donald duck

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…

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.

Jun

2014

Ten Thoughts on Saludos Amigos

Saludos Amigos (1942) was Disney’s first “package film” – a feature made up of individual shorts. I had never seen this movie before – I had never even heard of it. Which, as it turns out, is kind of a shame…

There are four animated shorts in this movie, linked by a live-action travelogue about Disney artists touring South America for inspiration. They were actually on a goodwill tour commissioned by the State Department to counter some of the influence of Nazi Germany on Latin American countries, because Disney cartoons were very popular there. That last part isn’t mentioned in the movie, which is a shame because it’s kind of bad-ass. Walt Disney vs. the Nazis. That’s a bio-pic waiting to happen.
The first short shows us Donald Duck visiting Lake Titicaca and the nearby town, and everything is quaint and exotic and primitive and hoo boy is it 1942. It’s funny, though. I mean, it’s Donald Duck getting mad and there’s a snooty llama. How can it not be funny?
The second short is Pedro, about a baby plane on his first flight, picking up the mail from Mendoza, Argentina, and bringing it home to Santiago, Chile. It’s adorable. Who’s a cute widdle baby plane? You are, Pedro! Yes, you are!
The animators keep forgetting that Pedro is carrying the mail bag. It vanishes and reappears from scene to scene. Seeing as how the whole cartoon is about Pedro delivering the mail, that’s kind of an important plot element to neglect to draw.
A lot of the non-anthropomorphic animals in Disney shorts act as either the straight man or the antagonist to the main character. In the third short, El Gaucho Goofy, Goofy’s horse is just as ridiculous as he is, and it works very well.
El Gaucho Goofy ends with Goofy saying “Hasta la vista” and for a second I forget what year it is and I’m sure he’s going to end it with “baby” but then he doesn’t. Obviously.
There are live action shots of the carnival in Rio, and there’s not a single drag queen to be seen. I don’t care if it is 1942, I don’t buy it.
The final short is Aquarela de Brasil (Watercolor of Brazil) and it’s gorgeous, particularly the opening sequence where a paint brush creates the Brazilian rain forest. Even though they’re twenty years apart, and one is Latin American themed and the other Polynesian, I was reminded of the Enchanted Tiki Room – I wonder if there was some inspiration drawn from here. This short marks the first appearance ever of José Carioca, the cigar smoking parrot. José would go on to be hugely popular in Brazil, starring in his own series of Disney comics. He likes to get boozy, so I’m a fan.
Blink and you miss it, but just before the last sequence the paint brush drains the bottle of cachaça that Donald just got hammered on and uses the strong alcoholic liquid as its paint for the final samba scene. Brilliant.
If you can put up the theme park history tour, the shorts in this flick are pretty great. Don’t expect a movie, expect a couple of fun cartoons. It’s worth a watch.

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