disney

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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Aug

2014

Ten Thoughts on Make Mine Music

I had never heard of Make Mine Music (1946) before beginning this project. It’s another package film made on the cheap while the Disney studio was struggling in the aftermath of World War II. It’s sort of a low-rent Fantasia – a collection of unrelated vignettes set to jazz music. And wouldn’t you know it, there just happen to be ten such vignettes. How convenient!

The Martins and the Coys is technically the first short of the film, but it’s the one I watched last. After I finished the movie, I looked it up online and discovered that the copy I had viewed was missing this segment. Turns out, it was edited out of all of the home video releases in America because of concerns about excessive violence. Well! How can I hear that and not dig up a copy? I was only able to find a terrible quality Italian-dubbed version of it on YouTube, but I suffered through it because I care, readers, I care. A few seconds in I paused to go and read the lyrics in English because I had no idea what the hell was going on, but then I muddled through to the end. The cartoon is a twist on the Hatfield/McCoy feud. All of the Martins and Coys look exactly alike, which I would say suggests inbreeding except there isn’t a single woman among them, so I’m thinking cloning. Well, not a single woman except for one of our two stars. The families wipe each other out except for one young and hot representative from each side, a young man and a young woman (I don’t know which comes from which family because it was in Italian). They fall in love, get married, the ghosts of their dead relatives freak out, and then the newlyweds beat the ever-loving shit out of each other. The end. I don’t know if I would have edited it out for the violence so much as for the scene where a chicken is pecking food out of a sleeping Coy’s beard. It was seriously gross.
Blue Bayou is next (or first, if you’re not as obsessive a completist as me). It pretty much does what it says on the tin – there’s a bayou, and it’s blue. A bird flies around. It’s sort of pretty. Nothing really happens. The music’s real slow, and I’m falling asleep five minutes into this movie.
All the Cats Join In and I am jolted awake. Benny Goodman and his Orchestra play a jumping jam to accompany some cartoon teens getting together to swing, baby, swing. It’s awesome. We see the pencil drawing the scene and there are a lot of clever bits made from this conceit. A car full of kids zooms away too fast for the pencil to finish drawing it, so it has to catch up to the car at a stoplight. A boy teen yawns when a girl teen with a big butt is interested in him, so the pencil erases the weight off and he’s…wait, that’s not clever, it’s a painfully offensive relic of its time. Never mind. Hey, a naked girl! Very racy for a Disney flick – this was back when Walt was still trying to be all grown-up about things. I thought it was pretty sexy while I was watching it, with the girl in the shower and getting dressed and all, and then I learned there were bare boobies in the original version, which were also edited out for home video. Human boobies – bad. Centaur boobies – A-OK!
Without You brings me back to Slumberland. It’s a lovely song but nothing’s happening on the screen – just scenery changing. At least when Fantasia was dull, it was pretty. Even the animation in this segment seems bored.
I’m guessing you’ve probably heard of Casey at the Bat. This is a gag-filled “musical recitation” by Jerry Colonna of the famous poem. I won’t go through it joke by joke (even though having visual jokes described to you is hysterical) but the last bit with Casey in the rain in the empty park, repeatedly throwing balls to himself, swinging and missing, crying uncontrollably, is bleakly hilarious.
Oh, hey, Dinah Shore sings this next one, Two Silhouettes! I remember her from a talk show and…lesbian golf or something? Anyways. It’s two shadowed ballet dancers prancing in front of an animated background. The dancers are real, they’re completely silhouetted, and it looks pretty cool. I found myself wondering if they were wrapped head-to-toe in green-screen material, which might explain why, considering they are dancing a ballet, they don’t actually move around all that much.
Peter and the Wolf is up next, an animated acting-out of Prokofiev’s tune. The opening – with the narrator, Sterling Holloway, explaining how each instrument represents a character – is very Fantasia. The cartoon is silly fun, but I have some issues. The wolf is drawn in a very Satanic manner and it is constantly drooling. The animators are clearly trying to influence us to root against this noble beast. The good cat tries to eat the good bird and we’re all supposed to forgive and forget, but the wolf just tries to defend himself – Peter and his menagerie come hunting for him, remember – and somehow he’s the bad guy? Prejudice! Wrote a song about! Like to hear it? Hear it go. Also, the wolf clearly eats Sonia the duck – we actually see her ghost go to Heaven – but then the filmmakers wimp out and make it so she’s alive at the end. The Martins and the Coys shooting each other to death was fine, but a wolf eating a duck is a step too far? America has weird values.
After You’re Gone has Benny Goodman back again as each member of the Goodman Octet is represented by an animated instrument going wild. It’s non-realistic and incredibly fun and somewhat nonsensical – I particularly liked the fingers in tutus dancing on the keyboard – and it’s over way too soon.
Johnnie Fedora and Alice Bluebonnet is about two hats that are in love. There’s not much more I can say about it, except excessive time spent on Tumblr led me to expect the fedora to say “M’lady” a lot while wearing a trenchcoat and holding a My Little Pony.
I almost jumped off my sofa in excitement when I realized the final installment was The Whale Who Wanted to Sing at the Met. I had the book and record set of this as a kid – those of you of a certain age may remember these, you turned the page when you heard the bell. I loved the damn thing, but it had been so long that I had forgotten the entire story. I always thought it was a stand-alone Disney short, I had no idea it was a part of a feature. So I was pretty excited to see the actual cartoon for the first time, and I wasn’t disappointed. Seriously, get this DVD just for this short (I’d say watch it on YouTube but I can’t find it). It’s about an opera-singing whale named Willie who dreams of being discovered. Nelson Eddy does all the voices and he’s superb. There is an extended dream sequence of Willie singing opera’s most famous roles at the Met – him immense, his co-stars normal sized – and it’s perfection. He’s Pagliacci with a HUGE red nose and a tiny, tiny hat. It’s just…see it. Make Mine Music has a lot of really great ups and a few really boring downs, but this final segment makes the whole film.

