By Scott Ross
In April, the sublime (The Little Mermaid); in May, if not the ridiculous then arguably the pits.
After years of avoiding them except in excerpt form — the only way to really enjoy the best segments in them — I finally sat down with the entire run of Walt Disney’s animated anthology movies, which constituted his studio’s entire feature output between Bambi in 1942 and Cinderella in 1950. It was a period of consolidation and uncertainty at Disney; he took on government work that, due to his perfectionism, consistently lost him money and added to his debt. In addition to the general run of the studio’s shorts (Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, Goofy, Pluto, the Silly Symphonies) Walt augmented its output with this uninspired, and largely uninspiring, series of omnibus pictures. Although all the titles save Saludos Amigos are feature length, they are neither the fish of a short subject nor the fowl of a true narrative feature, and, uniformly, contain the worst impulses of both Disney and his staff: An over-reliance on mostly unfunny gags and an anemic preciousness that can cause the teeth to ache. I can’t think of another comparable animation unit that, during the studio era anyway, hit such a long stretch of mediocrity and even downright rottenness in its output.
The Reluctant Dragon (1941) It’s a flaw in me, I know, but I have always found Robert Benchley’s patented nervous-after-dinner-speaker routine a trial. Unfortunately, fully half of this Disney exercise in self-promotion is taken up with it, and him, so it’s a double relief to get to the animated bits, even when they’re only mildly diverting, as in the “Baby Weems” sequence, a trifle about a little temporary post-natal genius. (Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner did this business much better 20 years later in their “Two-Hour Old Baby” sketch.) The picture is in the form of a tour of the Disney studios, with Benchley being shown various aspects of animation production. As nice bonuses we get the recording session of an operatic duet between Florence Gill as Clara Cluck and Clarence Nash, the voice of Donald, and Jack Kinney’s Goofy short How to Ride a Horse with John McLeish’s peerlessly stuffy narration. And if the titular centerpiece, an adaptation of Kenneth Grahame’s literary fable, lacks the charm of the original, it has in Barnett Parker’s hilariously fruity vocal characterization of the dragon the gayest animated figure in an American theatrical feature after the implementation of The Motion Picture Production Code.
Saludos Amigos (1942) James Agee, writing in The Nation in 1942: “Barring a few infallible bits of slap-stick and one or two kitschy ingenuities with color, Saludos Amigos depresses me. Self-interested, belated ingratiation embarrasses me, and Disney’s famous cuteness, however richly it may mirror national infantilism, is hard on my stomach.” This 43-minute featurette made to promote the Good Neighbor Policy, in which the United States government in its terror of “losing” the Southern Hemisphere to the Axis pretended it had never had designs on the resources of Mexico and South America, depresses me as well. Its chief virtues, seen from a 21st century perspective, are its brief documentary glimpses of Walt and some of his staff — Mary Blair and Frank Thomas are the most easily identifiable — and the Jack Kinney-directed El Gaucho Goofy, presumably the source of Agee’s infallible bits of slap-stick, and which was just as funny viewed as a short subject outside of the Latin American context. Decidedly not funny is Pedro, the saga of a baby Chilean mail-plane. (Pedro was no funnier, but just as nauseatingly cutesy-poo, when Tex Avery Anglicized him in 1953 as Little Johnny Jet.) The Donald Duck sequence at Lake Titicaca is at least pleasant-looking, and the combined live action/animation isn’t bad.
The Three Caballeros (1944) If you’ve ever spent time ruminating on whether Donald Duck is heterosexual, The Three Caballeros provides the definitive answer. This unofficial sequel to Saludos Amigos which while lasting only 73 minutes feels like 273, features endless depictions of the duck frantically pursuing half the human female population of Mexico — object: inter-species rape, presumably. He acts at all times like a maddened bull elephant and there are moments watching this immoderate display when you sit there slack-jawed with incredulity, unable to believe the Disney animations could expend this much time, effort, ink and ingenuity depicting the priapic misadventures of a waterfowl sex-maniac.
Although I took a 10-minute shower immediately after watching The Three Caballeros, scrubbing the stain from my soul took considerably longer.
Make Mine Music (1946) Must I?
The first of Walt Disney’s post-war musical olios is a mishmash of the best and the worst impulses of its makers. When it’s good, as in the “Peter and the Wolf” sequence and the Benny Goodman “All the Cats Join In” with its antic collection of teenage hepcats, it’s very good. When it’s bad, which is most of the time, it’s maudlin kitsch on an epic scale, unrelieved by either taste or good humor.
Of the original 10 pieces on the program, one, “The Martins and the Coys,” has been self-censored by the Walt Disney Company on its home-video releases, according to the movie’s Wikipedia entry, “due to objections to the film’s stereotypical depiction of hillbillies.” My God! Now we have to worry about offending them?!?
Melody Time (1948) Nearly as blood-curdling as Make Mine Music, what with an extended cutesy-poo evocation of Currier and Ives, a sanctimonious Johnny Appleseed segment narrated (and brayed) by Dennis Day, a stomach-churning Little Toot adaptation, a reprise of Donald Duck in his Latin phase relieved only by the Ernesto Nazareth polka which accompanies him, and a studied, somber conjuration of Joyce Kilmer. The only bits with much of anything to recommend them are the “Bumble Boogie” sequence out of Rimsky-Korsakov with its tremendous piano work by Jack Fina, and the deliberately outsized “Pecos Bill” segment, told by Roy Rogers and The Sons of the Pioneers.
Fun and Fancy Free (1947) The last of Disney’s animated musical anthologies is marginally better than its predecessors for its second half, and could only have been improved by the complete axing of its first, the lugubrious, militantly un-charming Bongo, Sinclair Lewis’ fable about a little performing bear loosed from his circus train and taking refuge in the wild. Each time you think it can’t go on any longer, or be any less amusing, on it goes, being unfunny. Blessedly, Bongo is followed by the delightfully conceived and executed Mickey and the Beanstalk, the first teaming of Mickey, Donald and Goofy since Tugboat Mickey in 1940. Your appreciation of this fact will probably depend on whether that partnership means as much to you as it does to me, since I think of those trio shorts as the most inspired collections of brilliantly sustained animation gags between Mickey’s black-and-white heyday and the advent of Bugs Bunny. The sequence of the beanstalk growing in the night is almost profligate in its mixture of grace, pictorial beauty and magnificent comic timing, and if you’re a Chuck Jones fanatic you can see in the sequence with the dim-witted giant exactly where Jones took his inspiration for Beanstalk Bunny in 1955.
The two parts of Fun and Fancy Free are framed by live-action sequences in which the stories are told to Luana Patten by Edgar Bergen, Charlie McCarthy and Mortimer Snerd and which, defying the odds, are a great deal of fun, with Bergen illustrating once again why he was the ideal ventriloquist for radio.
Text copyright 2023 by Scott Ross
So few critics, so many poets 