Alfred Hitchcock once famously said "Actors arc cattle." Or maybe it was that they "should be treated like cattle." Sources differ. No matter, Disney's newest animated feature is proving him right. In fact, in Home on the Range, cattle are the actors.
"It's an underdog movie," says co-director and co-screenwriter Will Finn. "Gary Larson always did cow jokes in The Far Side because there's something inherently silly cabout cows. Whenever we tell someone we're making a movie that stars cows, it gets a laugh!"
This delightfully silly twist on Westerns features the vocal talents of Roseanne Barr, Dame Judi Dench and Jennifer Tilly as a trio of bovine heroines. "Three dairy cows save their farm by catching a wanted cattle rustler," says Finn. "It's an upside-down Western. The cowboys are the bad guys, and the cows are the good guys."
"The farm is about to be foreclosed upon, and they need $750 to save their farm, which, coincidentally, is the exact amount of the reward for the cattle rustler known as Alameda Slim," says co-director and co-screenwriter John Sanford. "So, they decide to go and catch him." "That's the premise we started off with," says Finn.
"Disney had been playing around with various Western stories for about five years [including Sweating Bullets, an earlier incarnation of this project with a different plot]. They threw it open to a hunch of story guys, and in October 1999, Michael LaBash, who was new to Disney, came up with this premise. I got involved three or four months later as a story artist. John and I had been in conversations – John had seen some of the story reels on it, and they asked us to take it over and direct it in October 2000."
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