We've reached my first first-time watch for this series! Remember, movies I'm seeing for the first time are marked with an asterisk.
Also, boy I did not manage to keep these write-ups shorter like I had said I would.
4. Dumbo (1941)
It's also—unless we're counting the Romani stereotype Stromboli or the now-buried pieces of the original Pastoral Symphony—the first time that good ol' fashioned Walt Disney racism rears its head in one of the studio's features, in the form of Jim Crow, the jive-talking bird who mocks Dumbo for his attempt to fly. See, it's funny, because crow... Jim Crow... black people. Or something. The logic is fuzzy and somewhat horrifying. The thing is, though, that Jim Crow gets the absolute best song in the feature ("When I See an Elephant Fly"). Which is sort of this movie in a nutshell. It has problems, both in structure (the story is haphazard and lopsided) and in execution, but its good parts are so undeniably great that the movie as a whole gets pretty close to something like a flawed masterpiece. It's hard to call any movie that gives us the rain-soaked tent-raising sequence (also featuring troubling racial stereotypes, tbh), the drunken stupor cum acid trip "Pink Elephants on Parade," and, yes, "When I See an Elephant Fly" anything but good-to-great. And that's to say nothing of how crushingly sad this movie can be. Dumbo's mother reaching through the bars of her elephant jail to cradle Dumbo as "Baby Mine" plays is arguably the most effective moment of pure pathos in any of Disney's pre-WWII films—the only other candidates being one or two moments in Pinocchio and that part in Bambi. Aesthetics, aeshmetics.
5. Bambi (1942)
My memories of watching Bambi as a kid consist of my being mostly entertained by the child half of the movie and mostly bored by the adult half. I also remembered this movie being fairly lengthy, and I seldom made it to the end. Well, when I checked this movie out of the library the other day, what to my wondering eyes did appear but a 70-minute runtime, which makes it most definitely a fairly short movie. I also realized, as an adult, that I now find the child half of the movie to be mostly boring, too. For a movie that's about (among other things) growing up and realizing that the world is as harsh as it is beautiful, my becoming a little less enthused about a movie I already wasn't super enthused about seems a thematically appropriate takeaway.
But, per the other half of the movie's aforementioned message, I must also admit that this movie is quite beautiful. On a purely textural level, the film shares a bit of the flatness I saw in Dumbo, and there's certainly nothing so rich as Pinocchio's painterly strokes on the animated characters (though the forest backgrounds are stellar). But this movie is a masterpiece of character design and animation; the way the animals are simultaneously so realistic and so expressive is something that Disney never quite managed again (though they tried their darnedest with The Lion King), and long sequences of this movie are devoted to the sheer awe of seeing these characters in motion—something that, truth be told, contributes to the boredom I felt at times as much as it does the sheer technical achievement of the feature. There are also moments of shocking maturity and sobriety, to the point where it's really not clear the extent to which this movie was meant for children—not just the most famous death in cinema history (though there's no way to oversell just how shocking and callous the death of Bambi's mother is; I think it's the only death in a Disney movie that's not given the "Disney Death" treatment, i.e. letting someone be dead for a minute before resurrecting them via magic or some fake-out [something we've already seen twice in this retrospective]) but also the extended sequence about the male aggression of deer sexuality and the bit where we watch frightened pheasants huddle in fear at an approaching human, among countless other moments in the film. It's all extremely patient and not all that expository, and long, long portions are without dialogue, and the sheer ambition and audacity of the movie's vision is kind of a shock to me. Is... is this Disney doing slow cinema before slow cinema was even a thing?
All of which is to say that I have to walk back to a degree some of my hand-wringing in my Fantasia write-up. Disney still had a ton of non-children-oriented and aesthetically ambitious work up its sleeve in the form of this movie, though I'm reasonably confident this is the end of it.
6. *Saludos Amigos (1942)
My first first-time watch!
Even though Bambi and Saludos Amigos had their respective premieres within just a few months of one another (though Saludos Amigos's premiere in the United States was firmly in 1943—the movie's world premiere in August of 1942 was actually in Brazil), Saludos Amigos is the first Disney movie that's definitely not pre-World War II. It's not just that Bambi's lengthy production time meant that a large portion of its development occurred before the United States entered WWII in December of 1941, despite the movie's 1942 release. It's that the entire premise of Saludos Amigos hinges on specifically WWII anxieties. In response to fears that some Latin American countries would ally themselves with Nazi Germany, the United States government commissioned Disney to go on a goodwill tour of South America and, from that trip, to create a film that could be shown in Latin American countries to convince them that the USA was a-okay (despite having done all sorts of heinous stuff to Central America in the late-19th and early-20th centuries, but hey, details).
So with Saludos Amigos, you have the birth of what would keep Disney Studios busy during the extent of WWII: anti-Axis propaganda and "package films" (i.e. features that are really just a bunch of short films stitched together by a common conceit, which is what Saludos Amigos is). As propaganda, Saludos Amigos is pretty lightweight; the only mention of America at all is a brief comparison between American cowboys and Argentinian gauchos, and in general, the approach seems to be an implied, "Hey, Latin America, we like you; you should like us in return!", which is just about the most gentle propaganda of all time. There's also (from a 2018 perspective) the pervasive head-patting typical of travelogues from the mid-20th century, with lots of exoticism and use of the terms "local color" and "quaint" in its depiction of the various countries' cultures. It's definitely condescending, and the general premise of harvesting Latin American culture to be repackaged, animated, and sold back to Latin America in the form of a United States motion picture would be a lot queasier if the movie weren't so nice and genuinely curious about those cultures—Wikipedia quotes some dude who says that the movie actually helped dispel some of the backward misconceptions US audiences had about these countries, which (if that's true) seems admirable enough, if we're willing to accept a little bit of capitalistic cultural tourism as the slightly seedy tagalong.
