Disney Review: Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan, Lady and the Tramp

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.

Sorry for the delay (vacations, weddings, etc.—you know, real-life stuff). But I'm back! Onward!

You can read the previous entry in this series here.

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

13. Alice in Wonderland (1951)

In the Disney pantheon, there are the unassailable masterpieces (of which so far we've encountered Pinocchio and Fantasia, I'd say). Alice in Wonderland isn't quite that, but if we allow for a tier just a hair below those earlier classics, this movie fits on that level comfortably. It is one of two Great Movies created by Disney in the 1950s (the other we'll get to next time), and to this day, it remains singular not just in the Disney canon but in American film in general. It's a film that looks simultaneously forward and backward; more than any other Disney feature up to this point (except maybe The Three Caballeros, though that's a different story entirely), Alice's loose and playful relationship with reality recalls Disney's early Silly Symphony shorts, and more than any mainstream American film I can think of prior to the late 1960s, Alice's penchant for surrealism and loopy faux philosophy anticipates psychedelia—this is the main thing that separates the movie from its Lewis Carroll source material, in that it accentuates the strangeness and putty-like world of Wonderland rather than the logical puzzles that Carroll was so fond of.

In that regard, it's not too hard to see why the movie was a critical failure and a box office disappointment at the time of its first release. It's a film resolutely out of time, and there's a persistent feeling of uncanniness throughout the film. The choral singing in the music and the rich, brightly drawn animation place the movie within a solidly '40s and '50s Disney tradition, but the bizarrely plotless accumulation of dreamlike imagery and chaotic, non-sequitur dialogue promptly create a dissonance with that tradition. This is a wild, phantasmagoric movie dressed in the formal wear of a straight-laced Disney film, a strange contrast that's subtly uneasy and strange—more so than if Disney had completely abandoned its house style altogether. We have some very good Disney movies to look forward to in the coming few posts, but all of them fit a kind of narrative template that's more or less conventional (or at least persistently concrete); there's virtually nothing like Alice in Wonderland as far as the eye can see into Disney's future, and I cherish this immaculate little bit of otherworldly anti-convention.

14. Peter Pan (1953)

If we're looking exclusively at narrative in the traditional sense (i.e. a consistent conflict that escalates to a climax at the film's end, which means we're excluding great but unconventional features like The Three Caballeros and Alice in Wonderland) Peter Pan is Disney's most successful feature film since Dumbo, nearly twelve years prior. It's a rollicking adventure story with exciting setpieces (the children flying through a nocturnal London is my favorite), a great villain (yoooooour aaaaa crook, Captain Hook), and fun protagonists (Peter Pan himself is a bit of a turd, but I suppose we should have expected that of anyone who literally never grows up). Like Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan is also tasked with turning a dreamscape into a comprehensible animated feature—J. M. Barrie's original novel quite literally makes Never Land the product of the random flotsam of children's sleeping minds—but Peter Pan deploys that premise to almost the exact oppose effect, applying real-life logic to a dream rather than savoring the blissful profundities of dream logic itself. It's an effective strategy, and the movie ends up toeing just the right line between head-in-the-clouds wonder and feet-on-the-ground precision. "You Can Fly!" is also one of the truly classic Disney songs of the pre-Renaissance era, too. So this is a pretty good movie.

But oh loooord have mercy, the qualifications I have to put on that assessment. Okay, look, I know that every film is a "product of its time," and that it can be very tiresome to sit here in 2018 and take pot shots at movies from 65 years ago for not being made with 2018 sensibilities. But I have my limits, and by golly, Peter Pan's depiction of Native Americans is one of them. I'm not above this movie's racism; when I was a kid, I enjoyed this movie's whooping, stereotyping, condescending version of indigenous peoples as a fun, noisy trope of adventure stories without ever really thinking about the ways in which it so offensively condenses an entire continent of people into some feathers and face paint (and this is basically how it's presented in the book—i.e. these Native Americans exist as the flattened, de-humanized archetypes that stick in children's brains from media and thus make it into Never Land, which would be an interesting idea if the book/movie didn't so sincerely engage with these tropes as "fun"). And I absolutely did not register the parade of uncut racist horror inherent in "What Made the Red Man Red." But hoo boy, it's all there, and it's impossible to overlook now. Every second involving the Native Americans in this movie is a checklist of every awful, marginalizing thing that American media did to Native American representation in the 20th century (and in some ways, continues to perpetuate). It's bracing and ugly.

