[Somewhat less editing this time. Do we come off as less intelligent as a result? I think so!]

BROOM I think we should start with some general comments and then talk about each section.

BETH Briefly.

BROOM Yes, briefly.

ADAM That was cheerfully stupid but it was still stupid.

BROOM It was pretty stupid.

BETH It was.

ADAM I do not recommend that people see this. I think this was the worst Disney production I’ve ever seen.

BROOM Ever?

ADAM Of all of them, yes.

BETH I saw a bunch of the individual pieces when I was a kid, because The Disney Channel would air them before or after shows, and I think that’s the best way to view them. When they’re all together, you can notice that they don’t really add up to anything and aren’t that great. But by itself, “All The Cats Join In” is a lot of fun.

ADAM A couple of them were more cheerful than stupid, but all of them seemed to have the same quality of being utterly careless.

BROOM I don’t think they were utterly careless, but I do think that the quality of care was lower than anything we’ve seen before. I know, that was already my comment about The Three Caballeros, which now seems undeserved. In fact, I want to add, for the record – I intended to add this when Beth added her opinion…

BETH I never weighed in on The Three Caballeros, but I thought it was great. That’s my official statement.

BROOM – I was going to say that when I watched it a second time with Beth, having come to terms with what it was, I really enjoyed it and appreciated the kind of craft that went into it, because I was no longer taken aback by how the tone of the previous movies wasn’t there. Whereas Make Mine Music seemed genuinely slapdash in exactly that way I described. But “slapdash” isn’t really a fair word to use for any Disney movie. During this movie I was thinking, “what if I went to an animation festival today and saw this?” Almost anything in this movie would make me think, “this is so wonderfully old-fashioned and they’ve done a really good job of it.”

BETH Really? What about “Without You?”

ADAM I don’t think any of these pieces had the inventiveness or fun or creativity of the Oscar-nominated shorts we saw. Not to mention prior Disney movies.

BROOM Last year’s Oscar-nominated shorts? I think most of these were better than the French priest who sells a heaven machine.

ADAM I think it’s reprehensible that they actually marketed this in theaters. It felt like a collection of leavings.

BROOM I think that’s exactly what it was. I know that “Blue Bayou” was cutting-room floor material from Fantasia.

ADAM In the introduction to Janson’s “History of Art” – or whatever my art history book was in high school – they talk about this Greek sculpture of a boy pulling a thorn out of his foot, and how your impression is changed when you realize that on the head, the locks of the hair are not falling down correctly, which indicates that the head was cut off of another statue and stuck on to this new statue. The knowledge of that lack of unity makes you appreciate the work less, in and of itself. And I think that is true here.

BROOM Yes. But I think I would have totally tuned out during “Blue Bayou” if I didn’t have that knowledge of where it came from.

BETH I pretty much did.

BROOM Yeah, I know. All right, let’s talk about them in order.

1. Rustic Ballad: THE MARTINS AND THE COYS

ADAM Worse than Hanna-Barbera.

BETH No! That’s not true.

BROOM I don’t think that’s fair at all. I thought the color design was appealing, as in other sequences as well. I thought the characters glowed nicely when they went to heaven. I thought the silhouettes in the square-dancing scene were well done.

BETH I also thought the square-dancing scene was good. I thought the music in that scene was very strong.

BROOM I thought there was a certain atmosphere to that indoor scene that was not worthless.

ADAM I guess it had a crude vigor, and it was a much better first number than “Blue Bayou,” which would have been a horrible way to start the movie.

BROOM Thoughts about its being censored? [ed: This segment has been cut in its entirety from the DVD release. We watched it on Youtube.]

ADAM Well, it is offensive, on several levels.

BETH I was not offended by it.

ADAM It consists of nothing but stereotypes.

BROOM I don’t imagine the hillbilly constituency is actually that threatening to Disney.

ADAM Really? There was an incident a couple years ago where the first lady of West Virginia complained about – I forget exactly what the medium was, but there was some project where every state was represented by a little cartoon, and West Virginia was represented by an outhouse. And there was a hue and cry.

BROOM Okay, but it’s not like this was called “A Tale of West Virginia.” It was just about hillbillies. They exist in –

ADAM They exist in about six states.

BROOM They exist as a stereotype independent of reality. To say where in reality that stereotype falls becomes offensive. I guess they were the Hatfields and the McCoys. But the real Hatfields and McCoys actually killed each other; I don’t think we have to show respect for them.

ADAM Whatever. It was fine. I didn’t think the caricature was especially interesting. They all looked exactly the same.

BROOM The character designs were ugly and dumb.

ADAM On purpose, I guess. It was ugly to look at. And the humor was not that funny.

BROOM I found a common problem of many of the segments to be that, unlike Fantasia, where there were no words, here the songs narrated the action. Doing that in a way that doesn’t make everything seem obvious and stupid because it’s redundant with the visuals… is hard.

BETH I thought that “The Whale Who Wanted to Sing at the Met” did that in an effective and funny way.

BROOM But in this first one, when they sang, “and then they went to heaven! and then they shot some more!…” and then you saw them doing exactly that, it seemed a little… [smacks forehead].

