YMMV / The Hunchback of Notre Dame II

• Anvilicious: There are far too many symbols about true beauty, with the biggest (literally) being the dull-colored bell adorned with gems on the inside.
• Awesome Music:
  • Carl Johnson's score still manages to be good, even eclipsing the poorly-received songs that were actually sung by the characters.
  • Jennifer Love Hewitt's “I’m Gonna Love You” is classic late 90’s/early 2000’s cheesy pop garbage, but it’s still genuinely sweet especially since we, the audience, are well aware that Quasimodo is indeed a guy worth the mushy lyrics of the song.
• Broken Aesop:
  • The message from the original, and in the sequel, is supposed to be that you can't judge by appearances and true beauty is on the inside. Unfortunately, it is distorted by the way that Quasimodo not only falls in love with the beautiful Madellaine, but she also goes through a rather formulaic Heel–Face Turn, and the villain Sarousch is not really all that handsome to the viewer, despite his own vanity, meaning that the viewers get a solid Beauty Equals Goodness message instead.
  • One of the other messages, that prejudice is wrong, is also broken. Phoebus is portrayed as being in the wrong for his prejudice against carnies, and he says that he was wrong at the end. But he wasn't wrong; the carnies really were stealing from people, and Madellaine was the only exception, so his suspicions were entirely justified!
• Common Knowledge: No, TMS Entertainment did not do the animation for this film, as Doug Walker inaccurately claimed in his Disneycember review of the film. It was outsourced to Disney's Japan-based sub-studio. However, several ex-TMS staffers did work on the film.
• Epileptic Trees: One popular theory is that Zephyr is not Esmeralda's biological child, but her stepson; Phoebus' child from a previous marriage. This is frequently postulated to explain why he looks pretty much nothing like her.
• Fanon Discontinuity: Given how this movie makes no effort to live up to the standards of its predecessor, what with the poor quality writing and animation, and the silly, flippant tone, most fans like to pretend that this movie never existed.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: The fact that Haley Joel Osment voices Phoebus and Esmeralda's son Zephyr when he’d go on to voice Sora and then visit a world based on the original movie. Bonus points for Frollo thinking Sora’s a gypsy in that game because of the way he looks.
• It's Short, So It Sucks!: One criticism is that the movie is less than an hour long if you don't count the credits.
• Replacement Scrappy:
  • Sarousch. Aside from being a far less interesting villain than his predecessor Frollo, Sarousch is criticized for his annoying mannerisms, lack of personality other than being an arrogant narcissist, and for his plan of stealing a giant, hard-to-transport bell being very nonsensical.
  • Madellaine, who many fans felt paled in comparison to the original portrayal of Esmeralda, coming off as bland and clearly created solely as a girlfriend for Quasi. It doesn't help that, rather than making Madellaine a truly strong woman, the writers seem to have settled for making Esmeralda weak and ineffectual in comparison.
• The Scrappy:
  • A lot of people find Zephyr extremely shallow and annoying, having no personal traits beyond "Quasimodo's child friend". Most of his dialogue consists of either saying that they're best of friends with little actions justifying their friendship or reacting to things with vague wonderment.
  • While the gargoyles as an entity were not viewed as this in the first film beyond Hugo himself, even the most adamant defenders of the characters cannot stand them here. Their annoying tendencies change from an element of their character to the entirety of their character, with their attempts at comic relief being painfully humorless and their function as mentors and moral support being minimal at best.
• Sequelitis: Often considered to be a contender for one of the worst, if not the absolute worst, of the Disney Direct to Video sequels. The first film had gorgeous animation, dealt with some pretty heavy themes for a Disney movie, had a great villain and stellar music. The sequel dispensed with all of these and made the tone much Lighter and Softer. It's clear the only purpose of the film was to give Quasimodo a girlfriend. It was so bad that it contributed to the end of Disney's DTV sequels.
• Sweetness Aversion: The entire movie is animated with bright colors that only make the low-quality animation all the more obvious, and the entire plot of the film, on top of Quasimodo's personal quest for love, revolves around the cast's respective couples professing their love for each other before the entire city in a huge festival; to say that this was jarring for those who appreciated the original's unusually dark tone would be an understatement.
• Tear Jerker: The scene where Quasimodo furiously chews out Madellaine when he thinks she had a hand in stealing La Fidele and was only pretending to love him (despite her attempts to explain the truth), breaks off their relationship, retreats to the Notre Dame cathedral and angrily walks up the stairs before breaking down in the middle. The end of that scene almost harkens back to the first film where a saddened Quasimodo retreated to the Cathedral after being humiliated at the Festival.
• Took the Bad Film Seriously:
  • Shallow a villain as Sarousch may be, many still credit Michael McKean for what is often considered a genuinely chilling voice for the character. Cringeworthy as much of his vanity-laden dialogue is, he at least sounds threatening.
  • The same principle applies to the rest of the cast as despite the movie’s low quality, they sound like they are making the most of what they have.

---