Disney Review: The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh, The Rescuers, The Fox and the Hound

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.

Even the Disney Dark Age has a silver lining.

You can read the previous entry in this series here.

EDIT: You can read the next entry in this series here.

22. The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh (1977)

The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh is one of the (perhaps the sole) unqualified successes of the xerography era. The reasons for the movie's wonderfulness are countless, but to go right to the centerpiece, I'd be remiss in not beginning with Sterling Holloway, a guy who'd been around the Disney block a few times as a voice actor (and is a highlight each time) but found what is unquestionably his greatest work in the silly ol' hunny-junkie bear himself, Winnie the Pooh; his is one of the all-time-great vocal performances, not just in a Disney movie but in any animated movie ever. Maybe it's just that I grew up reading the books and watching this movie at the same time, but I cannot imagine A. A. Milne's guileless protagonist any more perfectly brought to life than by the soft, lackadaisical inflections of Holloway's Pooh. In the cradle of Holloway's voice, with a little help from the gentle fuzziness of the xerographic animation, one of the great icons of innocence in children's literature became one of the great icons of innocence in the Disney canon and an unambiguous force for good in the world. The character's wonderful mix of utterly irreproachable good will toward all and his relentless, nonsensical cunning (e.g. his plan to disguise himself as a raincloud in order to infiltrate a beehive to steal that precious, golden honey) has its perfect vehicle in Holloway and has been a source of laughter and joy in my life for decades now. I can hate on the laziness of this era of Disney for days, but by golly, the insipidity of '60s and '70s and '80s Disney might have all been worth it, just for this treasure of a character.

Speaking of the xerography era, it's worth mentioning that one of the great achievements of this film is how well it turns the often-limiting characteristics of those decades into assets. The sketchy, incomplete feel of the xerography style not only evokes E. H. Shephard's simple drawings in the original books but plays perfectly with the movie's light metatextuality, wherein the characters are literally illustrations come to life in a book (the features of which they often interact with—e.g. jumping over the crease between pages, climbing over letters, etc.). The episodic structure and the just-having-a-good-time-chilling-with-these-characters-and-their-low-stakes-misadventures vibe that makes so many of these xerographic films feel maddeningly slight turns out to be the perfect framework for the free-flowing playfulness of the Pooh stories and the polite digressiveness of their cast of characters (and re: the episodicness, let's not forget that this movie is basically three pre-existing short films from the '60s and '70s stitched together, which might also help in this regard—it isn't just aimless; it's pointedly episodic). The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh just freaking works in a way that no other Disney movie within ten years of either side of this film's release does.

And miracle of miracles, the movie does all of this while largely leaving the A. A. Milne source material intact. There are a few superficial changes—Pooh now wears a shirt instead of being top-to-bottom jaybird-naked as he is in the book's illustrations, Piglet has undergone a color shift from green to a much more sensible pink, Tigger occupies a slightly larger role, etc.—but on the whole, this is without a doubt the most reverently a Disney feature ever treated its source material. There's precious little "Disneyfication" going on here, possibly because Milne's confectionery novels are plenty sweet on their own, but that Disney is willing to leave in the somewhat un-Disney-like nonsensical wordplay and rambly, child-at-play feel of Milne's narration is the dearest of blessings. I love this movie, y'all.

