DATE: Thursday, June 26, 1997               TAG: 9706260040

SECTION: DAILY BREAK             PAGE: E1   EDITION: FINAL  

SOURCE: BY MAL VINCENT, ENTERTAINMENT WRITER 

                                            LENGTH:  183 lines

HERC GOES HIP DISNEY OFFERS A NEW TAKE ON GREEK MYTHOLOGY WITH "HERCULES," THE MOVIE.

THE DISNEY empire is going to Hades this weekend.

But don't worry: Zeus's baby boy, Hercules, will set things right and, just possibly, become a new pop-culture phenomenon.

The opening of any Disney animated film is something of a phenomenon that defies ignoring. The studio's 35th animated feature film, ``Hercules,'' is surely no exception. It's a return to the sock-it-to-'em vaudeville razz of ``Aladdin'' after the relative levity of a love sick Virginia-native maiden and a lonely hunchback.

This one signals that it's 'toon time again. Ancient Greece goes hip, with Herc emerging as a hero. He has a feisty and shapely girlfriend named Meg, a flying horse named Pegasus and a trainer named Phil, with the voice of Danny DeVito.

He's introduced by a group of soul-warbling muses who are closer to the Supremes than a Greek chorus. There's a bunch of songs composed by eight-time Oscar winner Alan Menken, all designed to get you tapping your sandals.

Once every four years or so, the color-stained wretches known as animators are let out of their cels to meet the public as their movie premiere. In our imagination, they spend the rest of the time hovering over drawing boards drawing lovable creatures with big eyes. ``Hercules'' took 12 to 24 drawings per second, requiring the labors of 906 artists. What must their lives be like?

At the ``Hercules'' press conference, the animators were gathered on an ice rink at the Chelsea Piers, just off the Hudson River in Manhattan. (``Well, where else is cool enough to hold us?'' one of them said.)

The godfathers of ``Hercules'' are Ron Clements and John Musker, co-directors of the film. They look like Mutt and Jeff. Clements is a short, smiling, bearded guy. He's reportedly the one who goes for character and overall story. Musker is the tall, thin one with a moustache. Musker is rumored to be the one who likes jokes.

They met back when they directed ``The Great Mouse Detective,'' and they must have gotten a huge raise when they dreamed up a blue genie that ad libs like Robin Williams for ``Aladdin.'' That movie earned $217 million at the box office, plus selling 254 million copies in video.

``We wanted to do something different here,'' Musker said. ``We wanted the film to be stylized, not realistic in any way. We weren't going for a hero. Hercules is naive, shy, a farm boy who's just learning about the Big Olive, a city that looks like an exaggerated Manhattan. We weren't afraid to exaggerate anything.''

``Hercules'' was first suggested as a Disney subject by an animator four years ago.

At first, it was thought the Greek guy had been done too often. After all, he'd been played, in particularly cheesy versions, by muscle men Steve Reeves, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Lou Ferrigno with titles ranging from ``Hercules Unchained'' to ``The Three Stooges Meet Hercules'' and ``Hercules Against the Sons of the Sun.''

When the Disney version was in the planning stage four years ago, the studio had no idea that the TV series ``Hercules: The Legendary Journeys'' starring Kevin Sorbo would become a hit.

``When it did air,'' Musker said, ``we weren't worried. We saw it as just a cheaply produced TV show shot in New Zealand, and, frankly, we thought it would be off the air before the movie got made. The fact that it's a hit won't hurt us. It didn't hurt `Beauty and the Beast,' which also had a TV series.'' Clements said the idea of ``using Greek mythology for an animated film was really appealing. The Pastoral sequence in `Fantasia' touched on it but not to any great extent. Monsters, hydras, the Fates, flying horses! These are the things that can be done in animation that no one else can do.''

The co-directors surprised everyone by bringing in British artist-satirist Gerald Scarfe as production designer. Scarfe's abstract and darkly absurdist drawings are a far cry from Disney animation, even though he did do the animation for Pink Floyd's film ``The Wall.''

Scarfe, who flew from London for the New York opening, said: ``Not one of my drawings is actually in the movie, but I do think I influenced the animators. I was in Los Angeles designing an opera production of `The Magic Flute' when they asked me to do some 30 drawings on the Hercules idea. I ended up doing 400 drawings.''

Andreas Deja, a 17-year Disney veteran, said that Scarfe's designs did influence ``Hercules,'' but ``at first, we couldn't figure how they could translate to three-dimensional, animated, beings. Animation is very different from drawings. Our characters must move and speak.''

Deja, 40, a superstar among the new-generation animators, designed Herc. He usually does villains, such as Gaston in ``Beauty and the Beast,'' Jafar in ``Aladdin'' and Scar in ``The Lion King.''

``It's much harder to do a hero,'' he said. ``They're much more subtle. We didn't want Herc to be a musclebound type. He had to be a more human character.''

