Not quite one of the Disney classics, yet still delightful, this little ditty owes much of its charm to its precise anthropomorphization: the rooster who serves as our minstrel troubadour (with songs written and performed by country star Roger Miller); the burly rhinoceros bodyguards of conniving villain Prince John (himself a skinny lion shorn of his mane and voiced by Peter Ustinov); the hissing snake who serves as Prince John’s sycophantic servant. And then there is Robin, envisioned, of course, as a fox. It’s not just that he can scamper stealthily about robbing Prince John and giving to the poor. It’s that he also has other, wilier methods: disguising himself as a fortune teller to sneak into Prince John’s carriage, for one, and devising an elaborate pulley contraption to smuggle gold out of the castle, for another. He does all of this with casual aplomb and the polite British voice of Brian Bedford. In short, the casting here – in terms of which animals are chosen to portray which figures of legend – is perfect.