23. The Rescuers (1977)

I used to watch The Rescuers all the time when I was little (rented from the local Hollywood Video, I believe—ahh, the polyester scents of the early-to-mid '90s. And golly, I sure remember this movie being better. What I remembered: a gloomy little mystery/adventure that culminates in a claustrophobic, scary sequence in a cave full of skeletons about to fill up with water. And that's all there. At times, the movie is astoundingly gloomy, a rain-soaked story set in the squalor of a Louisiana swamp where the time of day never seems to be anything but "dusk." Our villain, Madame Medusa, lives in the crumbling ruins of a Southern-Gothic steamboat that's practically melting into the Spanish-moss-shrouded muck it's wrecked on, and she has kidnapped a young orphan girl named Penny, whom she systematically abuses both physically and psychologically in her quest to get a gigantic diamond. Our score is a brooding mix of strings, synths, and piano, punctuated by some truly morose songs (sung non-diegetically by Shelby Flint, making this the first Disney movie since Bambi to not be a musical of some kind). This is some dark stuff, encapsulated strikingly by the opening—a wordless sequence in which we see a frightened Penny stumble out of the decaying steamboat into a midnight swamp so she can cast a bottle with a desperate plea for help into the bayou. We then see, in a succession of still images, the bottle swept out of the bay and across the ocean as Shelby Flint sings "The Journey," the saddest of the movie's roster of sad songs, and while the still images—barely more than storyboards, to tell the truth—are probably a choice born from Disney's notorious cost-cutting of the era, I'll be damned if it isn't an effective one. The opening of The Rescuers is some of the most haunting footage in any Disney movie, and certainly the loneliest four minutes of anything to bear the Disney name. If the movie at all delivered on the promise of this bit, we'd have a very, very good movie on our hands.

But alas and alack, those four minutes are the best piece of the movie by a gigantic margin. It's not so much that the rest of the movie is uniformly terrible. There are some things about the remaining 73 minutes that are quite good, particularly in the way the movie lets its detective mystery and its emotional beats roll out so patiently. And the part I remembered being scared of as a kid in the pirate's cavern is terrific. But those good bits are so thoroughly mixed in with some truly terrible stuff that they're hard to salvage. It's the blasted comedy, y'all. This is a movie about a woman abusing a kid—did we really need all the funny animal hillbillies? Did we need the alligators playing the pipe organ? Did we need a villain—who is, by the way, basically the missing link between Cruella De Vil and Ursula from The Little Mermaid, I'll take my PhD now, thank you—with a nebbish sidekick who keeps falling on his butt in silly ways? This movie has a crisis of tone, and that's death for a story as stark as this one. It's a much less-near of miss than this later film, but The Rescuers feels like a foreshadowing of the way that the Disney reflex for cute sidekicks and slapstick comedy undermined what could have been their best feature film of the 1990s, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and if you've seen Hunchback, you know that unique feeling of frustration that comes from watching a potentially great movie torn asunder by wacky hijnks. I truly hate the idea that all art must be Grim and Gritty, but sometimes a story just doesn't need a family of bootlegger bayou animals to run out of their Hee Haw hole and poke the villain in the butt while an off-brand "Yakety Sax" plays in the score.

But you know, at least Hunchback has some nice animation. The Rescuers, on the other hand, looks like straight steaming doo-doo in motion. It's easily the worst-looking animation that the studio had put out in a theatrical release up to this point, not just choppy and riddled with mistakes (and YET ANOTHER recycling of some Bambi animations—come ON, people) but often flat-out incapable of what even the worst Disney movies can usually do, which is to make its world feel convincingly alive and not just a bunch of cleverly sequenced plastic cutouts; the animation lacks depth or even a good sense of cohesion, and it's not unusual for one character in the movie to seem like it's on a different plane than another, as if they are just pieces of paper being dropped on a painted background (which they basically are, but the magic of animation is that you aren't supposed to be able to tell).

It's kind of a bummer to return to an old favorite like this one and find such a mess. Stupid reality, messing with my nostalgia [1].

24. *The Fox and the Hound (1981)

I saw The Fox and the Hound once when I was very young, so long ago that I did not remember anything from it except that I was quite bored, so I'm marking this as a first-time watch for me. My memories of boredom were reliable, though, because I was pretty bored this time around, too. The movie has a plot—an orphaned fox pup named Tod befriends a hound puppy named Copper, but when they grow up, Copper is trained as a hunting dog for a man intent on killing Tod—but that plot occupies maybe twenty minutes of the film; the rest of the movie's 83 minutes is padded out by some cutesy animal hijinks (will the birds ever get the caterpillar?? Wow, I'm on the edge of my seat) and a strange romantic subplot involving a female fox named Vixey (who is literally introduced to cheer Tod up after Copper tries to kill him—"I know your friend just tried to murder you, but here, clear your mind with some sex"). It is Not Interesting, folks.