Don't expect authentic Greek mythology here. Consider, for example, how gory and grisly things were in the ``real'' legends. Zeus, the father of the Gods, slipped away down to Earth one night and fathered Hercules via the mortal woman Alcmene. Hera, the wife of Zeus, didn't take kindly to the parenting. She sent two serpents to kill the child, but young Hercules strangled them both with his bare hands.

``No. No. We weren't going that route,'' Clements said. Instead, Hera, in the movie, likes baby Herc.

According to mythology, Hercules first married Princess Megara and had three sons, but vengeful Hera caused him to go insane. She also had him become the slave of his cousin, King Eursytheus, who instigated the trials known as the ``Twelve Labors of Hercules.'' She required him to dress as a woman and sew for three years. (Not our Herc!)

The movie keeps a girl named Meg but leaves out most of the labors, plus the insanity, the dress and the sons.

Mythology gets even murkier and decidedly un-Disney. Hercules' second wife was a Caledonian princess named Deianira. He killed the centaur Nessus for making passes at his wife. The wife, giving him an anti-love potion, put him in such terrible pain that he begged to be put on a funeral pyre and, accompanied by a thunderclap, was borne up to Mount Olympus. There, Hera made her peace with him and gave him her own daughter Hebe (goddess of eternal youth) as his bride. He ends up a god.

You can bet none of this is in the movie. Instead we have tunes and a Herc who turns out to be the hero of Thebes, a good sports town.

Alan Menken has won eight Oscars for writing music for Disney films and his ``Go the Distance'' from ``Hercules'' is the immediate front-runner for this year. Nonetheless, Menken is still bitter about how his score for ``The Hunchback of Notre Dame'' was treated.

``It's my best score,'' he said, ``but the academy seemed to be saying: `We don't care what you did. We're not voting for you this year.' Then, `Hunchback' got unjustly labeled as not being for kids. What they want me to do is closer to `Hercules.' ''

He personally chose Michael Bolton to record ``Go the Distance'' over the end credits.

Bolton, taking time out from preparing a new, operatic album, said, ``I found that Alan and lyricist David Zippel let me do my own thing with the song. They wanted a more Broadway-like bridge. I wanted something that would be Top 40 on the radio. We worked it out together.''

Menken said that ``the obvious thing would be to do something with bouzoukis, lyres and other Greek sounds, but we decided to go modern, right from the start.''

``Shooting Star,'' a ballad that Menken particular likes, was cut because it didn't fit the story. ``It was, perhaps, my favorite song,'' the composer said, ``but I still have it. It might can be used in some later work.''

The voice of the adult Hercules is that of Tate Donovan, an actor who has been in things like ``Memphis Belle'' and ``Murder at 1600'' but is more famous for the girls he dates - previously Sandra Bullock and currently Jennifer Aniston of ``Friends.''

``The best thing is that I can play this part without even going to the gym,'' Donovan said with a laugh. ``I don't see much of myself in his look, but, yes, his voice is mine. It took a real discipline to learn to convey everything with just the voice.''

Hades, a guy who claims he could have been a hero if he wasn't surrounded by so many deadheads, has the voice of James Woods.

Nick Raniera, who was the supervising animator for the horrendous villain, said: ``There's never been a Disney villain quite like Hades. He's very charismatic and outgoing. He's always in your face. His flaming hair ranges from cool gas-jet blue to fiery red, depending on his mood.''

Raniera didn't worry about terrifying children. He said: ``Children go to see `Jurassic Park.' They go to see everything. Disney films have a tradition of important villains, and every time someone accuses us of scaring children. I think, on the contrary, many generations have first learned about drama in Disney films. The good always wins out. The children know that.''

Susan Egan, who has been playing Belle in Broadway's ``Beauty and the Beast'' for two years, has both the singing and speaking voices of Meg, the worldly city girl who wows Herc.

``I imitated Barbara Stanwyck in `Double Indemnity' and `The Lady Eve,' '' she said. ``I loved Barbara Stanwyck in all those old films. I think they had in mind Herc being Jimmy Stewart and Meg being Barbara Stanwyck.''

Phil, Herc's trainer, is a comic character who is part goat. (He has hooves and horns.) He's short, bald, overweight and has the voice of Danny DeVito. The animators say they thought of Grumpy in ``Snow White'' and Bacchus in ``Fantasia.''

The prime candidate for a stuffed animal under the tree next Christmas is Pegasus, Herc's flying horse. Pegasus has no lines, but he has a jealous dislike for Meg.

Then there are the Fates - three horrific ``things'' with just one eyeball between them. Their master, Hades, describes them as ``Fates worse than death.''

Pain and Panic are the two comic characters who are the underlings of Hades. Bobcat Goldthwait, who is the voice of Pain, said: ``I kept thinking I'd run into Xena, but that's the wrong Hercules. What I want to know is why they thought of me when it came to Pain.''

It will be interesting to see whether children will be asking for Pain and Panic as Christmas toys this year. ILLUSTRATION: Color Photo

[From the movie Hercules...]

WALT DISNEY PICTURES

His loyal horse Pegasus takes a disapproving view of the budding

romance between Hercules and Meg.

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