By Tricia Olszewski
Home on the Range, the latest animated feature from Disney, also stars a wisecracking, larger-than-life character: a well-teated, well-fed show cow named Maggie. Maggie, voiced irritatingly yet appropriately by Roseanne Barr, is a new addition to the Patch of Heaven dairy farm, an idyllic place populated by Disney-adorable little piggies and chickies, a cranky old goat, and the resident queen cow, the very proper Mrs. Caloway (Judi Dench).
Caloway doesn’t take too kindly to Maggie’s bombastic arrival (accompanied, naturally, by a “Back in Black”–ish theme song), but she’s soon presented with a greater concern: Unless the farm’s proprietor can come up with $750 in a few days, Patch of Heaven will be put up for auction. Naturally, she and the newcomer band together for the greater good, setting out with New Age–y pacifist cow Grace (Jennifer Tilly) to try to raise some money.
Home on the Range is a fun, fast-moving 76 minutes that, except for its catchy, genre-crossing soundtrack, feels more like a Looney Tune than part of the Disney oeuvre. In addition to having a flat look that’s miles away from Finding Nemo lusciousness, Home on the Range occasionally pays outright tribute to several Warner Bros. staples, from the Bugs Bunny–looking rabbit that pops out of a hole to the baddie named Alameda Slim (Randy Quaid), a cowboy with Yosemite Sam facial hair and a fondness for shouting, “Dagnabbit!”
Kids certainly won’t be bothered by the movie’s derivative moments, though. And even if Maggie’s sarcasm goes over their heads (when one of her many jokes falls flat, she says, “Is this thing on?”), there are enough softballs lobbed by Tilly’s vulture-attracting, ever-warbling Grace and a spastic, bicep-kissing horse named Buck (Cuba Gooding Jr.) to keep them laughing.
Like the best of Disney cartoons, Home on the Range offers jokes for the grown-ups, too: Steve Buscemi lends his voice as a yellow-toothed, pencil-’stached accountant who’s funny if only because of Buscemi’s own grubbiness, and Alameda Slim, a C&W singer, has an ability to lull cows into submission that seems like a dirty little reference to groupies.
Surprisingly, that’s only one example of the sexual innuendo rampant throughout the movie, from Maggie’s assertion that her goods “are real” to the attention that the female cows get on the road (“Sure, we could help you...maybe we could help each other!”). Makes you wonder, actually, what the filmmakers had in mind when naming the farm Patch of Heaven. With any luck, though, the wee ones will be too taken with movie’s animated birds and bees to be puzzled by their metaphorical ones.