The screenwriter Joe Eszterhas claims he once sold a screenplay for a film with the pitch: “It’s Jaws, with paws!”. We like to imagine a similar pitch took place at Walt Disney studios viz: “It’s the UN, with mice!”. This pretty much sums up the premise of 1977’s The Rescuers, a tale of two mice who set off on an adventure of epic proportions to rescue a kidnapped girl from treasure hunters.

There is a feeling of leftovers here, Medusa feeling like a sub-par Cruella de Vil, such that the erratic driving scene appears to have used animation lifted directly from One Hundred and One Dalmatians. Though one might more generously say that she and her two pet crocodiles were a forerunner for The Little Mermaid’s Ursula and her electric eels. The idea-guys also appear to have got bored half way through thinking up ingenious examples of mice repurposing human objects for their own needs. We begin with an international conference taking place inside a steamer trunk, followed by a journey in a sardine can aboard an albatross, but by the time we land in the sticks, the mice are swigging from miniature jars, using miniature rolling-pins and carrying miniature pitch-forks and fishing-rods (presumably purchased from a miniature shop with miniature money???). Furthermore, whoever was in charge of plucking country names out of the encyclopaedia clearly couldn’t cope with African country names, yet somehow decided that Austria and Vienna were separate entities.

The cynical viewer might even question what right these over-zealous mice had to intercept a message in a bottle, clearly destined for human recipients, but to their credit, they do get the job done.

It may be unfair to nitpick at a film which was only ever meant to be a B-movie, but got bumped up to the big league when another project fell through. As a result, newbie animators Glen Keane, Don Bluth and Ron Clements (who would go on to bring us The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin and Hercules, to name but a few) got to work alongside three of Disney’s Nine Old Men: Ollie Johnston, Milt Kahl and Frank Thomas.

It’s a brave storyteller who mixes all the cuteness of two little mice (they use a comb for a ladder!) with a tale of child-trafficking and slave labour. Add in the unlikely pairing of Eva Gabor with Bon Newhart and you’ve got yourself something that can only be put down to Disney Magic.