I watched this last night with my mom as she’d never seen it before now. It’s heavier than I remember and feels like The Irregulars in a way-a story with Holmes stuff bolted onto it. Very Spielberg movie. I didn’t know Pixar did animation for this film.
I’ll say this about it: They got three of the character’s names right.
It was before they were properly Pixar, still basically a division of ILM, and the first time CGI was used to animate a “character”, if you can call that stained-glass knight a character.
Beaten out by Cocoon for an award, if I remember right.
I thought it was a pleasant little movie. I didn’t realize that Nicholas Rowe, the actor who played Holmes, wound up playing the role again decades later. In the 2015 movie Mr. Holmes, which somehow managed to slip my notice even as I happily gobbled up episodes of Elementary and Sherlock, he does so in a movie-within-a-movie that the main character sees.
It was an “eh” movie. Watson was played as a Nigel Brucian foil. It didn’t help that David Burke (and later Edward Hartwicke) was playing a more intelligent and respectable Watson opposite Jeremy Brett in the Granada TV version at the time. the Phil Tippett rod puppets (they didn’t actually do any stop-motion IIRC) and the then state-of-the-art CGI were cute diversions, but betray who the real audience was.
I think of this as Sherlock Holmes and the Temple of Doom
The post-credits stinger was a treat, though. I was one of those who stayed around for just this sort of thing. Joe Dante had begun putting little extras after the credits, and RoboCop had a hidden joke in the closing credits, so I knew it was worthwhile to stay.
I brought this up not all that long ago in another thread. I had recently re-watched the movie, and was surprised by the stinger, of which I had absolutely no memory. Apparently I didn’t stick around when I first watched it. What also struck me was that this is the earliest example I could think of or find of a stinger that wasn’t just outtakes or a gag, but an actual continuation of the movie’s plot and a set-up for the plot of the sequel (which in this case never came about).
As to the movie itself,
Amend that to The Young Sherlock Holmes Chronicles: The Temple of Doom, and I agree 100%. Which isn’t really a bad thing, in my opinion, but, yeah, Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes it ain’t.