Reviewing: Disney's Wartime Era (1942-1949)
After suffering financial losses, animator strikes, and the entry of the United States into World War II, Walt Disney was in a tight spot. The company needed films to keep itself afloat, but it didn’t have the funds to take the adventurous gambles Walt had enjoyed with flicks like “Fantasia” or “Bambi”. The result was a long string of “package films”, which were essentially collections of short animated segments. While most are utterly forgettable, there are one or two that turned out to be diamonds in the rough.
The Best: The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad
The Worst: Make Mine Music
Saludos Amigos (**)
In which a plane gets in a fight with a mountain
Although we need to cut Disney some slack here considering Hitler was in the middle of trying to take over the world, this is a far cry from the historic heights previously set by this animation studio.
So it's 1942. In North America, Pearl Harbor got blown up last year by the Japanese, triggering the United States' entry into the second World War. Over in Europe, Germany was well on their way to World Domination. France had fallen, and most of the mainland was under Nazi boots. And down in South America, the Nazis were trying to win the allegiance of various nations to help them in the war. The States no doubt recognized the potential threat that could come from a Nazi-occupied neighbour to the south, so they launched an interesting strategy.
They hired Walt Disney.
The American government figured that if they sent Walt down to make a few 'cartoons' inspired by the culture and landscape in Chile, Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico, it would strengthen the relationship between North and South America. Going on a business trip down south probably wasn't on Walt's mind at the time, given that a huge strike had just been kicked off by many of his animators. But finances were tight since the war had begun, and the government was offering to pay for the entire production. Walt got in the plane.
Saludos Amigos is super short. At 42 minutes, it barely counts as a movie. Its runtime is split into four segments. The first segment is Donald Duck touring South America, and it's utterly forgettable. The second segment is about a plane delivering mail - and it's not much more exciting than it sounds. There's a bit of Goofy doing his standard slapstick stuff that's fine, I guess. The final segment is its best - the animation is creative and charming, and it really captures the vibrance of South America that Walt's creative team saw during their trip.
But honestly, unless you're studying the history of Walt Disney Animation Studios, I can't think of a good reason to sit down and watch this. There's just nothing remarkable about it.
The Three Caballeros (**1/2)
In which a duck tries hitting on a bunch of young women and they’re surprisingly okay with it
This is mildly better than "Saludos Amigos", but that's not saying much.
Just like Disney's last picture, this film is not really one coherent narrative as much as it is a few scenes loosely strung together. Maybe back in the day that was an acceptable sort of experience to have in the movie theatre, but I can't really wrap my head around it as I watch them today. This should be a series of YouTube videos or a collection of short films, not a package film.
There's seven segments to this thing. The only ones worth bringing up are the ones with live-action elements, because they're actually pretty neat. The Three Caballeros (Donald Duck, Jose Carioca from "Saludos Amigos" and the newcomer Panchito Pistoles) travel through South America, dancing with real people that are sometimes on real sets and sometimes on cartoon backdrops. It's relatively seamless, and there's a particularly cool bit where two animated dancing rooster silhouettes transform into the live-action silhouettes of two dancing men. It's like a one-second shot, but it was the part of this film that I'm going to remember. There's a few creative ways they make it look like Donald Duck is really interacting with the live-action environment, like the spot where a bunch of girls on the beach appear to be repeatedly throwing Donald up into the air and catching him on a live-action blanket.
On the whole, though, I just want to get back to the stuff that Disney is known for. I know I've got a few more films ahead of me that are package deals like this one, but there's a reason nobody's seen these. They may have been necessary to get the company through World War II, but that doesn't mean they have a whole lot to offer us today.
Make Mine Music (**)
In which the studio that made the film dismantled it and sent the pieces to the far corners of the earth where no one could ever find it
Now that I’ve seen it, I no longer wonder why this is the only one out of 58 Disney Animation Studios films that is not included on Disney+.
I need you to know how difficult it was for me to track this movie down. When I began this watch-through quest, this was the first hiccup on the journey. I knew that this was the eighth Disney animated feature film, but after finishing up with The Three Caballeros, I was disappointed to find that ‘Make Mine Music’ was not on Disney’s streaming service. At first I thought that maybe the streaming rights were temporarily locked with some other company, but that couldn’t have been it. After all, who else is gonna care about a 1946 flick that’s essentially vanished from the general memory of the public? Then I considered the possibility that Disney was deliberately withholding some of their content so that they could release it at a later date. Or maybe it had something to do specifically with streaming in Canada. Whatever the case, I decided to move along and skip ‘Make Mine Music’.
Months later as I approached the end of my journey, I knew that I didn’t feel right about leaving this movie behind. My goal had been to watch EVERY SINGLE Disney animated film, and if I skipped this one intentionally, I’d be finishing a few steps short of my goal. So I started looking for sites that would allow me to watch the film anyway. Surprisingly, I didn’t have much luck on the traditional movie-streaming sites (even the legal ones). What I ended up having to do was look up the Wikipedia article that detailed the ten musical segments of the film, and then find videos that had been uploaded to YouTube for each segment. As a result, my watching experience was certainly not what the filmmakers initially intended, but I did my best.
And let me tell you something. Disney is right to leave this movie behind.