Aug

2014

Ten Thoughts on The Three Caballeros

I saw The Three Caballeros (1944) once when I was very little, but all I remember is the theme song and wondering why the other two caballeros with Donald weren’t Mickey and Goofy. This film is better known than its thematic predecessor, Saludos Amigos, because of more frequent theatrical and home video releases, but it’s essentially another package film, and another tour through Latin America as seen through the Disney lens.

The opening sequence, which is also the framing sequence throughout the film, is Donald celebrating his birthday (Friday the 13th) and receiving presents from Latin American friends. He receives a film projector and gets tangled in the screen while setting it up and stays remarkably composed, given his well-known history of anger management issues. The first short he watches is called “Aves Rares,” or “Strange Birds,” and Donald indicates birds by making a shadow puppet of wings and flapping them. He makes the shadow puppet of wings with his…wings. It’s very confusing. It’s like making a shadow puppet of arms with your hands. Why not just use your arms? I spent so much time thinking about this that I missed most of the strange birds.
Pablo is the titular (heh) star of the next short, “The Cold-Blooded Penguin.” He’s a penguin at the South Pole (or “Polo Sur”) who hates the cold so he makes his bathtub into a boat to sail to a nice warm South American island. It’s a fun cartoon but there’s a bit at the end where the bathtub is filling with water and he’s frantically trying to bail it out, and it only works if we don’t know that penguins can swim. Which is something they’re actually pretty well known for. I’m okay with a penguin having a bathtub but my suspension of disbelief only goes so far.
More strange birds of South America! Did you know that toucans can’t make love because they wallop each other with their beaks whenever they try to kiss? No? Me, neither. I’m beginning to think that this feature is not living up to its remit to educate its audience about Latin America.
“The Flying Gauchito” is about a little Uruguayan boy named Gauchito (“Little Cowboy”) who, while out hunting condors finds a winged donkey named Burrito (“Little Donkey” – think about that the next time you order the beef at Chipotle). First off – hunting condors? That’s a thing? Second, it’s here that I realize how much Spanish vocabulary this movie is hurling at us with no explanation, just plopped in the middle of otherwise English sentences. It’s like the screenwriters for this flick were Dora the Explorer and El Dorado from The Super Friends. Anyway, Gauchito enters Burrito in a race and he wins but then Burrito’s wings are revealed and everyone accuses him of cheating and so they fly away and – in the words of the older Gauchito, who’s narrating the story – “Neither him nor me was ever seen again as long as we lived.” The end. Uh…okay? That was abrupt. Did you fly into the upper stratosphere and freeze to death? Did you go off and live happily in the Andes with your donkey-bird? I feel like there’s more to this story. It’s all very “Poochie died on his way back to his home planet.”
Hey, José Carioca is back! He’s that sketchy Brazilian parrot from Saludos Amigos. This oughta liven things up. José takes Donald on a tour of South America, which eats up the rest of the film. Baía is first, which is lovely (it looks like foreign money) although the song is a little dull. They jump into a pop-up book to interact with the locals, including singer Aurora Miranda (sister of Carmen, who was a famous entertainer mostly remembered for wearing a hat made of fruit). Donald and José go ga-ga for Aurora in a particularly unconvincing mix of live-action and animation. Aurora has crazy eyes. Maybe it’s from having to interact with rear projection so much, but I’d play it safe and stay away, fellas.
I can’t understand a damn word either of these birds is saying.
Before we resume our tour, we finally meet the third caballero – Panchito Pistoles, representing Mexico. They sing the title song – “We’re three happy chappies, with snappy serapes, you’ll find us beneath our sombreros…” and then they all fire guns into the air. And it’s still less offensively stereotypically Mexican than what I saw on Univision at the laundromat this morning.
And suddenly a group of big-headed Mexican children straight out of a Little Golden Book are teaching me about the true meaning of Christmas and it’s all very earnest and it has something to do with piñatas and I have to check to make sure I’m still watching the same movie.
That last segment is where this movie really goes off the rails and never comes back. It’s not bad – it’s kind of great – it’s just insane. The trio of birds fly over Mexico on a magical serape taking in the sights. Why don’t they use their wings? Don’t ask silly questions. Donald starts horn dogging it again on the live-action ladies. Cartoon birds love live-action ladies. They fly over Acapulco Beach and all three birds go nuts dive-bombing the hot bikini babes. There are no men, by the way – they must all be at a different beach. (Can I go there?) The interaction between the actors and the animation is much better in this segment – at one point the beautiful ladies catch and bounce Donald in a blanket and it’s flawlessly done. I completely bought into it.
And then Donald drops acid with the animators, that’s the only explanation I can find for this last section. His unnatural lust for human women has finally driven him mad. I don’t even know how to describe it. He’s up in the sky gathering stars and he’s chasing this singer and then there’s a woman dressed like a flower and then he dances with an adorable cactus lady and José and Panchito keep appearing and inexplicably tormenting him and the flashing colors and the noise and I think the filmmakers had some issues to work out. And then Donald gets inside a bull costume made of fireworks and bullfights with Panchito but then José lights the fireworks and they explode and that’s the end of the movie. (Add tequila, churros and a donkey and it’s a trip to Tijuana I took in 1996.) The Three Caballeros isn’t a bad flick. Some of the travelogue sections get a little dull, but the humor veers between classic Disney and batshit crazy, both entertaining in their own way. Plus the theme song is catchy as hell. I give it two and a half caballeros.

