#vance gerry

With the Chanticleer idea dead and Woolie Reitherman about to retire, the writing was on the wall, and Mel started thinking about retirement. There was one last story he tackled, however, in the spring of 1981: The Great Mouse Detective (then known as Basil of Baker Street).

He would end up having a decisive impact on it, as Burny Mattinson explained:

Ron [Clements] was in Story at that time, and then they moved John [Musker] in as the director on it. So when I came down there, I was sort of the outside director. [What Ron and John] had done was a very farcical approach to the story. It was really all done for laughs, and I didn’t care for that style that they were working with. It looked nothing like what we used in the picture . . . Then I had these setups that Mel was doing, and everybody liked Mel’s stuff. It was beautiful stuff, but [John and Ron] were persistent. They wanted to go in a whole different direction. Anyway, I went to Ron Miller and I said, “Ron, we’ve got to make a decision on this. Which way are we gonna go? Are we gonna go with the farcical they want to go with, that approach, or do you want to go with Mel’s?” And, thank God he said “Mel’s.”

Not only was the overall tone of the movie set by Mel, but the most memorable sequence in the picture was also the fruit of his imagination, as his colleague Vance Gerry remembered a few years later:

Mel [Shaw] had drawn this picture of Big Ben in England and it was like a down shot—you were way up in the sky and looking down on it. But you were close enough to see that the two mice, Basil and his archenemy Rattigan [sic], were having a fight to the end. Much like Sherlock Holmes had a fight with Moriarty at the falls. Here were these two mice at the very tip end of one of the hands of Big Ben. Now, that picture was so powerful and suggested such an image that you couldn’t do anything but keep that in the movie. It was such a powerful image. And it stayed in the movie. That was done very early. That is when he was just exploring possibilities for what could happen. I don’t think it was in the book; it was just something that occurred to him . . . That’s one example I can remember of where one drawing suggested a whole sequence.

(Unfortunately the aforementioned artwork is not shown in the book.)

La Esmeralda and Djali concept art.