ADAM A problem that I have with country music is that of all genres of popular music, it is the one that is expressly narrative in almost all cases. And that is not good. Songs should not be expressly narrative.

BROOM You think there shouldn’t be ballad songs, period?

ADAM It’s very hard to do them well, and they work best when they’re somehow over the top, as the whale one was. This one was just straightforwardly narrative and uninteresting.

BROOM Thinking back, that was the thing that made those first two sequences in Three Caballeros seem particularly dumb – the penguin bit and the gauchito bit: they were narrated as they happened, which always makes things seem clumsy. The redundancy of a narrator describing animated action makes both halves seem pointless. “Why do we have to watch it if he’s describing it? And why does he have to describe it if we’re watching it?” I think it’s almost always a mistake and I don’t know why they didn’t realize that.

BETH Let’s move on.

2. Tone Poem: BLUE BAYOU

ADAM Terrible! Terrible.

BETH That was the dullest animated thing I’ve seen in a long time.

ADAM Almost no visual interest of any kind.

BROOM When the water was sparkling and you saw the moon reflected in it, that was okay. But it didn’t have anything to do with the music, in this version, because it was animated to something else. [ed: Debussy’s Clair de Lune]

BETH Whatever. It was bad.

BROOM I remember it being unsatisfying on the Fantasia bonus disc in that other form, too. But here it was really unsatisfying.

BETH The song was bad.

ADAM It had none of the “right ring and left ring” appeal of Fantasia. In Fantasia there might have been one thing happening in the middle, but there would also be curlicues around the sides that made you feel that they cared about it.

BROOM Yes, here you were just looking at animation of a stork. It was a stork, right? [ed: a heron]

ADAM Or a pelican maybe.

BETH I don’t think it was a pelican.

ADAM I don’t know. Not really.

BROOM A wading bird.

3. Jazz Interlude: ALL THE CATS JOIN IN

BROOM I saw this on TV once, and I didn’t know what the source was, and I thought, “Really? Disney made this? It’s so cool!” And I still think it’s cool. The animation is not the cleanest they ever did, and the faces are all dumb-looking, but it makes you think about what it was like to be a teenager in the 40s, what “fun” was like in the 40s, and it makes a pretty convincing case.

ADAM I don’t know that that was really what it was like to have fun in the 40s.

BETH It’s an idealized version.

BROOM It’s a fantasy.

ADAM It has sort of a “Peach Pit” quality.

BROOM What does that mean?

BETH From 90210?

ADAM Yeah. Actually, that’s not what I mean. What I mean is – what was the hangout from Saved By the Bell?

BETH I don’t remember. [ed: “The Max”]

ADAM Well, that. It had sort of that feel. And everyone’s face looked like a Raisinet. But it was okay. And at least there was some sort of secondary action, with the little sister.

BROOM It was a relief, because it didn’t have narration, just music, and suddenly the movie felt alive. And the music was actually good, because it was Benny Goodman playing jazz.

ADAM It was definitely the toe-tappingest of the musical numbers.

BROOM I thought the wit of the drawing pencil was well done, and I liked that it was a part of this idea of fun.

ADAM When was Harold and the Purple Crayon created?

BROOM I don’t know. Crockett Johnson. [ed: 1955]

ADAM I think it’s a great concept; it’s always been a great concept, and it was here too.

BROOM I thought it was cool when he didn’t have time to draw the back wheel of the car, so he drew a stop sign to give himself a chance to catch up with them.

ADAM It was good. Yes.

BROOM There’s a slightly sexist quality to the whole thing, but what are you going to do.

ADAM As with all of them.

BROOM Like when the girl gets drawn with too big a butt, and the guy won’t dance with her, and she gets pissed off at god.

BETH That’s funny!

ADAM Or when they leave the girl with the books behind. She’s the only teenager who doesn’t get to join in the fun.

BROOM The only cat who doesn’t join in.

ADAM She’s no cat.

BROOM And also, most pointedly, when the girl is naked for no reason.

ADAM That would never fly today.

BROOM There’s a prurient quality to that. Undisguised prurience.

4. Ballad in Blue: WITHOUT YOU

BETH I really liked the rain on the window, but aside from that I thought this was boring.

BROOM I thought the trees and the wavy shadows looked like Salvador Dalí, which might not even be a coincidence, because I know he was hanging around the Disney studios in the 40s. And I thought that was kind of cool.

BETH Eh. I think you’re attributing more to it than it deserves.

ADAM I thought the rain was the only thing they had going at all, and they overdid it.

BROOM You didn’t think it was cool when there were silhouetted trees on the horizon and they were sort of wavery?

ADAM It had an unnecessarily static quality that nothing in Fantasia has. Everything in Fantasia feels ripply and alive, and this was just like, “Here’s a tree.” “We’re slowly panning back through the window.” “Nothing is moving.”

BROOM It had a sort of creepy quality to it that I enjoyed. I thought the design was interesting and a new look for them. I’m surprised at you, Beth, because I thought that it had a “feel” in the way that you like things to have a feel. And yet you didn’t get anything out of it.

