awful song of the south children

Dec

2014

Ten Thoughts on So Dear to My Heart

So Dear to My Heart (1949) is the fourteenth feature film from the Disney studios, and, like Song of the South, it’s a mixture of live-action and animation. The animation only makes up a small portion of the film, though – early drafts had no animation at all, and the cartoon segments were added mainly due to a requirement in Disney’s distribution deal with RKO. But enough background – what did I think?

Hey, Burl Ives is in this, yay! Oh, goddamn it, so are those irritating kids from Song of the South. Jeez Louise, Walt, weren’t there any other child actors you could get on the cheap? I appreciate loyalty, but come on. This is the third picture for Bobby Driscoll and the fourth in a row for Luana Patten. She’s not that cute.
Welcome to Fulton Corners, Indiana, in the year 1903. Well, that may be the precise setting of the film, but really we’re in Disney-fied Americana. Main Street, USA, at the turn of the century. A general store, horse-drawn wagons, lots of open space for kids to play in, and the train’s arrival at the tiny depot the biggest source of excitement for miles. This is the first real appearance of Walt Disney’s idealized old-time America in a feature, but get used to it – you’ll be seeing it again and again.
Dan Patch, the famous racehorse (or a reasonable facsimile) stops briefly in our little town, led off the train to stretch his legs. This inspires our hero, Jeremiah Kinkaid, known as Jerry and played by that awful Song of the South boy I wished so much ill upon, to one day own a champion racehorse of his own. Good luck, kid! We also meet Tildy, played by the so-adorable-you-want-to-punch-her Luana Patten. Tildy is Jerry’s friend – or maybe his cousin? I’m never clear on this. Our other two main characters are Jerry’s Uncle Hiram, played by Burl Ives (in his first major film role), and Jerry’s Granny, played by Beulah Bondi (who I am unfamiliar with, but who is amazing). Tildy hangs out with this crew all day and night, but she doesn’t seem to be related to them. Unless she is? She mentions parents, but we never see them. She refers to Hiram as “Uncle” but Granny is explicitly not her grandmother. But Hiram also calls Granny “Granny” so maybe “Uncle” and “Granny” are nicknames as well as relationship indicators? It’s all very confusing. Disney movies always seem to have some little inconsequential plot point like this that I spend way too much time thinking about. Details matter, people!
Finally we get to the meat of the movie (so to speak). Granny’s sheep give birth, and one of them, a black lamb, is rejected by its mother. Jerry takes the lamb as a pet, despite Granny’s objections, and his dreams of owning a champion racehorse are replaced with dreams of his little lamb, whom he names Danny, becoming a champion instead. I know there’s no racial message intended here, but there’s something about the black lamb, particularly Granny’s warnings – “I know the nature of them black sheep, especially a ram. He’ll be into everything.” – that makes me uncomfortable. Casting Song of the South boy doesn’t help.
The incidental music in this film is a little heavy-handed. Every single line is underscored, the slightest motion is accompanied by a dramatic chord. “Jeremiah!” (Duh-duh-duh!) His head whips around! (Dum-dummmmm!) Granny scowls! (Bum-bum-ba-bum!) Close-up on the lamb! (Tweetle-dee-dee!) Jimmy smiles! (Doot-doo-do-doo!) Granny softens! (La-la-la-laaaaa!) STOP TELLING ME HOW TO FEEL!
