The Reluctant Dragon (1941) is another hybrid film from the Disney studios, though it’s a very different creature from Fantasia. It’s a 74 minute fictionalized “behind the scenes” featurette wrapped around four cartoon shorts. This is the first of the films in this series of mine that I had never even heard of before, let alone seen. So what did I think? You know…I’m honestly not sure.
- Wacky henpecked husband and nagging harpy of a wife. Even in 1941, this wasn’t original. This doesn’t bode well. The live action sequences star Robert Benchley, whose wife has bullied him into trying to sell the idea of adapting the book The Reluctant Dragon into a feature to Walt Disney. Benchley and wife don’t own the rights to the book, mind you. I guess she’s hoping for a finder’s fee?
- Benchley’s wife drops him off at the studio for his meeting (he doesn’t have a meeting, yet Disney agrees to see him anyway – maybe Walt’s lonely? I’m not sure), but Benchley doesn’t want to meet with Walt Disney, because screw that guy (Maybe? Clear motivations are hard to come by in this flick.), so he ducks out on the nerdy (but cute) (that’s irrelevant, sorry) page who’s escorting him and sneaks around the studio. The various people he meets give him lessons on how animated movies are made instead of calling security. (Seems like a bad example to set for the children watching this – sneak away from a tour and see the REAL magic!)
- Benchley is a goddamn lech in this movie. He’s super gross to every woman he meets and they all laugh it off, but, hey, it’s all in fun and his wife is a monster so it must be okay. (Ugh.) He wanders into an art class because he see a pretty woman in a robe walk in and assumes she’s a nude model. (Which, to be fair, is not an unreasonable assumption. She could have been posing for Fantasia centaur boobies.)
- He wanders – he does a lot of wandering – into a film score recording with vocals by Clarence Nash as Donald Duck and Florence Gill as Clara Cluck. It’s wonderful and gives me hope that this movie might not be entirely terrible. And Florence Gill wears an evening gown and fur coat to record her chicken noises, which is bad-ass.
- There’s a really entertaining example of foley sound recording set to the first original cartoon of the movie, which stars Casey Junior, the train from Dumbo. (I watched this movie out of release order (it’s unsurprisingly hard to find), so it didn’t occur to me until now that this was Casey’s first appearance, since Dumbo wasn’t released for another few months.) Every time there’s a sound effect in the cartoon, they cut to the foley artists using a real object to make the sound. Also, the music from this cartoon is damn catchy. It’s still stuck in my head. All aboard!
- There are a couple of hints at upcoming Disney movies – I’d call them plugs, but they do genuinely seem to be in there just because they were what the studio was working on. It’s not like they’re saying, “Go see Dumbo, in theaters this fall!” or anything. In addition to the Casey Junior cartoon, Benchley is shown an animation cel from Bambi, and he examines some three-dimensional models (called maquettes) of characters from Lady and the Tramp and Peter Pan. He also steals a maquette of one of the racist topless zebra centaur ladies from Fantasia, because of course he does. (But hey, more centaur boobies!)
- The cartoon Baby Weems is our next original segment. It’s presented as a semi-animated storyboard, but it’s a full story about a baby genius and it’s amazing – genuinely funny and clever. It’s followed by a Goofy “How To” short, How to Ride a Horse. (I later learned this was the first in the series.) It’s also pretty great, and is the only one of the cartoons in this film to be released on its own. Disney should do the same for Casey Junior, Baby Weems, and the title cartoon – they’re all too good to be buried in this peculiar movie.
- Benchley finally gets to meet Disney, who’s just sitting down in his screening room to watch the premiere of his new animated short. Suprise! It’s The Reluctant Dragon, the very story that Benchley’s horrible wife sent him there to pitch. Benchley pulls out all the swag he’s been given by all the various departments and dumps it all in Disney’s lap, including the naked zebra lady, and it’s super creepy and gross. He plays it off with a laugh – “How’d that get in there?” – and everybody laughs along with him, but Walt had to be thinking, “You stole a little statue of a cartoon centaur, which was used to help make a movie for children, so that you could masturbate to it. You are a horrible, horrible man.” That’s certainly what I was thinking.
- I sound like a broken record, but the actual titular cartoon is wonderful. I’ve completely fallen in love with the character of the Reluctant Dragon and he deserves to be one of Disney’s iconic characters. (He also deserves to be a gay icon. The coding on this flouncing, poetry writing, tea drinking dragon is not subtle.) Much like Fantasia, the animation style seems way ahead of its time and much different from contemporary Disney fare – I’d believe this was made in the sixties. In fact, the pacifistic tone of the cartoon seems to be straight from the sixties too. It surprised me that it came from the Disney studios of 1941. The war in Europe was raging and Disney wasn’t exactly known for its anti-war stance. I know that before the attack on Pearl Harbor there was a lot of debate about whether America should enter the war and to what extent – this cartoon has me second-guessing what position Disney might have taken in that debate. (But just wait until two years and four movies from now, when DIsney releases Victory Through Air Power. Teaser!)
- The film ends like it started, with Benchley being nagged by his shrew of a wife. (I was going to call her a cartoonish shrew, but cartoon shrews are more likable.) She seems to think that if Benchley had gone straight to his meeting with Disney he would have been on time to sell him the idea, and that they made the entire picture, from having the initial concept to developing the film, in the hour or so that he was wandering around. I don’t expect her to have as thorough a grasp on what goes into making a movie as her husband now does, but that seems more than a little ignorant. Then again, she seems to think that just having the idea to adapt a book into a movie means you own the rights to it, so she’s clearly not a great thinker. Benchley curses at her in Donald Duck’s voice and lovingly cuddles a bust of his own head that a pretty girl sculpted for him. Creepy to the end.
