire’ is all about explaining Frollo’s character motivations.
Turns out he’s lusting after Esmeralda and his way of dealing with it is telling her to date him or else he’ll burn her to death.
Esmeralda was ‘sexed up’ for the Disney adaptation.
In Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris Esmeralda is a naive 16-year-old girl.
Why they chose to go with a super-sexual, pole dancing, bustier wearing version of her for a children’s movie, I will never understand.
Frollo was originally a priest.
Depicting such an evil character as part of the judicial system is terrifying in its own right.
But imagine Frollo as a powerful member of the church?! And how much more evil he could’ve achieved!?
Despite this, there was still religious controversy about ‘Hunchback’.
Frollo is shown to be a devout Catholic who hides behind his faith to justify his terrible actions.
Now imagine the uproar if they had kept him a priest.
Clopin tells kids about Quasimodo.
He tells them about why he is deformed, and that Frollo wanted to dump him into a well as a baby.
Does he really think that’s an appropriate story to tell children?
Frollo was right about the Feast of Fools.
He called it a “drunken stupor”.
The festival-goers drink so much ale after Topsy Turvy that they turn into a violent mob.
There’s a smoking goat.
This one isn’t so disturbing so much as perplexing.
Where did a goat even get a pipe packed with tobacco??
There’s torture.
It’s pretty heavily implied that the ‘Captain of the Guard’ before Phoebus, was whipped at Frollo’s instruction.
We don’t see it but that’s still pretty dark.
Quasimodo has Stockholm syndrome.
Before Mother Gothel in Tangled , there was Frollo in The Hunchback of Notre-Dame .
I didn’t understand Quasimodo’s loyalty to Frollo as a kid. But now I know it’s Stockholm syndrome.
Frollo is definitely guilty of sexual harassment.
This picture really says it all.
Frollo is for sure the evilest Disney villain so far in my opinion.
One of the reasons Frollo is so scary is because he thinks he’s the good guy.
He actually says, when praying to the Virgin Mary, “You know I am a righteous man, of my virtue I am justly proud.”
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Yikes.
Disney’s ‘Hunchback’ is the watered down version.
Despite all the attempted genocide and creepy sexual overtones, Hunchback is a much happier story than the original by Victor Hugo.
Everyone was supposed to die.
At the end of Hugo’s story, Esmeralda is burnt at the stake by Frollo.
Then Quasimodo angrily murders him and refuses to move from her grave and quickly starves to death.
Phoebus is much nicer is ‘Hunchback’.
Originally he is a womanizer who pursued Esmeralda because she was young and pretty.
He even betrays her at the end, leading her to her execution when she asks him for help.
The most disturbing thing about ‘Hunchback’ is that it’s rated G.
Pretty much nothing about this film is what parents would want their kids to be watching!