The animation sequences are gorgeous, but they’re sort of shoved into this movie – they’re meant to be springing from Jerry’s imagination, and they mostly consist of advice for animated Danny the Lamb from a Wise Old Owl, who comes from a series of postcards Jerry has in his scrapbook. (Oh, let me interject to say that Jerry is really, really good at scrapbooking. His scrapbook is to die for, even before it comes to life as a cartoon. If this were set in the present he would be majorly internet-famous on Pinterest.) The songs are a lot of fun, particularly “Stick-To-It-Ivity,” which features an animated Robert the Bruce getting advice from an animated spider which inspires Robert to get off his lazy ass and go and slaughter some more Brits. My pride in my heritage might have caused me to find the spider’s cliched Scottish appearance and dialect offensive if it hadn’t looked so cute when it did the Highland Fling.
Most of the movie consists of Danny the Black Sheep getting into exactly the kind of trouble Granny predicted, and Jeremiah apologizing for it. Danny destroys Granny’s living room, Granny’s yard, Granny’s screen door, Granny’s rocking chair, plus the town general store for good measure. Granny shows remarkable restraint in not serving up a plate of her famous Black Lamp Chops. I keep going back and forth as to whose side I’m on, but ultimately I decide that the lamb is pure evil and his destruction is completely on purpose, so I’m on his side.
Jerry and Tildy go to the swamp to look for bees – long story – and they find a complete cow skeleton, stripped to the bone. An entire cow skeleton, just lying there on the ground. Tildy is freaked out, since she’s been warned again and again about how dangerous the swamp is and also WHAT THE HELL LIVES IN AN INDIANA SWAMP THAT CAN SKELETONIZE A COW but Jerry is all, “Whatever. I’m following a bee. You can come or not.” I wish I could say it’s bad-ass, but coming from Jerry it just reads as slack-jawed vapidity. “Huh, yeah, a cow skeleton, that’s OH LOOK ANOTHER BEE!”
Little Jerry’s an asshole, by the way. He’ll be all doe-eyed one minute to get his way, but he’ll tear your fucking head off if you come between him and his lamb. Tildy goes to feed Danny, who escapes and disappears into the swamp. Jerry rips Tildy apart for feeding him, chews Granny a new one for not keeping better watch, and then denounces God for taking his lamb away. It’s…kind of awesome. My liking of this kid is growing faster than Annette Funicello’s sweater size. (That’s a Mickey Mouse Club joke. Look it up, kids.) Granny – and the narrative of the film – aren’t down with the blasphemy, and she gives him a severe spiritual smack-down. Jerry relents, promising God that if He returns Danny, Jerry will abandon his dreams of winning a blue ribbon at the County Fair. (That’s been the main plot of the movie this whole time. Sorry I haven’t mentioned it before.) Granny is touched by this, and when Danny is found, she tells Jerry that she promised God that if Danny was found, they would go to the Fair, and since she’s older she’s the one who has to keep her promise. As an atheist, I don’t really get the whole religion thing, but that seems like a dubious doctrinal lesson for a parental guardian to impart. It’s okay to break your promise to God, as long as it was a really, really cute promise.
They go to the fair, and Danny doesn’t win the blue ribbon. I’m really hoping he’ll go on a rampage and raze the whole ring to the ground while Jerry screams and cries and blames everyone else for his problems (and really, their behavior throughout the entire movie thus far suggest that’s exactly what should happen), but alas. They take their loss with dignity, and the judges give him a special award, a big pink ribbon. It feels a little “Everybody Gets a Medal Day” to me, but the movie seems to think it’s a happy ending, so who am I to argue? All in all, So Dear to My Heart is basically a harmless bit of fluff. It’s a shame the animated sequences haven’t been lifted out and shown separately, as they’re the best bits of the movie, but there are worse ways to pass an hour and fifteen minutes. If you’re curious about the genesis of whitewashed Disney America, this is a reasonably inoffensive place to start.