Disney basically buried Song of the South, its 1946 joint-live-action-and-animated feature-length adaptation of the Uncle Remus tales. I'm not here to defend that movie because 1) its depiction of African Americans in the Reconstruction-era South is not good, and 2) even putting that aside, the movie as a whole is not good either. But if Disney's really so serious about scrubbing its history of all its racism (instead of releasing well-contextualized academic versions of those racist works that actually show the company coming to grips with its history rather than pretending it never occurred, which is what I'd like to see happen), what's Peter Pan doing out there in the wide-open world as not just a readily available Disney movie but one of the company's flagship features? I don't necessarily want Peter Pan buried either, but the inconsistency in messaging is striking.

And that's not even mentioning the weird, troubling choice to sexualize Tinker Bell and make her something of a woman scorned archetype. Or the way that Peter himself treats Wendy, which feels like "bad boyfriend 101." I guess what I'm saying is that this is one of those times in the Disney canon where the troubling "product of its time" pieces of the movie feel inextricable from the things that make the movie good, which makes it hard for me to enjoy sincerely now. Which is a real bummer, and I can only imagine is even more of a bummer for the people who are directly marginalized by this movie's depiction of women and Native Americans. Peter Pan used to be one of my favorites. Stupid racism. Stupid sexism.

15. Lady and the Tramp (1955)

I really hate the Uptown Girl trope. "Oh, I'm so privileged and such, but thank goodness for the virtuous poor person to show me what life really is; and hurray for our true love conquering systematic prejudice!" Yeah, no thanks. These are stories with these grand pretentions of social commentary, but they almost invariably focus on the rich half of the romance at the expense of any real commentary on poverty, which makes it obvious how much the storytellers like to use poverty as scenery for a story that, in the end, just affirms the hierarchies it claims to want to comment on. So Lady and the Tramp, whose central romance hinges on exactly this trope, already has an uphill climb into my heart (made even sharper by the intrusion of that good-time Disney racism—i.e. "The Siamese Cat Song," which I won't belabor because I've already said my piece about Peter Pan, and anyway, it's not quite as heinous or pervasive as the racism in Peter Pan, but still... yerg).

I won't deny the movie its charms, though. For starters, it's not completely an Uptown Girl love story; a good part of the film involves positioning Lady as a sort of older sibling becoming jealous of a new baby in the house, which, as an older sibling, I think is a more interesting story; another section of the story involves the scariest rat of all time trying to murder that baby, which is yet another entry of "extremely dark and scary thing thrown into the middle of a happy Disney movie" (also, do rats really try to kill babies in real life? the movie certainly seems to take this as a given, and if it's true... hello, nightmares). Another thing I enjoy is the film's Bambi-like ability to draw its animal characters in a way that's both naturalistic and expressive—it certainly helps that dogs are already extremely expressive animals, but the way that the animators are able to take such a variety of breeds and make each of them its own cartoon personality simply by depicting them more or less how they are in real life is a lot of fun. Some of it is pretty obvious (oh the Scottish Terrier has a Scottish accent, ha ha), but it's never not amusing, especially in the standout sequence at the pound.

So anyway, this is a roundabout way of saying that once I get past my reflexive gagging at some of the romantic tropes of this movie, it's not bad. It's right there with Cinderella as the worst of this run of post-package-era films, but it's got enough to offer that I think it edges out Cinderella pretty comfortably.

See y'all next time!