BETH I do like things to have a feel, but I didn’t feel like this had a feel.

BROOM I thought it was kind of a classy little number, and it was short.

ADAM It was short.

5. Musical Recitation: CASEY AT THE BAT

ADAM Why did the faces of all the people in this movie – with the exception of the kids in the “Cats” segment – have this weird working-class leery-scowly bubble-nosed quality?

BROOM I know! It’s a thing that will remain in Disney movies for quite a while. I imagine it’s due to some particular animator. But this was definitely the first time we were seeing it in one of their features. I associate it with an Irish caricature.

BETH It is an Irish caricature. I thought that maybe bow on the umpire’s arm had something to do with Irish heritage, but I’m not sure.

ADAM Maybe. And they do have specifically Irish names in the poem.

BROOM And the guy – Jerry Colonna – is doing Irish voices for a lot of them. It’s like everyone in the story is Irish.

BETH Yes, they all seemed to be Irish.

BROOM It’ll keep coming back; Tweedledum and Tweedledee in Alice in Wonderland, which is coming up, are the same thing. They’re like leering, honking Irishmen.

BETH I liked some of the images in this one.

BROOM You were giggling at it, which surprised me because it was so cornball.

BETH It was really lame. But funny.

ADAM A weird choice to take an established poem and interlace it with songs and other stuff.

BROOM I think the other stuff was to justify its fitting into this “musical concert.” Make mine MUSIC. We didn’t talk about the fact that there was, oddly, a title song to this movie. “Make mine music and the world will sing with you,” or whatever.

BETH Right. It was stupid.

BROOM And a program book opening at the beginning. “Casey at the Bat” was supposed to be manic and funny, like a Goofy cartoon, but it got a little confused. There was a lot of action and a lot of noise, and I didn’t always know what was happening, or why.

ADAM It was at least competent. It looked like solid Disney-style animation. They didn’t get carried away with artsy-fartsy pretension.

BROOM But if things are going to be mediocre, I think artsy-fartsy is more interesting to watch. I found the dumbness of this segment a little numbing.

ADAM That’s because you’re, like, an animation class alum.

BROOM All right, all right. Maybe that’s pretentious of me. I just found myself getting bored during “Casey at the Bat.”

ADAM I didn’t say you’re pretentious. I’m saying that you are more interested in technical variation than other people.

BETH You were bored with the tale of “Casey”?

BROOM No, with the visual. What do you guys think? Do you think it was a good “for-all-time” visualization of the poem “Casey at the Bat?”

ADAM No.

BETH No.

ADAM At first I was dismayed when it was just still images, and I thought, “This is going to be told entirely in stills.” Again, it was like they were scrimping on movement.

BETH I liked that.

BROOM I liked those stills. They were in a style that surprised me.

BETH I thought those seemed to have been given more care.

BROOM They had that turn-of-the-century atmosphere; I liked that. And then when the characters showed up, the Tweedledum faces sort of took away from that atmosphere. I liked all of the period touches. I liked when they said “the band is playing somewhere” and they showed a little town band in a gazebo, which is exactly what it should be.

6. Ballade Ballet: TWO SILHOUETTES

BETH Oh god, “Two Silhouettes.”

ADAM It was terrible, but at least they thought they had a neat idea, unlike in “Blue Bayou.”

BROOM This was a technical exercise that I took no pleasure in. It was the same impulse as “Let’s make Donald dance with a real live woman!” and then the entire sequence ends up being about that.

BETH If you’re going to trace live dancers, the dance that you have them do should involve a lot of movement!

BROOM That was the Disney people once again reaching out for high, high beauty.

ADAM It had all the ponderous sentimentality of animation, but none of the spontaneity.

BETH Well, that’s why they added those cupids, because they needed something.

ADAM Something to look at in the 90 percent of the frame that was not the silhouettes.

BROOM The technical concept demands that they do something with it that they couldn’t do with live action. You could just film silhouettes – I’m sure there’s a way of doing it with lighting. So the point of tracing it should have to be that, like, you put sparkles in their hands, or make them be batting at a cupid. But they hardly had them do anything. Also, beautiful graceful movements in humans are so much less graceful than what you can do with animation that their actual little footsteps end up looking weird and awkward.

ADAM Yes. When she was bobbling along and you could see her feet moving, you thought, “Oh. This actually isn’t as graceful as a cartoon.”

BROOM They could have had her fly around –

ADAM They did, briefly.

BROOM They just had her rise up. But since they could have made her sprout wings, everything she did seemed weighty, which is the opposite of what ballet is supposed to be, so it doesn’t work. The idea doesn’t work.

ADAM By the way, in “Without You” – just going back for a second – I thought, when they showed the star behind the cloud, because there was something in the song about a star, it was the most grudging sort of alliteration, if you will, of image to sense, as to be positively negative.

BROOM I didn’t find that at all. I found the stylization of that one interesting. But we’ve already agreed to disagree.

7. Fairy Tale with Music: PETER AND THE WOLF

BROOM The narration really killed it. And this one seemed like it had been directed to work without narration, with all attention on the music, and that then someone, after the fact, had said, “we’ve got to have some narration; get Sterling Holloway in here.” And then they recorded him saying, “Uh-oh, Peter!” “Ohhhh no.” “This looks bad!”