Dec

2014

Ten Thoughts on Melody Time

Melody Time (1948) is (sigh) yet another package film from the Disney studios. After The Reluctant Dragon, Saludos Amigos, The Three Caballeros, Make Mine Music, and Fun and Fancy Free, I’m kind of running out of enthusiasm for the format. Disney’s still feeling the financial hit of the war, so he’s still throwing a bunch of shorts together on the cheap and calling them features. Better things are coming once we hit the fifties, but for now, let’s put our heads down and see what he’s served us this time, shall we?

We’re off to a promising start. Lots of stars in the opening credits, although I confess the Andrews Sisters, Roy Rogers and Trigger are the only names I immediately recognize. And the sequence for the title song is well done – “Melody Time” is sung by some stylized masks, created by a paint brush. That whole “brush creates the characters” thing has been done before, but it’s cute here and I like the design of the masks. It’s making me hopeful that maybe this wasn’t slapped together as haphazardly as Fun and Fancy Free seemed to be.
“Once Upon a Wintertime” is our first story. Two young lovers are enjoying a sleigh ride pulled by two enormous horses – they’re like the horse from “What’s Opera, Doc?” with longer necks. There’s not much of a story, at first – they stop and go ice skating and make lots of hearts in the snow so we know they’re in love. But then he does something dopey and she gets mad and storms off and because women – am I right, fellas? – she doesn’t see the “Thin Ice” sign. The ice shatters and he tries to save her but he fails miserably and knocks himself unconscious. Her chunk of ice drifts through some rapids towards a deadly drop over a waterfall – wait, where the hell were they ice skating? Whoever made that “Thin Ice” sign was really underselling the danger. Anyway, the animals, led by the poster children for Horse Growth Hormone, rescue her, and she’s back in love with her man even though he did nothing but make the situation worse. Then a close-up on their loving faces fades to a photo of the two of them in a living room. It’s meant to suggest that they lived happily ever after, except I swear that it’s a different woman in the photo. I guess at some point she wised up. Or drowned.
“Bumble Boogie” gives us a jazzy rendition of “Flight of the Bumblebee” while the titular bug tries to escape a Dali-esque hellscape of plant/musical instrument hybrids trying to kill him. It’s an acid trip worthy of Fantasia and I love it.
“The Legend of Johnny Appleseed” is next. The whole thing is a little too Jesus-loves-me-this-I-know for my tastes, but given John Chapman’s real life religiosity that’s probably appropriate. John’s a scrawny little fella who wants to head west with the pioneers (because there’s “plenty of room” – nobody out there already, nope, just unclaimed, uninhabited land as far as the eye can MANIFEST DESTINY), but he doesn’t think he has the suitable skill set to survive out there. His guardian angel appears in a vision, because Johnny is out of his god-damned mind, and convinces him to head west with just a pot on his head, a bag of apple seeds and a Bible. Pretty sure the angel was muttering, “Kill them, Johnny, kill them all and take their eyes,” but my copy didn’t have great sound so he might have been saying something else. Long story short, Johnny spends the rest of his life planting apple orchards all over the country and becomes beloved by the good-hearted pioneer folk for providing them with God’s chosen fruit. After forty years of walking and planting, looking like someone you’d change subway cars to get away from, he dies underneath an apple tree (cyanide poisoning from eating too many apple seeds if I had to guess), and his angel comes to take him to Heaven. They need him, you see, because the afterlife doesn’t have any apple trees. And in a twist worthy of a Christmastime stop-motion “secret origin of Santa” special, it’s revealed that clouds are actually Heaven’s apple orchards, planted by the ghost of Johnny Appleseed. Betcha they didn’t teach you that in your Godless public school, did they, sonny? I hate apples but luckily I’m unlikely to ever get to Heaven.
I did some research on John Chapman after watching this movie (damn you, Disney, for prompting me to learn), and apparently the apple trees were beloved by the pioneers mostly for real estate reasons – orchards were required to maintain their claim on otherwise unclaimed land. Johnny had religious objections to grafting, so the wild apples that grew from his trees were pretty much inedible and only used for making hard cider. Thanks for getting our ancestors drunk, Johnny! Your legacy lives on today!
