The Ultimate Walt Disney Company Performances Bracket -- Round Three, Day One

A talking...parrot?

Can you believe it, folks? We’ve finally arrived at the third round of the Ultimate Walt Disney Company Performances bracket. That means while we started with 256 seeds, we’ve winnowed it down to 64 seeds.

Now, because the site I use to tally up the results doesn’t let all the matches go swiftly to 64 — it would cause a weird round-robin effect I don’t particularly like — I have created a new bracket just of the remaining 64 seeds to ensure that all of the prior head-to-head battles lead naturally to the matches you’ll see over the next eight days.

Yes, that’s right — still four matches per day in this round, so let’s dive right in!

(1) Gene Hackman, The Royal Tenenbaums vs. (16) Pat Carroll, The Little Mermaid: The battles really do start getting tough now. I think that Pat Carroll is truly brilliant as Ursula, both in performing verbally dexterous numbers like “Poor Unfortunate Souls” and in her snappy, campy dialogue. But. I have said before that The Royal Tenenbaums is one of my favorite films of all time (as in, top ten), and Gene Hackman’s lead performance is the capper to an excellent career. Voice work is challenging, and Carroll’s is great, but Hackman’s using his whole body and delivering an all-timer. He gets my vote.

How about you?

(8) Eleanor Audley, Sleeping Beauty vs. (9) Harrison Ford, The Empire Strikes Back: I mean, I’m pretty sure I know who’s going to win here. (Get it? “I know”? Because, you see, that’s a famous line that Harrison Ford has…oh, you get it.) I am partial to seeing Eleanor Audley put up a good fight here, but similar to the previous match, there’s something about a voice role going up against a live role, and how the latter almost automatically gets a bit of a leg up. But it’s your call — the rogue or the villainess?

(4) Albert Brooks, Finding Nemo vs. (13) James Woods, Hercules: I’m honestly a little surprised that James Woods got as far as he did here, though I’m not complaining. But I will also not complain if he loses here, because I do think Albert Brooks is giving the stealth best performance in Finding Nemo, even if his future-talk-show-host co-star is giving the showier performance. Woods is excellent as Hades, a role that’s awfully suitable for him, but I give it to Brooks as Marlin.

(5) Tim Curry, Muppet Treasure Island vs. (53) Paige O’Hara, Beauty and the Beast: I adore Beauty and the Beast, and arguably would rank it higher as an overall film than Muppet Treasure Island. But Tim Curry’s performance as Long John Silver is [whispers] the best human performance in a Muppet movie, and I know who I’m ranking him above [ends whisper]. Curry gets the vote for me.

What say you?