Reflections on the Wartime Era

If this Disney rewatch plan was going to have a rough spot, at least I got it out of the way early. This batch of films is unique in that they aren’t really full movies, they’re hodgepodges made out of the scraps of abandoned projects and half-baked ideas.

During World War II, Disney lost most of their animators to the war effort, either as soldiers or as animators for the U.S. government’s propaganda films. To keep from shutting down, Disney pulled together six package films—a bunch of shorts strung together as a feature—in order to put butts in seats and make the studio some money. It worked out for them financially—I hear Disney is still around, and maybe doing pretty well for themselves—but it’s hard to make the case that it worked quality-wise.

It’s probably helpful to establish a baseline of what these films look like, given that most people have a) never seen them, b) never will see them and c) should not under any circumstances seek out these pieces of garbage. Every film features voiceover narration, which is always overwritten and usually overbearing, obscuring what little quality there is in the film. The shorts themselves have some structural variety to them, ranging from 2-3 minute music videos animated to songs from popular performers of the day to longer narrative adaptations of fables and fairy tales like “Peter and the Wolf,” “Johnny Appleseed,” and “Jack and the Beanstalk.”

They also (almost) all have some pretty simplistic animation, owing to the limits of their situation, budget, and in some cases, their imagination. As much as the shorts can vary in structure, they can vary in quality, and often the few bright spots in each film would be followed by absolutely crushing awfulness.

The thing that nearly every film lacks, which was crucial to the Golden Age films, is patience. Somehow despite the fact that the films are entirely filler, they have little room to breathe, always rushing from one element to the next, charging forward without reflection. The most contemplative shorts end abruptly, and the most electric segments refuse to take the time to set the scene. As a result, it’s very difficult to care about any of the images. These are slippery films--your attention slides right off the screen, your eyes begging for something more interesting to look at.

How do you judge a set of films that barely count as films? At their most interesting, all six function better as dark reflections of better films in Disney’s canon than they do as pieces of cinema in their own right. As curios, they can have some value--as pieces of content? With few exceptions their content is pretty terrible.

Saludos Amigos (1943) - 2.5/5

Released a few months after Bambi with only a fraction of that film’s charm, Saludos Amigos is the first of two films that are products of Walt Disney and his animators going on a goodwill mission to Latin America. Produced mostly to counteract and undercut the ties between Nazi Germany and Latin American governments, the two films have something that every other wartime Disney film lacks: a point of view. Now, that point of view is unsophisticated propaganda co-written by the U.S. government, but at least the films have a semblance of cohesion.

At just 42 minutes, this is also Disney’s shortest feature film (just barely reaching the 40 minutes the Academy of Motion Pictures requires to consider it feature-length), which mostly saves it from being a slog. The first three segments are pretty dull, jumping between countries to give very simplistic overviews of their cultures. For segments ostensibly about Latin America, however, they’re pretty devoid of life.

The fourth and final segment, “Aquarela do Brasil,” has a spark of energy to it. It introduces José Carioca, a parrot who takes Donald Duck on a whirlwind tour of Brazil, and is animated as a paintbrush rendering a gorgeous and lively watercolor. This short actually works, mostly because it shows an actual sense of visual imagination beyond the static landscapes and slapstick gags that sustain the first 25 minutes of the film. Then just like that, the film’s over--breezy enough that it doesn’t feel exhausting, but lacking enough substance to recommend it. Too often it feels like an academic lecture written by someone who skimmed the Wikipedia article on Latin America.

The Three Caballeros (1945) - 3.5/5

An improvement in nearly every way on what Saludos Amigos was attempting, The Three Caballeros is still a fairly mixed bag. It’s more cohesive than its predecessor, and even features an actual frame story beyond “these Disney animators got on a plane and gee whiz would ya look at all that culture.” The frame—it’s Donald Duck’s birthday and his friends from South America are sending him gifts from afar to represent their homelands—is hardly more than an excuse to move from short to short, but it gives the film some propulsion.

*Whomst among us has not turned into a hummingbird and fallen in love with a singing head in the center of a flower*

Again, the early segments are among the weakest, but it builds in strength as it goes along. José Carioca joins the party halfway through after two fairly crummy shorts, and by the time we meet the third titular caballero—the Mexican rooster Panchito Pistoles—the film has locked into its groove. It all culminates in a musical number that’s somehow wilder than “Pink Elephants on Parade,” a nightmarish fever dream where Donald lusts after a live action singer. It’s colorful, energetic, and a whole lot of fun.

It’s a minor miracle that this film’s racism never gets worse than “aren’t Latin folks are so different and exotic,” so some points for clearing that very low hurdle. At the very least, the freaky “Donald’s Surreal Reverie” is worth a watch. (The final parts are here and here since the first clip cuts off.)

Make Mine Music (1946) - 1.5/5

The songs of Make Mine Music are all mostly absurd and forgettable, and even the most recognizable of the stories—“Peter and the Wolf” and “Casey at the Bat”—are sapped of nearly all their energy. Unlike Fantasia or even The Three Caballeros, Make Mine Music has no sense of what makes its elements meaningful, investing in slapstick and silliness rather than creatively interpreting the stories. That robs the stories of their emotional impact, and removes any sense that the segments are worth paying attention to.

