Disney Review: Melody Time, The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad, Cinderella

I'm blogging through all the feature films released theatrically by Walt Disney Animation Studios! For more information on the project, you can visit my introductory post here. You can see an overview of all the posts in the series here.

The package films this time were actually good, but thank heavens we're at the end of this era of Disney.

Remember, first-time watches are marked with an asterisk.

You can read the previous entry in this series here.

UPDATE: You can read the next entry here.

10. Melody Time (1948)

At this point, I'm not sure that I have a lot left to say about these package films other than to compare them to one another. And on that note, I suppose this is where I call Melody Time easily the best of the whole set—at least, the best of the ones that aren't The Three Caballeros, and really, that one's working on a different rubric altogether. Unlike virtually all the other package films, Melody Time doesn't actually have a bad short in its runtime; some are clearly better than others (I don't know that the sleepy "Once Upon a Winter Time" is ever going to be anyone's favorite), but overall, there's a consistency of quality in these shorts that sets the movie as a whole above the others.

And even including The Three Caballeros, Melody Time is the finest-looking Disney feature in motion since Bambi. The animation is certainly more inventive in Caballeros, but it's still obviously a shoestring affair. Melody Time, on the other hand, has a fluidity and range of expressiveness in all its characters that the package films have usually reserved for celebrity characters like Mickey and Donald; it's the first movie in quite a while that has the feel of Disney animation being on its technical A game, from the nocturnal lighting in "Blue Shadows on the Trail" to the water animation in "Little Toot" to the triumphant amiability of the protagonist in "The Legend of Johnny Appleseed" to the nightmarish, "Pink Elephants on Parade" style freakout of "Bumble Boogie" (my favorite short of the bunch).

Don't hear me saying that this movie is any kind of classic. There's a good deal of American mythologizing that veers from cloyingly wholesome in that mid-century way I hate (such as appears in "The Legend of Johnny Appleseed," to say nothing of the short's heinous propaganda for the red delicious apple, i.e. the worst apple) to horrifyingly racist in a way I hope we can all hate (the "painted desert" section of "Pecos Bill")—either way, a bunch of Manifest Destiny baloney. It's also, curiously, the only Disney feature I can think of (correct me if I'm wrong, internet) that's openly religious, and of course that means this white-bread Christianity that's as boring and nutrient-free as unbuttered toast. On the less-ideological side, there's still a stiltedness to the package film format that never lets Melody Time truly break free into something as wildly creative as my old buddy The Three Caballeros (or even Fantasia, for that matter, though Melody Time really wants to be Fantasia at times). But as far as these package movies go, Melody Time is firmly in the "enjoyable" camp, and that's about all I can ask.

11. *The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad (1949)

Like Fun and Fancy Free, The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad (THE LAST OF THE PACKAGE FILMS, praise be!) is a double feature, pairing two lengthy stories that had been, in the post-war cost-cutting, been pared down from planned features into completed shorts. Unlike Fun and Fancy Free, however, The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad is actually quite good throughout, though also like Fun and Fancy Free, Adventures leads with the weaker of the two shorts. The first short, a jaunty half hour adapted from Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows, is the only one of any of the package-era shorts that feels worse-off for having been cut down from feature-length. Its recounting of Mr. Toad's misadventures from the novel is charming (Toad and Moley in particular are extremely cute in the best way possible), but it's also rushed and doesn't quite do the novel justice, even as an obviously condensed version of the plot. It's never boring like "Bongo," and overall, I'd call it a success. But it also is conspicuously incomplete.

The second short, though, is magnificent. Disney's adaptation of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow is one of the few unqualified successes of the package era, and likely as good an adaptation of Washington Irving's comic ghost story novella as we'll ever need. Ichabod himself is bar-none the best-designed human character of any Disney output in the 1940s, a perfect amalgam of Irving's absurdly angular description of the man in the book with Disney's cuddlier sensibilities, and to watch this strange bird human in motion is to be mesmerized. The rest of the cast has more great character design (if not quite on the level of Ichabod), especially Ichabod's antagonist, Brom Bones, who radiates with brutish cunning that the movie twists deftly from oafish to frightening in equal measure. And of course there's the movie's climax, the famed nocturnal chase through the woods as Ichabod tries to outrun the Headless Horseman; it's a strange sequence that walks a fine line between horror and comedy (it honestly reminded me of the dreamlike tone of Evil Dead 2), a strangeness best illustrated by the way that the Horseman's steed is lit from below with a hellish red light while Ichabod himself gawkily struggles with his own bony, cartoony horse—and it's fantastic. This is probably the last time for a while I'll see Disney's penchant for terrifying children rear its head, so I'm going to savor it.

12. Cinderella (1950)

I've always found Cinderella to be one of the weakest of the "princess" films. The songs aren't good—"Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo" and "A Dream Is a Wish Your Heart Makes" are the ones Disney seems most intent on making "classics," and if those snoozers are your golden girls, you know you're in trouble (and let's say nothing of the truly bad "So This Is Love" and "Sing Sweet Nightingale"). The characters aren't good—Cinderella is, typical of these early princess movies (my beloved Sleeping Beauty has the same problem), personality-free and gratingly virtuous, and the villain cast, while at least more distinctive, are all more irritating than menacing (though the movie does play some good work with light and shadow on Lady Tremaine); I'll grant that the mice are fun most of the time, but even then, they're too cutesy by half and not always interesting. And then there's the movie's greatest sin, one that not even the worst princess movie makes—the animation is drab. Cinderella, in addition to being boring on a narrative level, has the most anonymous character design in the Disney princess canon, and at times, she has the impression of being a moving mannequin; elsewhere, there's none of the technical wizardry or depth of field that made the early Disney features so breathtaking, not any of the shambolic poetry in motion of the studio's shorts (though again, I'll grant that the mice have some good animated sequences).

But when I've traditionally said all this, what I've usually been doing is comparing Cinderella to either the early Disney classics or the later Renaissance titles that solidified the princess brand. What I haven't typically done is view the movie with the historical context in mind, i.e. the fact that Disney hadn't made a proper narrative studio feature in eight years. Leave it to the package films to make one of the weaker Disney movies feel like a breath of fresh air. To be sure, Cinderella is still all of the above re: its characters, animation, and music; but relative to the package films (though, it should be clarified, not the above two in this post), there's a professionalism and high-budget quality to Cinderella that feels like a real return to form, even if the movie is mostly free of the experimentalism and playful spirit that energized the best of the package shorts. And on a structural level, it's just a relief to see a Disney movie stick to one coherent narrative the whole way through.

Thankfully, the studio's features would get much better than this in the subsequent years. But for now, I, like a starving prisoner of the package era emerging back into free society, will take whatever bread crumbs I can get.