Jul

2014

Ten Thoughts on Victory Through Air Power

Victory Through Air Power (1943) is an odd film. It’s the first example of wartime propaganda produced by Disney. I had never seen it before – hadn’t even heard of it until I was deciding which movies I was going to watch for this series of posts. Apart from the opening sequence, it wasn’t ever shown on TV and it wasn’t released on home video until 2004, so it’s fairly unknown, despite it being only the eighth Disney feature. It really is blatant, unashamed propaganda – it’s based on the book of the same name by Major Alexander P. de Seversky, who appears in the film in the live action sequences giving a lecture to the American people and, most particularly, to military and government leaders, about the necessity of increasing America’s commitment to develop long-range bombing and of building a better fleet of long-range bombers. That’s it. That’s what the whole movie’s about. Like I said, it’s an odd film.

The opening sequence, “History of Aviation,” is the only part of the film that was occasionally shown over the years since this film’s release, since it stands on its own and isn’t quite as propaganda-y as the rest. It’s a cartoon telling us – well, the history of aviation. And it’s very cartoony – although the narration is straightforward, there’s a lot of humor in the animation. You could replace Orville Wright with Goofy and I’d believe it’s another installment in his “How To” series. Overall, this segment is pretty awesome. It’s entertaining and even educational.
There’s a close-up on a newspaper. The headline we’re meant to see says, “U.S. War Dept. Plans Air Corps,” but the headline beneath that reads “Rich Filipino Brings Natives Here.” I think I’d rather watch that cartoon.
According to “History of Aviation”, pilots in the first world war were quite polite to each other at first, even friendly. The very first dog fight began when a French pilot snapped a picture of his German counterpart as their planes were passing, but when the French pilot developed the film, the German pilot was making a nasty face at him. So the next time they passed the French pilot threw a brick at him. I am beginning to doubt the historical accuracy of this cartoon.
Into the first live action sequence, and Seversky is wasting no time. He starts right off with the great risk America is at of being bombed by the Germans. This was released just a few months after Pearl Harbor, by the way. The filmmakers know how to play to the fears of their audience – essential for any good piece of propaganda. And this is pretty effective propaganda. It’s very clear and persuasive. There’s an interesting segment about how Germany’s dominance of the air led to their successful invasions of France and Norway.
The music is amazing. The orchestral score keeps dropping in bits from “La Marseillaise,” “Rue Brittania,” and “America the Beautiful” (to name just a few) whenever we’re meant to get teary about those songs’ respective countries. It works. (The film was nominated for an Oscar for Best Score.)
Hey, that silhouette of a WWII tank kind of looks like a Dalek! Oh…wait…I probably have that backwards…
This may come as a shock, but the segment on the importance and logistics of supply lines is a little dull.
There are a lot of impressive, effective images in this movie. A champagne bottle smashes against a supply ship, launching it. Cut to: a torpedo hits the ship in the exact same spot, sinking it.
There’s a symbolic bit where a circle with a swastika at the center, representing the German front, is besieged on multiple sides by arrows, representing the Allied forces, trying to burst through the circle to reach the war machine factories at the center, when one of the hypothetical long-range bombers flies straight through and drops a bomb which explodes in the center and then all the arrows which couldn’t puncture the circle scatter in all directions. It reminds me so much of a cartoon from a high school health class about a bunch of sperm trying to fertilize an egg. (Minus the swastika, hopefully.)
The movie ends with some severe war porn – animated shots of American planes bombing the hell out of Japan, the entire country’s infrastructure destroyed. There are no people shown but it’s really quite disturbing. While I’m sure it was meant to inspire the people of 1943 who had just endured such a frightening sneak attack on American soil, today the delight we’re meant to take in the destruction of our enemies is rather chilling. But then there’s a giant eagle and it’s fighting an evil octopus, and the eagle kills the octopus which releases the daggers it had been plunging into the Pacific islands with its tentacles and then the eagle lands on a post and turns to gold and the post is a flagpole and the American flag is waving and The End. What the hell did I just watch?

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