In case you were wondering, all three of these movies are rewatches for me. I won't be rewatching every movie, but I thought these three were important enough that I should do so. Plus, I hadn't seen Snow White or Pinocchio in a very long time, so I was due a refresher. In the future, movies I'm watching for the first time will be marked with an asterisk, but of course, that's not necessary this time around.
Anyway, here we go. These write-ups are long, far longer than I have any intention of making subsequent write-ups. But these first three movies are three of the most important movies in the Disney canon, so they deserve the extra words.
EDIT: You can now read the next entry in the series here.
However, once the dwarfs arrive, the movie perks up considerably. I had forgotten how much of a delight those boys are, not just for their slapstick and general amiability but also because they liven up the animation style to a tremendous degree. All the strictly human characters—Snow White, the Queen, the Huntsman, the Prince—are mostly drawn from live-action footage (some of it actually rotoscoped, a process by which animators draw directly onto live-action shots), giving vividly lifelike movements and proportions to these characters. It's beautiful and stately, but it's also part of what makes the beginning of the film so lethargic, as it renders the characters with this otherworldly, trapped-in-amber feel. Then come the dwarfs, drawn as caricatured and cartoony as you would expect of Disney models. They bound across the screen as if they're made of rubber, and their features are warm and expressive in ways that only cartoons can evoke, and all of the sudden, the movie is a great deal of fun.
The other thing that's skewing me more positive is that I had forgotten the degree to which I love the wicked queen. There's not a lot to the character, I'll grant, but as a force of pure and gloriously arch evil, she's unbeatable. The same animation style that makes Snow White airy and unapproachable makes the queen a terrifying, inky-black screen presence, and the ravenous vigor with which voice actor Lucille La Verne (a Tennessee native!) attacks the phrase "BURIED ALIIIIIVE" makes for one of the greatest line readings in the entire Disney oeuvre. I loved every minute of her role, so it's probably no surprise that the best part of the movie by far is the rain-soaked climax in which the dwarfs (the movie's heart) chase the cackling queen (the movie's murderous brain) up a craggy mountain. Some Disney villains go down like little wimps, but the queen's death (and the moments that precede it) is the biggest, baddest thing ever.
2. Pinocchio (1940)
Let's talk about nightmares, too, because Pinocchio is not fooling around. That Monstro, a colossal sea leviathan[1] that sounds like the revving engine of a war machine, isn't the scariest thing in the movie really says something about just how little Walt Disney cared about little kids wetting themselves. In fact, it's practically a relief to get Monstro after the barrage of Pleasure Island; as if it weren't already enough to have all those freaky carnival designs beckoning young boys to their doom (serviced by these bizarrely blank shadowy figures who look more like ghouls than humans), we're then treated to the motherload of scares in the form of Lampwick, Pinocchio's fast-talking, chain-smoking acquaintance, screaming for his mother as he transforms into a donkey. It's not just "scary for a kid's movie"; it's the most viscerally frightening moment of mainstream American cinema before the release of Psycho. Beyond just the scary scares, there's a lot of distressing stuff here—the movie makes something of a motif out of the trafficking of children, and the image of a child being thrown into a cage while crying for his parents is repeated frequently. There's also that shot of a lifeless Pinocchio face-down in a pool.
For all the talk in this movie about being a "good boy," it's not really a story about morality; it's about how unbelievably cruel the world is, how it rewards trust with betrayal, innocence with brutality, and, in the face of all that, how vital it is to care for those who love you. When Pinocchio saves Geppetto at the movie's climax, it's a moment of pure and true love in defiance of every self-serving impulse he's been offered for the movie's previous 80 minutes. To say that this is a more sophisticated message than Snow White's goes without saying, but I'll go further: this movie earns its message of familial love and self-sacrifice more than most movies that profess these themes. So in case you couldn't tell, Pinocchio is one of the all-time greats. I love this movie. I could watch it forever.
3. Fantasia (1940)
In a way, this movie is the culmination of this era of Disney. Both Snow White and Pinocchio took these European stories and created vaguely European fantasy neverwheres rendered with classically high-brow sensibilities and populated by contemporary-styled cartoons; Fantasia pushes this high-brow/cartoon dichotomy to its logical endpoint by having the highest of European brows, orchestral music of the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries, rendered through a combination of folk-tale and cartoon imagery. Most iconically, of course, is Mickey Mouse corralling broomsticks to the tune of Paul Dukas's Sorcerer's Apprentice, and the rest of the sequences fall somewhere along the spectrum of the dark fantasy of Night on Bald Mountain (Chernabog, wassup) to the dancing hippos of Dance of the Hours. It's the abstraction of the Disney formula established in its very limited way by the studio's first two features, and that abstraction is notable. Disney is a studio that, in certain respects, is experimental—right now in 2018, we're nearly three decades into a long-form experiment involving the extent to which identity theory, reader response, and corporate synergy can intersect—but it's rarely formally experimental in the way that Fantasia is when it uses its own animation to mix and match the component pieces of what can be called a Disney Feature.
To that point, this is the purest expression we ever got of Walt Disney, Visionary. Walt was flawed in severe ways (not the least of which were his racism [of which we can see in the original cut of the now-edited Pastoral Symphony sequence] and affinity for unbridled capitalism), but there's also the very real fact that his ambition both to bring feature-length animation to the masses and to do it through such sophisticated and high-class-adjacent methods as he did in Snow White and Pinocchio permanently changed the fabric of American cinema forever. And Fantasia was his attempt to do so again, to reinvent the American middle brow's relationship with classical music and animation. And there are some astonishingly bold aesthetic choices here that the Disney team utilizes to these ends, from the opening Toccata and Fugue in D Minor sequence's use of abstract, nonrepresentational animation to even the inclusion of Rite of Spring at all, a piece which not even three decades prior was inciting riots. Imagine Disney in 2018 releasing a movie featuring the music of John Cage and the animation of Don Hertzfeldt, and you've got the rough modern equivalent of how out-there this project was.
Viewed another way, Fantasia is also the end of this era for Disney. In its original release, it netted a huge loss financially, and this loss casts a long shadow on Disney history. It (along with cost-cutting measures during WWII) effectively killed the lush, layered, painterly style of these first three features; the following movies Disney released before WWII—Dumbo and Bambi—are no slouches of animation, but the style has changed; the focus is more on character design and bright colors, and little of the Impressionism of Pinocchio nor the baroque colors of Fantasia survives. And definitely gone is the experimental urge at play here. There's an argument that Bambi uses up the last of this spirit, but even then, it's a muted spirit. For the most part, following Fantasia, Disney movies plant their feet more and more firmly into the territory of "children's entertainment," and while that's not an inherently bad thing (Disney has done a lot of great work making movies exclusively for children), it is disappointing to see the diversity of the storytelling and animation of these early features constrict into the more limited palette of the Disney movies to follow. Worse, it sets the tone for American animation in general, relegating it unfortunately to the realm of entertainment only aimed at children and making it more difficult for any animated feature not family-oriented to survive.
This is getting bleaker than I meant it to be. Long story short, Fantasia is great and one-of-a-kind. I love it almost as much as Pinocchio.
See y'all next time!
1] Thanks to my wife for suggesting this word during our viewing.