BETH I think you’re right.

BROOM Not that it was probably great to begin with, but with the narration it was particularly lame.

ADAM It seemed instructional.

BROOM Well, the piece is supposed to be for learning about the instruments of the orchestra.

BETH The wolf was nice and scary, and that shot of him growling at the beginning was fun. I enjoyed that.

BROOM I liked when the instruments turned into silhouettes at the beginning, before the actual story started.

BETH I liked that part too.

ADAM This version is most people’s experience of “Peter and the Wolf,” is it not?

BROOM I guess. I don’t know.

BETH Mine was a record.

BROOM That’s the proper way to do it.

ADAM It was fine.

BROOM I thought it was pretty dumb. Of course the duck can’t die in this version.

ADAM The duck and the cat and the bird were ugly to look at, and not charming, and had no personalities.

BROOM And in the narration, they all had names, which is another reason it seemed after-the-fact. The animals don’t have names! Why should they have names? “Oh, Sasha!”

BETH Sasha and Sonia.

ADAM And Ivan.

BROOM There was no tension in the storytelling so you didn’t care what was happening. You couldn’t care about the music because he was talking over all of it. And you couldn’t care about the characters because most of them were badly designed. So it was just dumb. And it goes on a long time, because it has to.

BETH Yeah, it got boring.

8. AFTER YOU’VE GONE

BETH What was this?

BROOM A little jazz bit, where the clarinet and his buddies went on a journey of surreal discovery.

BETH It was fine.

ADAM It was okay. I have nothing to say about it.

BROOM I liked it!

BETH I liked it, but it was not memorable.

BROOM I liked that it was like, “Let’s do a bunch of that stuff from Fantasia again,” but it was a little bit…

BETH Looser?

BROOM Loosey-goosey-er. I liked when there were those floating circles from Fischinger movies, but the clarinet is jumping on them from one to the other. And then a string of colors comes in and it jumps on that, and then a keyboard – it was all the standard ideas that you associate with “animated musical fantasia,” but just sort of thrown together stupidly. I enjoyed how stupid the sequence of events was, and the color scheme was bright and stupid, and I enjoyed that too. And the music was better than a lot of the other ones.

BETH Yeah, the music was good.

BROOM And it was so super-short that I don’t know how you could not enjoy it.

BETH Yeah.

ADAM Yep.

9. Love Story: JOHNNIE FEDORA AND ALICE BLUEBONNET

ADAM Sung by the Andrews Sisters.

BETH Now that was stupid.

BROOM You didn’t enjoy that??

ADAM This is actually when I started to perk up again.

BROOM I think they saved the two they thought were best for last. It seemed like the last two were meant to be their strongest.

BETH It was fine. It was stupid, but in a cute way.

ADAM I expected to hate it, but I actually giggled a couple times.

BROOM I thought all the design was actually kind of nice. And I liked the sense you get of the city, and of the period – although it was kind of the same period again. Why were there two turn-of-the-century pieces in this same movie? But I liked it, in a silly way. It was a little like when Mary Poppins goes into the sidewalk painting.

ADAM You know what it was exactly like? There is a Disney short, which I believe is also narrated by that same guy, Sterling Holloway, about a new car, and the car goes through various travails, and then it gets put out on the street, but then it gets bought by a teenager who lovingly restores it.

BETH I think I know what you’re talking about.

BROOM They’re both like The Little House.

ADAM What’s The Little House?

BROOM Virginia Lee Burton children’s book; there’s a little house and the city grows up around it and it gets sadder and sadder, and then it gets trucked out to the countryside to start a new life.

ADAM I’ve seen that, right.

BROOM And I think Disney even made a movie out of that, too. [ed: ALSO narrated by Sterling Holloway!]

ADAM In terms of Disney cartoons, this seemed expressly like the little car one.

BROOM It’s a standard Disney formula. You anthropomorphize a thing, and then the world is rough to it.

ADAM It gets shabbier and shabbier but then it achieves happiness at the end.

BROOM It was an odd choice that Alice couldn’t make any expression with her eyes.

ADAM It was like an early Botox fantasy.

BROOM It was cute that they ended up on horses.

ADAM I didn’t see that coming. It’s nice that in her period of dotage, she didn’t get as battered as he did.

BROOM Anything to say about seeing New York?

BETH I really enjoyed that.

ADAM I liked that it was explicitly New York, and not just some Gotham.

BETH I liked that they showed the Brooklyn Bridge.

10. Opera Pathetique: THE WHALE WHO WANTED TO SING AT THE MET

BETH It was good.

ADAM Iconic, even.

BROOM So you had heard of it?

ADAM I think maybe you had mentioned it. Even though it was absurd, it was clearly the standout piece. Although the ending was a total cop-out. Having him get harpooned at the end was just like saying “it was all a dream.” It absolved them from having to come up with any story; just a collection of silly images. But they were funny silly images.

BROOM I thought the high point of this entire movie was when the whale sings “Mama’s Little Baby Loves Shortnin’ Bread.”