There’s been plenty of problematic moments in Disney’s earlier films. Part of that is just because of the nature of changing times. What is taboo in one culture may be commonplace in another, and vice versa. When Charlie Chaplin kisses a young boy on the lips in the 1921 film “The Kid”, we squirm and panic. But to the audiences of the time – and to some weirdo family members today – it’s totally cool to give little kids in our family smooches. There’s definitely moments like that in this film, and then there are other moments that are just certifiably over the line. There’s jokes about domestic turmoil (yelling, throwing objects, deep-seated anger), lots of people shooting and killing each other, and a naked teenage girl, for starters. Then there’s a sequence where the animator’s pencil comes right onto the screen to start drawing young couples at a dance, except one of the girls complains that she’s been drawn too large so the animator comes back and squeezes her waist and butt in tighter. It’s only THEN that guys come to dance with her. And in a baseball scene, it’s declared that the women who come and watch don’t understand a thing about it. Funny back then? Maybe. Okay now? Nope.
Sure, there’s some admirable bits in the picture. A sequence of two hats who fall in love evokes much the same emotion as Pixar’s “The Blue Umbrella”, and the finale segment of a whale who dreamed of singing opera professionally was actually rather poignant. But on the whole, I think Disney is going to have a hard time if they ever try to open this up to the public eye again. Some of the segments are definitely worth remembering, but there are others that remind us that the ‘good old days’ were just as imperfect as the days we live in now.
Fun and Fancy Free (**)
In which a dog and a mouse try to stop a duck from slaughtering a cow with an axe
Jiminy Cricket is in this movie which confirms the Disney Cinematic Universe and no one can convince me otherwise.
This film is made up of two shorts, only one of which is worth it. The first is about Bongo, a circus bear who escapes and begins living life in the woods. He finds a pretty she-bear, loses her to a much larger and stronger bear, but then gets her back after learning that bears show love to one another by slapping each other. It's fun, sure, but there's no substance to it. What I've always loved about Disney - and what I've always held as incredibly important compared to other family/children's films - is that there's always a meaningful and significant message behind the story. That's not the case here; the movie's title really sums it up. It's fun but ultimately soulless entertainment.
The second segment genuinely made me laugh a few times, which is the only reason I gave the movie two stars. Mickey, Donald, and Goofy star in an adaptation of "Jack and the Beanstalk", and the bit where they are starving to death is honestly really funny. The other notable thing about this segment is that it may or may not contain a Lost Disney Princess. The segment starts off by showing us a castle in a faraway land, and standing in one of the castle's towers overlooking the kingdom is a beautiful young woman who looks a little bit like Cinderella. She also happens to be a harp, yes, but given that we don't see anybody else in that castle, I'm inclined to believe that she's the princess of the kingdom.
What's weird about that segment is that it ends before we see things made right again. When the harp is stolen, the kingdom withers. But when Mickey, Donald, and Goofy return home with the harp, we don't see the natural balance restored, nor do we see them get any sort of reward for their work. We're just kind of expected to assume that things work out.
And then the giant from the story shows up in the real world for like five seconds, making this whole thing feel more like a hallucination than an actual film.
Melody Time (**)
In which a cowboy does some very racist things
This short-film compilation format just does not work for me at all. I can’t wait to get out of these movies.
What’s frustrating in watching these package films back to back is that it’s difficult to remember where one film ends and another begins. Within each film, there’s not much thematically that holds the individual segments together. And in this film, we move from a romantic skating scene to a whimsical musical romp with two of the Three Caballeros (yeah, they’re still around) to a story about a little tugboat...and then there’s the final segment with Pecos Bill.
Is it an American thing to appreciate this cowboy stuff? Don’t get me wrong - I’ve enjoyed many a western in my time, but this whole bit just had no positive impact on me. The story of how Bill shaped all these areas of the West is so obviously hyperbolic, and it wasn’t that fun to watch. And THEN there was the bit where he starred shooting at a bunch of caricatured Native Americans for no reason. The depiction of these indigenous people was startlingly offensive to say the least - it was the most outrageous thing I’ve seen Disney do since Dumbo.
The Johnny Appleseed segment was interesting and charming, but I shouldn’t have had to watch the rest. I see that a lot of people have good stuff to say about this film, so what am I missing?
The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad (***)
In which a handsome man uses a portly woman and a pumpkin as tools in his quest to win the affections of another woman
This is the last of the Disney “package films”, but it’s the first that I can honestly say I enjoyed from start-to-finish.
It seems that the key to Disney’s success (at least in my eyes at this stage of their history) has to do with their ability to adapt well-known works into animation. Disney’s Golden Age is entirely comprised of movies based off of books (with the exception of Fantasia, which underperformed upon its release). These package films haven’t been often based on well-known stories, apart from Mickey’s take on ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’ in ‘Fun and Fancy Free’ or the retellings of the stories of Johnny Appleseed and Pecos Bill in ‘Melody Time’. For this film, they decided to focus on just TWO stories, and both stories were already popular to begin with. “The Wind in the Willows” was a successful children’s classic that I currently have sitting on my shelf - I promise I’ll read it soon. The Legend of Sleepy Hollow is a staple of early American literature, and it’s character “The Headless Horseman” is absolutely iconic. Both stories gave Disney plenty of charm to work with. I’ve read Sleepy Hollow, and Disney captured the small-town fun and tension of the story. This isn’t something heavy and horrifying like Bram Stoker’s Dracula. It’s just a fun little tale with a spooky part thrown in for good measure.
I have never seen either segment before, but found both fun. Mr. Toad’s mannerisms are quite funny, and he’s a character that you find yourself rooting for almost immediately. He’s likable in a way that “Bongo” was not. Ichabod Crane was also very entertaining. The animators made the most of his lanky build, using physical comedy throughout the segment with great effect.
This isn’t a must-watch, but it’s the best film from this period of Disney’s history.
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