Next up is…oh, dear…”Little Toot.” (Must…resist…fart jokes…) Little Toot is a tugboat and he’s adorable as hell, and the toe-tapping song is sung by the Andrews Sisters, so I pretty much love this from frame one. Toot doesn’t take his job seriously – he just wants to play! – and he accidentally sends an ocean liner crashing into the city, toppling buildings and (presumably) killing thousands. Oh, Toot! You scamp! (Toot doesn’t talk so you could say he’s silent but deadly.) He gets banished to the deep ocean where he saves another ship and all is forgiven and Toot’s a hero. Hooray! Three toots for Little Toot! Toot! Toot! Too – oh, excuse me. I had cucumbers with lunch.
Joyce Kilmer’s poem “Trees” is set to music for the next segment, in which we watch a tree experience the changing seasons. Snore. I fell asleep just typing that. Nothing that wasn’t done better in Fantasia, or even Bambi. On the line, “Only God can make a tree,” the camera pulls back and the tree is in the shape of a cross with a glowing nimbus of light around it. Even the Veggie Tales cast would look at this and say, “A little heavy-handed with the religious stuff, don’t you think?”
“Blame It on the Samba” has…can it be? José Carioca! Donald Duck! Is that Panchito Pistoles? Could it be the Three Caballeros reunited? Oh, no, it’s not Panchito, it’s that irritating Woody Woodpecker rip-off, the nameless Aracuan bird. Oh, well. This segment is still pretty great, despite being a Caballero down. The music is fun and the birds never speak so I don’t have to worry about their complete incomprehensibility. I get worried when a live-action woman shows up, as the unnatural carnal lusts of cartoon fowl are well-documented, but the birds seem to be too caught up in the music to bother her. Also, unlike in other movies, they’re scaled to actual bird size compared to her, which I find weird for some reason. Like most cartoons with José and Donald together, the animators say goodbye to sanity about halfway through and things get really fun. This is definitely a highlight of the film.
Our next, and final, segment opens with tumbleweeds rolling across the desert at dusk while a lonesome voice croons, “Bluuuuuueeee shadooooows…on the traaaaaiiilllll…” Consider the mood well and truly set. It’s the story of “Pecos Bill,” told by live-action Roy Rogers to those two annoying kids from Song of the South, Bobby Driscoll and Luana Patten. (Luana was also the little girl in Fun and Fancy Free, so I guess she was not murdered by the living ventriloquist’s dummies as I hoped feared.) Trigger’s there too, but unfortunately he doesn’t do too much. (I say unfortunately because he’s a better actor than either of the kids.) So, yeah, Pecos Bill, lost in the desert by his parents as they headed west, found and raised by coyotes. (We actually see baby Bill headed to the coyote’s teat to nurse, but just as he’s about to get his lips around her we cut to mama’s face as her expression turns from surprise to pleasure. It’s…unsettling.) Bill basically gets super-powers from living with animals, and Roy sings a bunch of tall tales about Bill’s adventures, which are a lot of fun (apart from the one about the “painted Indians” – I won’t go into it, but…ugh). Then he meets Slue-Foot Sue and falls instantly in love. When we first see Sue she’s riding a giant catfish down a river, while the catfish jumps through the hoops she’s making with her lasso. I kind of fall in love with her, too. Sue meets an unfortunate end – on their wedding day, she gets bucked from Bill’s jealous horse and lands on the moon, stranded there forever, never to be seen again. And that’s why coyotes howl at the moon, Roy tells us in another Rankin-Bass kind of moment. The ending is meant to be silly but it disturbed me a little. Poor Sue, another strong female character fridged to provide motivation for the male protagonist.
And that just about exhausts my thoughts on the subject. Melody Time had more hits than misses, which is about the best you can hope for in these package films. It’s hard to judge them as features, since they’re really collections of cartoon shorts with only the flimsiest of connecting themes. This one’s worth having on in the background while you do housework, I guess. But Disney can do better.