ADAM When I was a kid, I used to sing that song all the time. I cannot imagine where I heard it, but it was in my small repertoire of American popular songs.

BETH Looney Tunes, probably.

ADAM Yeah, probably. I didn’t realize it was quite so Negro as it is.

BROOM It wasn’t done that way here; that’s just what it is.

ADAM Sure it was! “Little chilluns?”

BROOM Oh, that’s right.

BETH That was funny.

BROOM I didn’t like seeing his uvulas-slash-vocal-cords. They were just supposed to represent his different voices; they didn’t need to be jiggling stalactites.

ADAM They leaned on that pretty heavily. And at the end, he dies and he goes to heaven, and that’s the end of the movie? What?

BROOM Yeah, it was a little harsh. After the harpoon was shot, I just thought he was going to say something like “I will never fit in in the human world,” and then we’d see him serenading the seals. I don’t understand why he had to die. A martyr to the misunderstandings of opera-house managers.

ADAM Because they couldn’t work out a way to end it in a way that was on time and under budget.

BROOM The moral seemed to be: “He was a miracle, and people don’t always understand miracles.” Maybe there’s a lesson for all of us, there… about a certain miracle that not everyone has accepted into their hearts….

ADAM Really? I didn’t take it that way.

BETH I don’t think so!

BROOM I’m joking!

ADAM Disney cartoons are almost uniformly secular, in a way that I am glad about.

BROOM We all snickered when in “Without You,” when the lyrics said something about “when I pray,” and suddenly that secular cathedral thing appeared. The same shape from “Ave Maria” in Fantasia. There were a lot of things dredged up from the previous movies here.

ADAM This might be a lower point even than the late-70s trough that we’re all familiar with.

BETH It just doesn’t even seem like a movie.

BROOM That’s fair, but I think when we actually get to Oliver & Company you’ll see how much lower the standards can really go.

ADAM I guess I’ve never seen those, so I’ll find out then.

BROOM I think we really have to recognize that the high standard set by Dumbo and Pinocchio is not going to be met, even by the good movies coming up. Cinderella is just not going to be as good as those movies.

ADAM In that sense, the story of the Disney movies is much like the story of Johnnie Fedora. Shiny and new, and then scuffed, and then restored to brilliance at the very end.

BROOM Or is it? On a horse! With holes cut in it!

ADAM I think Aladdin is as good as Dumbo. Well, not as good as Dumbo, but it’s as good as Snow White. And I think The Little Mermaid is as good as those.

BROOM I don’t know about that. Maybe you have to measure their ambition against the possibilities of their own era. It seems like the ambition of Snow White compared to 1937 is grander than anything that was accomplished in the 90s.

ADAM Right, but as has been the case throughout, and as presumably will continue to be the case, ambition is a metric that you use more than we use. On all of these.

BROOM Do you think it’s inappropriate?

ADAM No, it’s just different. I’m seeing these less as artifacts and more as discrete entertainments.

BROOM Well, this movie was certainly far less entertaining than any of the previous ones. I have the least inclination to watch any of it again. Although I would watch the “Cats” segment if it was on, and I would also watch “After You’ve Gone,” I don’t know why you guys didn’t enjoy that one more.

BETH Sorry.

ADAM So, best and worst for everyone?

BETH Best: “Whale.” Worst: “Bayou.”

BROOM I think, best: “All Cats,” and worst: I guess “Blue Bayou.” But I feel like what’s the point of even complaining about it? It was so short. “Peter and the Wolf” was the one I was most disappointed with. I was the most uncomfortable.

BETH But which was the worst?

BROOM “Blue Bayou.”

BETH That was the question. [ed: but I’d now like to change my vote to “Two Silhouettes.”]

ADAM I will also say best was “Cats,” because come to think of it, I think of my affection for the whale one is just for the conceit of the title. Once you decide you’re going to make an animated short called “The Whale Who Wanted to Sing at the Met,” a lot of it follows naturally from the concept.

BROOM The visual of it being gigumbus in the opera house was funny. With a stupid little wig on.

ADAM And then being ginormous in Tristan and Isolde, and then being giant in Mefistofele.

BROOM And which is the worst? Feel free to knock the one I said I liked.

ADAM It’s either “Blue Bayou” or “Without You.”

BETH I might change it so that “Cats” is my favorite too. Because it is actually my favorite, I just wasn’t thinking about it. That’s always been my favorite, but I’d never seen the whale one before, so it made more of an impression on me just now.

[after reading the New York Times review, linked below]

ADAM That’s about right.

BETH It’s very good.

BROOM I thought it was actually a little more forgiving than you guys were.

BETH Of “Casey at the Bat”?

BROOM Of the whole movie. It’s more forgiving, frankly, than I feel.

BETH You can tell that the reviewer wanted to like it, but it’s still critical.

BROOM He lets it off the hook by saying at the end, “I’m sure Mr. Disney’s standards are higher than this movie he made, so it’s all fine.”

ADAM Is this the same reviewer that we’ve been reading throughout?

BROOM Bosley Crowther? I believe it is. Not sure when he’ll disappear.

