The Great Mouse Detective is an animated Disney film, and one of my favorites from the 80s.  It’s basically a Disney-fied version of a Sherlock Holmes yarn with mice as the lead characters and a rat named Ratigan in the Moriarty role (played by Vincent Price!). Even Basil Rathbone has a cameo as the real, human Holmes.

This seems to be an oft overlooked Disney film from the 80s, overshadowed by The Little Mermaid, The Fox and the Hound, and The Black Cauldron. It also came out the same year as Don Bluth’s An American Tail, which was a smash hit. This is a solid little movie, though, and is incredbily entertaining and fun for the whole family. Today, though, sees only the DVD release of the film. So maligned is it in the popular consciousness that it doesn’t seem to have earned its Blu-ray yet.

The film is still very fun and has the same breathless feeling you get when you watch the new Robert Downey, Jr. Holmes picture, you get dizzied in watching smart characters be smart, and for Disney to have applied that to a children’s film was a delicate balancing act that I would call a work of genius.  I would go so far as to say that this could be a very useful gateway drug to get kids thinking about the Sherlock Holmes formula and turn them into Holmes fans later in life.

You can get it on Amazon here.