Robin Hood (1973)
★★★ — Robin Hood (1973)
"Oo-de-lally, oo-de-lally, golly what a day." Roger Miller strums that opening ballad and you're in. Instantly. Completely. There's a looseness and a warmth to the first twenty minutes of Disney's 1973 Robin Hood that I find genuinely hard to resist, even now, even knowing what's coming. The problem is what's coming.
The central casting idea is a brilliant one. Robin as a sly, light-footed fox, voiced with real effortless cool by Brian Bedford. Little John as a big shambling bear. Maid Marian as an elegant vixen. It shouldn't work as well as it does, but the animal choices feel instinctive rather than arbitrary, each one telling you something about the character before they've opened their mouth. And in those early scenes, the film absolutely fizzes. Robin and Little John disguising themselves as fortune tellers, the chaos of the archery tournament, the Sheriff of Nottingham stomping around collecting coins from people who clearly have none to spare. There's a folk-tale scrappiness to it all, a sense that the story is being told around a fire rather than projected onto a screen, and I love that quality.
But here's the honest truth: the film runs out of road well before it runs out of runtime. Somewhere around the midpoint, you start to feel the wheels spinning. Prince John's tantrums, funny the first time, start to feel like a stuck record. The Sheriff of Nottingham is more nuisance than genuine threat. And if you've seen a few Disney films from this era, you'll clock the recycled animation sequences pretty quickly. Certain movements, certain crowd shots, lifted more or less wholesale from earlier features. I reviewed The Aristocats a while back and was already noticing signs of a studio cutting corners. Here the shortcuts are even more visible, and it gives the film a slightly deflated feeling, like a party where the food's run out but nobody's quite ready to go home.
The third act in particular sags. There's a prison break sequence that should be tense and exciting and instead just sort of... happens. The climax resolves itself quickly and neatly in a way that doesn't feel earned. Compare that to the sheer emotional wallop of something like The Hunchback of Notre Dame, a Disney film that genuinely commits to its stakes and pays them off, and the difference in ambition is stark. Robin Hood never really wants to make you feel anything too strongly. It's happy enough to charm you, and for a while, it absolutely does.
What saves it, and keeps it hovering around the three-star mark rather than falling below it, is the soundtrack and the sheer warmth of its personality. Roger Miller's contributions give the whole thing a genuine folk-music soul that most animated films wouldn't dare attempt. The voice performances are strong across the board. And there's a scrappy, handmade quality to the world that I find genuinely endearing, even if I also find it a little underpowered.
It's the kind of film that lives most vividly in memory as a collection of moments rather than a coherent whole. The oo-de-lally song. The archery disguise. Little John's laugh. Pull on those threads and you've got something lovely. Try to watch the whole thing as a story with a beginning, middle and end, and the middle starts to feel like it belongs to a different, less interesting film.
Three stars. Charming, musically rich, and just a little bit hollow at its centre. A pleasant afternoon, but not quite the proper adventure it promises in its opening reel.
Rating: ★★★ | Year: 1973 | Watched: 2026-03-21
Where to watch
Watch in the UK
Stream: Disney Plus
Rent: Rakuten TV
Buy: Apple TV Store · Rakuten TV · Amazon Video · Google Play Movies
Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi
Watch in the US
Stream: Disney Plus
Rent: Amazon Video · Apple TV Store · Google Play Movies · YouTube
Buy: Amazon Video · Apple TV Store · Google Play Movies · YouTube
Physical: Amazon US
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Related on Movies With Macca
More from Wolfgang Reitherman: One Hundred and One Dalmatians (1961) · The Aristocats (1970)
More from the 1970s: Fantastic Planet (1973) · Here and Elsewhere (1976) · Italianamerican (1974) · Punishment Park (1971)
More animation: Fantastic Planet (1973) · Alice in Wonderland (1951) · Mononoke the Movie: The Phantom in the Rain (2024) · Mononoke the Movie: Chapter II - The Ashes of Rage (2025)
More family: Alice in Wonderland (1951) · Wonder (2017) · Kirikou and the Wild Beasts (2005) · Anastasia (1997)
