Un Indien Dans La Ville - U.S. Release and Reception

U.S. Release and Reception

Shortly after its release in France in December 1994, Disney saw this film as a possibility to attract a family audience in the United States and considered giving it a limited release in select cities. Before releasing it in select cities Disney decided to release it under their Touchstone Pictures label as they felt this film had some mature themes for an ordinary Disney film.

As opposed to releasing it in the United States with subtitles leaving the original French dialogue in, Disney hired many cartoon voice-over actors to dub the original French dialogue out and substitute it with an English language format. They also gave the film an American name Little Indian, Big City. Under its new Americanized title and language dubbing, Touchstone finally released it to a select American audience on March 22, 1996.

Upon its original American release many American critics reacted exceedingly harsh to the film. Roger Ebert awarded Little Indian, Big City a rare "Zero Stars" rating claiming that he was annoyed by the awful dubbing as well as the writing and terrible humor. He ended his original Chicago Sun Times newspaper review by saying "If you under any circumstances see Little Indian, Big City I will never let you read one of my reviews again". Ebert's colleague Gene Siskel also deplored the film saying that it was likely to be a candidate for the year's (or any year's) worst film. He also said that if the word for the film got big enough in the United States family audiences would have been "hoodwinked into paying to see a totally unprofessional movie." When Siskel and Ebert viewed the film during its original theatrical release, one of the film reels broke out and the third reel of film was missing. A film executive informed Siskel and Ebert that they were allowed to come back the following week from their original viewing date and view the rest of the film that they missed. Siskel and Ebert came back to view the third reel regrettably, and by the time they had concluded viewing the whole film Siskel was quoted saying, "If the missing third reel was footage from Orson Welles's The Magnificent Ambersons, this film still would have sucked." Both Siskel and Ebert later went on to claim this as one of the worst motion pictures they had ever seen, and in January 1997 on Siskel and Ebert's "Worst of the Year" program for 1996 Ebert went on to call "Little Indian, Big City" the second worst film of the year, just behind Mad Dog Time.

The film also flopped during its American release grossing under $1,000,000 domestically. It was later released on home video under the VHS format in early 1997 and was re-issued one other time on VHS in mid-1998. The film has not been released on DVD or any other video formats in the United States.