I was obsessed with “Peter and the Wolf” as a kid. Interestingly, I remembered little to nothing about the actual events of that segment, even though every note of the songs resonated in my bones. It’s not a very good segment, but I can see why it appealed to me as a kid, especially a segment towards the beginning of the short (the standout sequence in the film) that breaks down the anatomy of the orchestral score.

This is also the only film not on Disney+, because the first segment, bafflingly inspired by the Hatfields and McCoys, features a whole lot of murder, and there’s a glimpse of nudity in the jazzy “All The Cats Join In.” It’s maybe for the best, as this is among Disney’s worst efforts. A simplistic slog with little to recommend it.

Fun and Fancy Free (1947) - 1/5

Whew boy, where to start. The first of the package films to only feature two longer short films instead of a bunch of unrelated segments, you’d think that the relative lack of manicness would make this film at least a little more watchable. You’d be wrong! This is one of the worst films I’ve ever seen, and I will be truly shocked if it isn’t at the bottom of my Disney ranking at the end of this.

Both shorts are saddled with baffling frame narratives. The first features a Jiminy Cricket who only speaks in rhyme dancing around a living room for five excruciating minutes--at about minute four of the rhyme-speak I nearly threw my computer--before finally deciding to play a storytelling record for his captive audience of two stuffed animals. The second, even more unhinged frame story features child star Luana Patten attending a party alone with fully grown adult Edgar Bergen and his two friends, Charlie and Mortimer. Also Charlie and Mortimer are ventriloquist dummies.

*Pictured: a totally normal way to introduce a Mickey Mouse cartoon*

Even getting past the frame stories, both of the shorts are bad. The first, “Bongo,” features awful narration from Dinah Shore that attempts to cover over the lack of excitement in the story with loud gasps and sing-song cheers. The animation is rote and repetitive, and the design offers nothing to make the characters memorable. “Mickey and the Beanstalk,” the second short, is somewhat better animated, but is narrated by the ventriloquist and his dummies so it takes the prize for the worst narrated short in all six films.

What Scared Reid: I’d seen “Mickey and the Beanstalk” before, but never with this frame story or narration. The frame takes a serviceable short and makes it borderline unwatchable, which might have something to do with why Disney has released it with three different narrators since its original premiere. The ventriloquist dummies didn’t scare me as a child, they scared me now, today, as an adult. Do not watch this movie.

Melody Time (1948) - 2/5

A film that benefited from coming after a complete disaster in my viewing order, Melody Time is (mostly) inoffensive and very forgettable. A crummy rip off of Fantasia, it features a Master of Ceremonies (a cartoon mask voiced by Buddy Clark) to introduce all of the segments, which helps the film feel a little less disjointed than Make Mine Music.

None of the segments are all that compelling. “Bumble Boogie” features a (bad) jazz remix of “Flight of the Bumblebee.” “The Legend of Johnny Appleseed” features an overtly religious justification for the settling of the West that implies the white settlers and the Native Americans had a nice friendly happy time together. “Blame it on the Samba” offers a worse version of the energetic closing numbers from Saludos Amigos and The Three Caballeros. “Little Toot” follows a mischievous fun-loving tugboat after his attempt to become more serious ends in a minor disaster.

It all ends on “Pecos Bill,” the worst segment of the film that features this gem of a scene that shows Bill randoming shooting at “painted injuns” and causing them to flee in terror, their paint rubbing off on the landscape to create the Painted Rock Mountains. It sucks, is my critical appraisal, and it probably just out-touches Dumbo to be the most racist film of this marathon. Congrats?

The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad (1949) - 3.5/5

By the time this film was in production, several of Disney’s animators (including many of their famous Nine Old Men) had returned from war, and wow does it show. Made up of two longer shorts just like Fun and Fancy Free, The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad has a couple of advantages over that dumpster fire. For one, its pair of narrators, Basil Rathbone and Bing Crosby, rock. For another, this film features some of the most kinetic, exciting animation Disney had yet attempted, a bold sign of things to come as the studio entered its next era.

The choreography in the animated action scenes is truly a breath of fresh air after several films of static, borderline lifeless sequences. The characters feel designed with actual intent and care rather than a few identifying traits slapped onto a basic form. Every face is more expressionistic, every environment rendered with more depth and attention to detail. You can tell that the masters have returned, and they’ve come to play--there’s fine work in both shorts, but the true standout is Ichabod’s terrifying night ride in “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.”

Ultimately, the film does still feel trapped between the two eras rather than fully advancing to the Silver Age. The songs are pretty awful and feel straight out of the earlier package films, and the narration is still a little overwritten. Plus, you can certainly feel why these two segments that were originally meant to be feature films were shortened, as neither really has enough meat on their bones. Still, it stands as the most successful film of the era, and I can’t even begin to say how excited I am to watch more like it.

What Scared Reid: Ichabod’s ride is a wicked bit of animation, especially because it’s even more frightening in its first half than its second. I’d never seen the film in full, but as a kid I remember being too scared to finish this short based solely on Ichabod’s first sinister steps through the woods, where every little noise is a potential ghoul out to get him. It’s still effective today, and the complicated chase that follows lives up to the opening spooks.

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Reflections on the Wartime Era