The Hunchback of Notre Dame II (2002)

Sequels arrive for many reasons, and artistic compulsion is rarely among them. The Hunchback of Notre Dame II, a direct-to-video continuation released in 2002, returns us to Notre-Dame, where Quasimodo rings bells, mentors a small boy named Zephyr, and pines for a circus performer called Madellaine whose employer intends to steal the cathedral's finest bell. The animation is thin, the songs are brief, and the gargoyles have been downgraded to comic relief on a diminished budget. It is a cash grab, and it makes no effort to disguise the fact.

What fascinates, from a taxonomic standpoint, is how little the film has to say. Quasimodo's appearance is treated as an obstacle to romance, and the resolution is the oldest kind of inner-beauty moral, the sort that long predates any modern conversation about bodies and self-acceptance. Esmeralda remains Romani, a detail the screenplay neither examines nor exploits. The villain runs a circus as a front for robbery, which is a crime story, not an indictment of wealth. Madellaine is an assistant in a leotard, defined entirely by her feelings for the bell ringer. No identity is interrogated. No system is named. No viewer is scolded.

There is something almost restful about it. Here is a film with no argument to make, no lesson to deliver, no contemporary grievance to rehearse. It wants to sell a few tapes and reach the credits. That modest ambition defeats it anyway, with a serene incompetence that borders on the admirable. We are left with a document of 2002 that could have been made in 1992 and would have been equally unnecessary in either year. It offends no one. It instructs no one. It improves no one. The classification stands, and it stands in silence, much like a bell that nobody has bothered to ring.

It is a sequel to a beloved film, and that is the whole of its taxonomy.