ADAM Beth, would you rather be named Bosley Crowther, or Manohla Dargis?

BETH I think Bosley.

ADAM I don’t have any idea what to say!

BROOM We weren’t stoned in any way, but I feel kind of like we were.

ADAM Yeah, I feel weirdly intoxicated right now. When it started, I thought, “oh, some cheerfully stupid shorts.” And they were unusually cheerful and stupid, even by the standards of the preceding movie. I forget now what the first one was.

BROOM Pablo the penguin was the first part, and then there was the little Gauchito and the flying donkey.

ADAM And both of those were like, “ehhh, here’s a thing we thought of.”

BROOM Yeah, they were really dumb, and while we were watching those I was thinking that you could really feel the studio having taken a downturn since the previous movie. I felt like Saludos Amigos had a higher standard of intelligence throughout, and that this really settled for “dumb” in those first couple of sequences.

ADAM Well, I thought that the first couple were awfully jovial, which made up for the fact that they were like, “ehhh… here’s this story… and nothing happens… and… woo!” Particularly the ending to the flying donkey one, where they build up to the climax of the action, and suddenly the next line is “I bet you’re wondering what happened to the flying donkey. He and I were never seen again for the rest of our lives!” So I thought, “well, okay, it’s ridiculous, but…”

BROOM Saludos Amigos was explicitly about good relations with South America, and they explained what they were doing; this never explained what its purpose was, so when they show you a stupid story about a penguin going to the Galapagos – which is only remotely related to South America…

ADAM It was very instructive about the western coast of South America and its many features!

BROOM …if it had an educational purpose, it was not made clear to us what that was. So while with Saludos Amigos I got to knowingly enjoy that “we’re learning about Argentina but we’re having fun at the same time,” here it just felt like “I don’t know why they’re showing me this!”

ADAM And that was only the first third of the movie…

BROOM Well, let’s talk about it in order.

ADAM First of all, the framing device was ridiculous.

BROOM It’s “a present from your South American friends.”

ADAM It’s three presents from your South American friends.

BROOM Yes. One from your South American friends, one from your Mexican friends, and one from your Antarctic friends.

ADAM No, that was really just “one about strange birds.” It wasn’t about a country. There was no parallelism at all.

BROOM Oh, you’re right. As for the frame, I want to say – the sequence with the piñata was included in some kind of Christmas special that we had on tape – it might have been something we taped from the “Disney Sunday Night Movie” slot at some point – and that sequence was part of some kind of present-receiving montage, and I always thought it looked cool. I liked that it was set in no-man’s-land, with just a weird pink and red background, just a place of pure fun. That indeterminate space where craziness happens. The same space where “Pink Elephants” takes place.

ADAM Where this movie started.

BROOM Right, where this whole movie basically takes place. Sure, there are episodes of the movie that go away from that space…

ADAM Not really – they don’t go anywhere real; they just get inside a pop-up book.

BROOM Well, that’s right, but on a film within the film we got to see Antarctica, and it was basically a mimetic Antarctica. But the movie really takes place in an abstract, conceptual space. And I thought that was cool when I was a kid. I thought I’d like to see that movie that takes place there, because the coolest parts of cartoons are always when things get crazy. So a whole movie that takes place in a world where there’s no division between the floor and the wall, or outdoor and indoor, where they’re just on top of a wash – that seemed promising to me.

ADAM But did you realize it was going to be a frenzied degeneration into lavishly frustrated sexual appetites?

BROOM No, I didn’t know that’s where it was going to go. Maybe I had read about Donald as a bee, or something, but I really didn’t know. Anyway. So the film about birds ended and then he went back to the box and got the second present, the Brazil pop-up book.

ADAM And José Carioca came out of it, and I thought, “okay…” – and then they were differently sized… it just started to disintegrate.

BROOM Then there was dancing with Carmen Miranda. [ed.: actually Aurora Miranda, Carmen’s sister]

ADAM It was right when she came around the bend – because before that it’s a cartoon shadow, and José Carioca says, “You think she’s pretty? Cookies, Donald! She sells cookies!” and suddenly it’s a real person! That’s when I knew we were in for something special. So then there was the dance sequence on the streets of Baía, where everyone joins in, even the buildings.

BROOM For all of their obvious interest in combining animation and live action, their technique wasn’t very good. You could see the layers either way they did it. When the people were in front, the animation looked out of focus; when the animation was in front, you could see the distance between the cel and the live action.

ADAM And the fact that they never interacted physically was glaringly obvious. Though I thought that in the Mexico sequences they did a better job. When he was at the beach being bounced on the blanket, and the women had convincing reactions to his physical presence.

BROOM The blanket was an inspired idea, and the fact that Donald was flying over their heads helped justify that he looked significantly closer than they were. But when Carmen Miranda – or whoever that was – kisses him at the end of the dance sequence, that was a let down, because they couldn’t really pull it off.

ADAM You don’t see anything!

BROOM Right, you don’t see any action. Much of this movie – even setting aside the psychedelic sequence at the end! – was about Donald’s lust for human women.