And as a package film, Saludos Amigos is... fine. Of the four shorts included, there's only one I would call "bad"—"Pedro," the story of an anthropomorphic plane, devoid of drama and engaging animation and that, if anything, is a dark foreshadowing of the kind of nefarious hijinks Disney had seventy years up its sleeves for the Planes franchise. Two more—"Lake Titicaca" and "El Gaucho Goofy"—are pleasant enough semi-educational pieces involving Donald Duck and Goofy as clueless tourists stumbling through various aspects of South American culture. The last, though, "Aquarela do Brasil," is a legitimately great animated short; ostensibly a primer on samba music, it mostly just involves Donald Duck and José Carioca (the green parrot often seen on Saludos Amigos posters) dancing through Brazilian landscapes as they are being painted by the animators—a sort of proto-"Duck Amuck," and it's a delight.
We're going to be in these package films for a while, so better buckle up.
See y'all next time!
5. Bambi (1942)
But, per the other half of the movie's aforementioned message, I must also admit that this movie is quite beautiful. On a purely textural level, the film shares a bit of the flatness I saw in Dumbo, and there's certainly nothing so rich as Pinocchio's painterly strokes on the animated characters (though the forest backgrounds are stellar). But this movie is a masterpiece of character design and animation; the way the animals are simultaneously so realistic and so expressive is something that Disney never quite managed again (though they tried their darnedest with The Lion King), and long sequences of this movie are devoted to the sheer awe of seeing these characters in motion—something that, truth be told, contributes to the boredom I felt at times as much as it does the sheer technical achievement of the feature. There are also moments of shocking maturity and sobriety, to the point where it's really not clear the extent to which this movie was meant for children—not just the most famous death in cinema history (though there's no way to oversell just how shocking and callous the death of Bambi's mother is; I think it's the only death in a Disney movie that's not given the "Disney Death" treatment, i.e. letting someone be dead for a minute before resurrecting them via magic or some fake-out [something we've already seen twice in this retrospective]) but also the extended sequence about the male aggression of deer sexuality and the bit where we watch frightened pheasants huddle in fear at an approaching human, among countless other moments in the film. It's all extremely patient and not all that expository, and long, long portions are without dialogue, and the sheer ambition and audacity of the movie's vision is kind of a shock to me. Is... is this Disney doing slow cinema before slow cinema was even a thing?
All of which is to say that I have to walk back to a degree some of my hand-wringing in my Fantasia write-up. Disney still had a ton of non-children-oriented and aesthetically ambitious work up its sleeve in the form of this movie, though I'm reasonably confident this is the end of it.
6. *Saludos Amigos (1942)
Even though Bambi and Saludos Amigos had their respective premieres within just a few months of one another (though Saludos Amigos's premiere in the United States was firmly in 1943—the movie's world premiere in August of 1942 was actually in Brazil), Saludos Amigos is the first Disney movie that's definitely not pre-World War II. It's not just that Bambi's lengthy production time meant that a large portion of its development occurred before the United States entered WWII in December of 1941, despite the movie's 1942 release. It's that the entire premise of Saludos Amigos hinges on specifically WWII anxieties. In response to fears that some Latin American countries would ally themselves with Nazi Germany, the United States government commissioned Disney to go on a goodwill tour of South America and, from that trip, to create a film that could be shown in Latin American countries to convince them that the USA was a-okay (despite having done all sorts of heinous stuff to Central America in the late-19th and early-20th centuries, but hey, details).
So with Saludos Amigos, you have the birth of what would keep Disney Studios busy during the extent of WWII: anti-Axis propaganda and "package films" (i.e. features that are really just a bunch of short films stitched together by a common conceit, which is what Saludos Amigos is). As propaganda, Saludos Amigos is pretty lightweight; the only mention of America at all is a brief comparison between American cowboys and Argentinian gauchos, and in general, the approach seems to be an implied, "Hey, Latin America, we like you; you should like us in return!", which is just about the most gentle propaganda of all time. There's also (from a 2018 perspective) the pervasive head-patting typical of travelogues from the mid-20th century, with lots of exoticism and use of the terms "local color" and "quaint" in its depiction of the various countries' cultures. It's definitely condescending, and the general premise of harvesting Latin American culture to be repackaged, animated, and sold back to Latin America in the form of a United States motion picture would be a lot queasier if the movie weren't so nice and genuinely curious about those cultures—Wikipedia quotes some dude who says that the movie actually helped dispel some of the backward misconceptions US audiences had about these countries, which (if that's true) seems admirable enough, if we're willing to accept a little bit of capitalistic cultural tourism as the slightly seedy tagalong.
And as a package film, Saludos Amigos is... fine. Of the four shorts included, there's only one I would call "bad"—"Pedro," the story of an anthropomorphic plane, devoid of drama and engaging animation and that, if anything, is a dark foreshadowing of the kind of nefarious hijinks Disney had seventy years up its sleeves for the Planes franchise. Two more—"Lake Titicaca" and "El Gaucho Goofy"—are pleasant enough semi-educational pieces involving Donald Duck and Goofy as clueless tourists stumbling through various aspects of South American culture. The last, though, "Aquarela do Brasil," is a legitimately great animated short; ostensibly a primer on samba music, it mostly just involves Donald Duck and José Carioca (the green parrot often seen on Saludos Amigos posters) dancing through Brazilian landscapes as they are being painted by the animators—a sort of proto-"Duck Amuck," and it's a delight.
We're going to be in these package films for a while, so better buckle up.
See y'all next time!
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