Still, I'd call The Fox and the Hound a step up, if a minor one, from The Rescuers for two reasons. The most visible one is the quality of animation, which is not just superior to The Rescuers's eye trash but an improvement on pretty much every non-Pooh Disney film since Walt Disney's death. The Fox and the Hound doesn't look quite as good as where Disney would be at the end of the '80s and the beginning of the Renaissance, but this is the first movie to give any indication that that's where we're headed. It's no masterpiece of the visual arts, don't get me wrong. But at least we're in the realm of "it looks like thought was put into these visuals," which is more than I can say of The Rescuers, Robin Hood, and even pre-dead-Walt films like The Jungle Book and The Sword in the Stone. The movie also has the decency to save its best animation for the film's climax, in which Copper and his master hunt down Tod until a bear emerges from the woods to make lunch of Copper's master. The bear in particular is just a great piece of animation, vicious and scary and remarkably tactile; it's a small thing, but I love how the fur practically hangs off the bear in a way that conveys the sheer weight of the coat.

And speaking of the climax, that's the second thing that puts this movie just slightly ahead of The Rescuers. In a lot of ways, The Fox and the Hound aspires to be a sort of Bambi for the 1980s; it's got that sleepy tone and the (possibly mistaken) assumption that the audience is just going to be cool with watching animals frolic for long, plotless stretches of the film, though The Fox and the Hound's animation, competent as it may be, has nowhere near the painterly beauty nor the commitment to realism that helps assuage some of Bambi's aimlessness (even if it does see fit, along with its xerography peers, to shamelessly recycle some animation from Bambi, in addition to Melody Time). But more than that, what makes The Fox and the Hound most like Bambi is how it punctuates its idyllic scenes of nature with searing tragedy; the film opens with Tod's mother being gunned down by a hunter in a scene you'd have to be blind not to connect to THAT PART in Bambi, and its climax, like Bambi's, revolves around a somewhat apocalyptic sequence that shows mankind destroying the natural world in the interest of being able to gun down an innocent animal. The Fox and the Hound's hunting sequence at the end isn't as all-encompassing as the forest fire that ends Bambi, but it shares that same visceral scariness of seeing what has been our protagonist's home for the majority of the film becoming something of a death arena. It's also—and this is unique to The Fox and the Hound—viscerally upsetting to see Tod and Copper, once cute childhood friends, turn into snarling animals with teeth intent on hurting one another. To see a Disney movie that veers so hard into ideas and imagery so unsettling, you'd probably have to go back to that classic spate of pre-WWII features. The Fox and the Hound is nowhere near the peer of Bambi and Dumbo and the rest—like I said, it is very dull for the majority of its run—but there's a spark in its final ten minutes that feels special.

We're almost out of the woods, y'all! One more post of this Disney Dark Age, and then it's the Renaissance! *choir sings "Ode to Joy"* See you next time!

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1] I'm putting this down here in a footnote because I feel a little crackpot, but does anyone else who has watched this movie as an adult feel like there's something just a little bit pervy about the way that Penny is animated? I might just the boy who cried male gaze here, but it's weird that we briefly see her without a shirt on—granted, from behind, but still, as far as I can remember, there is only one other instance in all of Disney with female nudity (again from behind, in the "All the Cats Join In" part of Make Mine Music, where it is definitely sexual), which makes this a bit out of the blue. More troubling is how twice Penny is held upside-down by the alligators such that her underwear is completely visible. I know she's a little kid and all, but I dunno. I feel weird typing all of this out, but I also feel weird about what I've heard about the chauvinist sexual politics of the Disney workplace throughout the decades, and I feel weird about the idea of those male animators drawing this stuff (especially in a movie now notorious for the way its team hid obscene images in the film).