ADAM Donald’s never-realized lust for human women. Which was the earlier movie that invited the queer theory reading? Bambi? Because this really asked for it.

BROOM Oh please. It was sexualized, but what was gay about it? That they said “gay caballeros?”

ADAM No. But that scene at the end where he’s mooning over that singing woman’s face in the flower, and goes in to kiss it, and his buddies jump out of her face and embrace him? It wasn’t gay… but it was something.

BROOM It seemed like that whole sequence was saying, “you have some idea of beauty, your heart is stirred by lustful, lyrical feelings, and they get interrupted by the craziness of the world.” Donald’s lyrical, sexual drive kept being defeated by chaos.

ADAM It seemed like a wet dream to me, never quite consummated.

BROOM It was like a wet dream mixed with a fever dream. Every time you think you’re about to have sex in the dream, suddenly other dream shit happens and messes with you.

ADAM And the fact that that was in the same movie as the cute penguin sojourning from Antarctica…

BROOM It’s bewildering. But let’s try to break it down. Clearly the impetus for the movie to exist was similar to Saludos Amigos, even if it wasn’t commissioned by the government.

ADAM It was a goodwill enterprise.

BROOM With an edutainment spin on it. But given that project, they made such anti-educational choices. There was very little content, and a lot of it was repeated from the other movie. They again listed the components of the gaucho’s uniform. We already saw that!

ADAM And there were again sequences of people dancing.

BROOM That Mexican dance on the boards looked very similar, in fact, to the Argentine dances in Saludos Amigos.

ADAM And José Carioca shows up again to extol the shimmying beauty of a Brazilian city.

BROOM You mean “shimmering.”

ADAM No, I mean “shimmying.”

BROOM Oh, because the city shimmies.

ADAM Yes.

BROOM It feels almost like they might have been trying to actually re-do Saludos Amigos, but with a clearer commitment to making it all cartoons. “Let’s make that movie again; we made a mistake last time by having live action footage and a narrator explaining everything – this one’s going to place entirely in cartoon-land, in fantasy.” It seemed like that must have been the thought behind all these weird choices. A bad idea!

ADAM But if you set aside the idea of it being edutainment, and think of it as a Freudian descent into the underworld of the mind, there’s a definite sort of logical and inexorable progression from cheerful stories to… Satyricon, basically.

BROOM You can watch it that way, but it surely was not meant that way.

ADAM Surely it was meant that way by the animators who made it, because how on earth could they have made this movie without intending that?

BROOM Just from an exuberant desire to animate the things that animation lends itself to: things transforming into each other, bursting apart, suddenly multiplying… these are things that are fun for animators to think of and execute.

ADAM I would just like whoever’s reading this to know that during the climactic scene, I was weeping with embarrassed giggles.

BROOM We were giggling pretty hard through the whole second half of the movie. Wow. I’m still processing some of the things we saw.

ADAM I hope this serves as an advertisement to whomever is reading this. Because you probably wouldn’t think a collection of Disney shorts from the 40s is going to be as interesting as this.

BROOM It wasn’t really a collection of discrete shorts – there were those first two segments that stood apart, but everything after José Carioca showed up was pretty coherently part of this weird movie. I have to say I think this movie is the worst one yet; I feel like this was the least successful at whatever it was striving to do, and a great deal of it had a shoddier feel. But that last sequence was something.

ADAM To explain the ending: reader, if you haven’t seen this, much of it was in the form of a travelogue to different Mexican locations, with footage of Mexican dancing; then they go to Acapulco and Donald strafes some women at the all-woman beach, and then we cut to the nightlife of Mexico city, and there’s a woman’s face floating disembodied over the city…

BROOM Donald’s looking at the city and he’s all excited, he’s about to jump into the book where they’re looking at it, and then Panchito says, “No, Donald, even the sky is full of romantic!” and Mexico City dissolves into stars in the sky, and one of the stars unfurls to reveal that it’s a live-action woman’s face singing, with twinkles around her, and Donald soon enough becomes a bee and she becomes a flower, and he wants to pollinate her.

ADAM And then her disembodied lips multiply…

BROOM Then it just goes crazy.

ADAM The wet dream/fever dream motif seemed strongest to me in the cactus sequence, where a cactus morphs into a we-were-supposed-to-think-beautiful woman…

BROOM A sexy Mexican cowboy woman.

ADAM Yes – who sings to Donald, and then he waits coyly for her in the posture of a cactus, and she approaches, and then all the cactuses start dancing, and then they start… ejaculating on her basically…

BROOM And then one of the cactuses bursts into a thousand Donald-shaped cactuses, with which Donald is obliged to dance, and he grumbles.

ADAM And then just as he’s about to kiss the woman, she returns to her cactal form.

BROOM And he hugs the cactus and it explodes, which as usual takes us to the next shot.

ADAM Which is of his buddies.