Nov

2014

Ten Thoughts on Fun and Fancy Free

I’m watching every Disney movie from the beginning for this series. Sometimes it’s Pinocchio, and it’s so beautiful and amazing that it’s a struggle to contain myself to just ten thoughts. Sometimes it’s Song of the South, and ten thoughts don’t seem nearly enough to elucidate the depths of my revulsion.

And sometimes it’s Fun and Fancy Free.

Fun and Fancy Free (1947) was another of Disney’s package films, made up of two shorts that were originally intended to be features on their own, but, due to financial concerns from the hit the studio took during the war, plus concerns about the artistic merits of the pieces, they were scaled back and bundled together as one movie so that they could hopefully make a little money to fund later, better pictures. The results are unsurprising.

The credits are promising. Edgar Bergen! Dinah Shore! And Mickey, Donald, and Jiminy Cricket are slipped into the credits along with the actors. That’s cute.
We open with Jiminy singing a fun song (which I later find out was cut from Pinocchio, because the key word for this film is “leftovers”) while roaming around somebody’s house. He comes across a fish in a bowl and I wonder for a second if it’s Cleo, but it’s not quite sexy enough. More cute than sexy. (I feel so dirty right now. In case you haven’t read the rest of this series, there’s a disturbing recurrence of sexy fish in Disney movies. It’s not me, it’s them.) And there’s a cat that tries to eat Jiminy, so it’s definitely not that wimp Figaro. By this point it’s clear that JC is in a modern house – given that Pinocchio was set in ye olde timmes, I’m questioning how long crickets live. He comes across a sexy French cancan doll and it cries out, “Mama,” as if it were a baby doll. Creepy. Who lives here?
The first animated short is “Bongo.” It’s about a circus bear who escapes to live out his dream of living in the wilderness. I think it worked out better for Disney that he could burn this off here, rather than developing it into a film of its own. The animation is fine, but nothing special – it’s short feature quality, not full-length. The plot is uninspired. It’s not bad, it’s just kind of dull. There are a lot of long stretches where Dinah Shore sings a perfectly lovely, perfectly sleepy song and nothing much is happening on-screen.
But there’s a circus train! Is it Casey? IS IT CASEY?!?! It’s not Casey. Just some dumb old non-anthropomorphic train. Darn it.
Bongo can ride a unicycle across a high wire while juggling twenty objects but in the forest he trips over a root and can’t climb a tree.
Finally Bongo meets a pretty girl bear and the plot picks up a little. He’s wearing clothes and she’s naked, which is a little disconcerting. The big romantic complication comes when she slaps him and he thinks she’s rejecting her, but actually, as Dinah Shore tells us via the magical medium of song, “a bear likes to say it with a slap.” It, in this case, being a declaration of love. It’s all very “He Hit Me (And It Felt Like a Kiss)”. At first I’m worried about the problematic message this is sending kids about partner abuse, but the she-bear is into it, and I ultimately decide it’s a nice message about initiating your partner into the joys of consensual S&M play. Very forward thinking of you, Walt. Very sex positive.
Back to the framing sequence, and Jiminy Cricket finds an invitation to child actor Luana Patten (she played the annoying little girl in Song of the South) to come to a party next door. He hops over to gate-crash and stumbles upon a complete and utter horror show. It’s a live action sequence with little Luana being thrown a party by adult comedian/ventriloquist Edger Bergen. THERE IS NO ONE ELSE AT THIS PARTY. A grown man is throwing a party for a little girl he is not related to and there are no other guests. The whole living room is decorated and he’s putting on a show just for her. He offers her cake and candy and I keep checking my phone for an Amber Alert. Oh, I guess technically there are other people at the party, Bergen’s dummies Charlie McCarthy and Mortimer Snerd. WHO MOVE AND TALK ON THEIR OWN. What the flaming hell? Were children of the forties completely inured to nightmarish homunculi? Because I’m convinced I’m going to wake up tonight to see Mortimer Snerd standing over my bed with a cake knife.
The cartoon for this sequence is “Mickey and the Beanstalk,” which is reasonably well-known from being snipped out of this movie and shown on its own from time to time (with Bergen’s narration mercifully replaced by that of Ludwig von Drake). It’s pretty good – it works as a short a lot better than “Bongo,” although I’m not sure it would have held up as a feature. I can tell it’s unfinished, even though I didn’t learn its history until after I watched – it’s very jumpy, with Bergen’s narration covering big gaps in the narrative.
I will grudgingly admit that the wisecracks from McCarthy and Snerd, interlaced throughout the short, are pretty funny. They comment on it like a 40s version of Mystery Science Theater 3000. They’re funnier when I can’t see them because their jokes aren’t drowned out by my screaming.
And, uh…that’s pretty much that. One mediocre short, one decent short, one terrifying framing sequence, all wrapped up in just over an hour. That was…a movie. I guess? Maybe we’ll do better next time…

Oct

2014

Ten Thoughts on Song of the South

Oh, boy. Take a deep breath. Hold your nose, maybe. Here we go. Song of the South (1946) was Disney’s first dramatic live-action film, though it does (thankfully) contain some animated segments. It’s based on the “Uncle Remus” stories of Southern African-American folklore collected by Joel Chandler Harris. And I feel like there’s something else notable about it I’m forgetting…oh, right. It’s kinda racist. I had never seen the film before, and odds are neither have you. Its last release in theaters was in 1986, and it’s never been released for the home market in North America, only overseas (and even then the last release was in the UK in 1991). So, it’s kind of hard to come by. Lucky for you, I’m nothing if not resourceful. So let’s dive in, shall we? (After the cut – this is a long one…)

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