Reflections on the Golden Age
My quarantine project, assigned to me by The Gods (a.k.a. me hopped up on five cups of coffee) is to rewatch and rank every Walt Disney Animated Studios film.
A side goal of this project is interrogating my own memories. I was under the impression that I didn’t like Bambi or Sleeping Beauty (spoilers, I was super wrong!)--where did those feelings come from? And, maybe more interestingly, what has changed about me in relation to these films? Maybe it’s partly that these are films from another era, but more likely it’s my own perspective slowly warping as the world around me turns more chaotic and confusing. I’ve grown up.
Looking at these classics--or, in some cases, wannabe classics--with more mature eyes exposes the flaws in some and the insane level of craft in others. So far the experience has been pretty fascinating, and I’ve gained at least two new favorite films of all time.
Me and the boys, simping
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) - 4.5/5
The very first Disney film is also one of the very best. If there’s one thing to nitpick over, it’s that in some places the story felt thin, a symptom of perhaps the film not fully immersing me in its world. That’s the only tiny gripe I could level at this otherwise immaculate piece of art. The backgrounds are gorgeously rendered, every character’s design is charming and unique. It’s a wondrous world, and possibly Disney’s most perfectly realized fairy tale. Light on its feet and soothing to my chaotic brain.
Pinocchio (1940) - 3/5
There’s definitely some stuff to like here, but woo boy is this film off-putting. It’s a simplistic moral parable, which in and of itself isn’t the worst thing to be, but the morality of the film doesn’t track. Perhaps the biggest surprise to me is that Pinocchio’s trademark nose growing happens in exactly one scene in the film, and his lying doesn’t actually seem to be a part of his personality or something he must learn to overcome. He just sort of bounces from scene to scene, with his flaws and good traits shifting to meet whatever the scene requires of him. It doesn’t feel like the film has much to say about Pinocchio’s journey beyond “boys should be nice and behave.” The film is incredibly well animated, possibly to a fault--the craft on display during the Pleasure Island sequence is undeniable, but it also makes it into the most frightening and unpleasant scene I’ve ever seen in a kid’s movie.
Finally, worth noting that this has the first--and certainly not last--racist caricature in a Disney film, featuring a greedy, disgusting Romani man who owns a circus and keeps Pinocchio in a cage for money. His accent is atrocious and everything about him sucks, yet he still managed to not be the most racist thing I saw in this set of films.
What Scared Reid: The Pleasure Island sequence on the whole is troubling, and the stuff with Monstro the whale at the end I remember being far too intense for my li’l eyes. But the main offender was absolutely the donkey transformation, which is *still* the stuff of nightmares. This ode to body horror and child abuse set to the soundtrack of a scared boy crying for his mama is beyond the pale. Don’t misbehave or you’ll be sold into donkey slavery, kids.
Fantasia (1940) - 5/5
The first out and out masterpiece of my revisit, I was absolutely knocked out by this thing. Right from its bravura opening set to Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, Fantasia spins through layers of abstraction and storytelling, from sublime to the cartoonish to the divine. This is some of the most gorgeous and stylistically satisfying animation I have ever seen.
Squad rollin’ up like
The iconic Sorcerer’s Apprentice sequence, a gorgeous Silly Symphony cartoon that went over budget and sparked the entire Fantasia project in order to turn a profit, isn’t actually the best sequence in the film. That honor goes to The Rite of Spring, a visual history of the Earth that brings us from the formation of the planet through the age of the dinosaurs and contains a stunning balance of composition and subtle characterization. We see the dinosaurs for only moments each, and yet we get a grasp of their fullness of life, an idiosyncratic suggestion of personality that wisely stops short of full humanization. Other more cartoonish sequences bring comic energy into the film (including the stand out weakest sequence, The Pastoral Symphony), but the final depiction of Chernobog falling to the forces of light is an exercise in patience and beauty. Despite Disney’s attempts to replicate this triumph several times over the next century, this film is one of a kind.
What Scared Reid: The final sequence with Chernobog (unnamed in the film) is certainly frightening, and the demons prancing through Hell were definitely enough to keep this film off my rewatch list. It comes across now as relatively tame, and the Ave Maria payoff is quite something.
Dumbo (1941) - 2.5/5
To paraphrase the critic Karen Han (in talking about this year's The Gentlemen), the problem with saying a film would be fun if it wasn't so racist is that the film is still fucking racist. This one is *really racist*, wow. It’s sort of an accomplishment that the crows aren't the most racist thing in the film--that honor goes to this incredibly fucked vision of black workers who “work all day and work all night” and “never learned to read or write.” 2.5 is probably the ceiling here when about 15 minutes of the 63 minute running time is straight up racism, and it probably would've been a 2/5 if not for the extremely surreal, legitimately incredible Pink Elephants on Parade.
Dumbo is cute as a button, and “don’t bully people for being different” is at least a more coherent moral than Pinocchio had. But on the whole it struggles to hang completely together even if you can get past the racism--which, given how short this movie is, is a pretty big ask.
What Scared Reid: What...is this? Dumbo and Timothy get drunk and have a shared hallucination of...something? I don’t know? It rocks?
Bambi (1942) - 5/5
The second masterpiece of the bunch, this one was a legitimate surprise. I knew about 5 minutes in that it was something special and I just found myself hoping it could stick the landing, and oh man it does.
Live reaction shot of me, watching Bambi (1942)
Bambi is a film about being a confused, scared, sad kid, which I related to *way too hard*. It’s about that slow dawning realization of the size of the world, and how that size is full of beauty and wonder just as much as it’s terrifying. And it’s about making peace with your role in that grand order, learning about your responsibility to the people around you, and building your identity as a person from that responsibility. It’s also largely about how humans suck, which is a sentiment I will relate to forever.
None of that touches on just how beautiful this film is, from the smallest animation of Bambi’s spindly legs to the impressionistic swirling flames that threaten to overtake the forest. There’s so much soul and love in every frame. The death of Bambi’s mom gets a lot of credit as one of the saddest moments in film, but it’s critical that we don’t see it--we see the desolation it leaves in Bambi’s eyes, and we feel the absence of her love over the remainder of the film. It’s a sharp, subtle script that succeeds at portraying every moral lesson Pinocchio and Dumbo attempted to impart. A masterwork of empathy.