BROOM Yeah, coming out of a trumpet. I was thinking, during that sequence, that part of the reason this movie would be attractive to stoners is because of Donald’s attitude, which I guess is Donald’s attitude in everything, but particularly when faced with this stuff which is surely the most surreal stuff ever to appear in a Disney movie – is that he first says angrily “What’s the big idea?” and then three seconds later has decided “I get what’s going on here! It’s a bunch of cactuses that look like me – I guess I’ve gotta do the dance with them!” He’s a little bit out of sorts when something surreal happens, and then he just adjusts to it. “Okay! Why not? This seems like fun!”

ADAM It’s also like being stoned in the sense that you are the befuddled initiate among cooler, uh, Hispanics.

BROOM That’s right – they didn’t have a problem with any of it. Although, I liked when just for a second, José Carioca himself was bewildered by something that the even-crazier Panchito does, Panchito being the essence of craziness. What is that saying politically? Meet our South American neighbors, and finally… meet Mexico: he screams “Weeeeeeeaaaa!” all the time, shoots guns randomly, and creates total anarchy.

ADAM I think this might be appealing to adolescents in its message of impossible-to-satisfy sexual chaos. I retract that it’s specifically gay, but it was definitely about sexual confusion.

BROOM I don’t think it was very gay. I think it was pretty clear that when his friends showed up in the fantasy, they were frustrating his desires.

ADAM They were cockblocking him, not actually taking the place of the desired. Fair. Although of course it’s hard not to do a queer theory reading of that.

BROOM Not hard for me.

ADAM That said, it’s definitely… as a sort of… [trails off]

BROOM You think about that.

ADAM Put in brackets, “trails off.”

BROOM Technically speaking, and in terms of the survey of Disney films, I feel like the movie introduced a bunch of interesting things. I feel like this was some kind of a turning point for the studio, because – maybe “shoddy” is too mean a word, but there was definitely a sense that this was less cared for.

ADAM It was workmanlike in its animation.

BROOM Yes. The animation was less loving throughout, except for in the craziness, where there was more attention paid.

ADAM Well, there were a couple scenes that I thought were attractive in their animation. Like some of the opening shots of Baía.

BROOM I was actually going to say that the “Baía” sequence – which by the way was a very good song; I think that was also by Ary Barroso, who wrote “Brazil” – that sequence seemed like another attempt at an old-school Disney “beauty” sequence, but half-hearted compared to Fantasia or Bambi. The droplets falling in the water felt like “the boss said we have to do beautiful droplets falling in water.” It just wasn’t that beautiful.

ADAM There was none of the effect where things in the foreground are blurry and things in the background are sharper, as there was very conspicuously in Bambi and in Snow White.

BROOM Those movies were meant to show off the power of the studio, whereas this was just a job. What I did think was newly good about it, as opposed to the quality of the animation itself, was the design boldness of the backgrounds, of those Mary Blair backgrounds. I thought the sequence when they were riding the train through those pastels-on-black backgrounds was really wonderful and charming. I thought, “oh, I remember this black background feeling from later Disney movies – like Alice in Wonderland, and Sleeping Beauty.” That’s a look that’s really atmospheric to a child watching it, and this is I think our first time seeing it.

ADAM I thought the same thing.

BROOM And there were a couple of the city backdrops that were totally static, or just had flame moving in them, that were very effective. The movie also puts a new emphasis on anarchy – though I guess “Pink Elephants” was the first time we saw that sort of thing. There there was that crazy bird here that runs around off the edge of the film, beyond the sprocket holes, and pops out from every corner of the frame. In Alice in Wonderland there’s also a bunch of stuff like that; the spirit that the freedom of animation is able to impinge at any time on the realism.

ADAM If you think of the painterly beauty of Fantasia and the comical anarchy of “Pink Elephants” as the two competing strains in the movies we’ve seen so far – frankly those strains continue in Disney movies even into the present. Aladdin and Lion King are the same poles of personality in the way that these are. It’s the same competition as between Mickey and Donald. Mickey could not have been in this movie. It would have fucking blown Mickey’s mind.

BROOM Right. They wouldn’t exposed Mickey to this kind of stuff. He’s above it.

ADAM I’ve always liked Donald more than Mickey, and this kind of shows why – he’s irascible and suspicious, but he’s also game.

BROOM I don’t think that’s the full Disney spectrum, just between Mickey and Donald; yes, Mickey couldn’t be in this movie, but more importantly, Bambi couldn’t be in this movie.

ADAM Well, yeah, but if you think of Donald and Mickey as the yin and the yang of Disney…

BROOM I know – you’re doing an Apollo/Dionysus thing. But I don’t think Mickey is nearly as Apollonian as Disney could actually get.

ADAM Clarabelle?

BROOM Clarabelle Cow? I think she was dead by this point. There was the Disney of “high art” and there was the Disney of the shorts, of “let’s just make a funny cartoon,” and the combination in this last sequence was that the animation and design people got to go to town and flex their imaginations, but the content was totally inane, so it became very weird.

ADAM You know that one of the upcoming Disney features is Rapunzel based on a painting of Fragonard. I bet there won’t be a lot of fart jokes in that. Fart jokes being the modern equivalent of anarchy.

BROOM Do you think when they were making this, they knew how crazy it was? Or do you think that in some respects they underestimated how crazy it would seem?

ADAM I sort of pictured the animators egging each other on in the studio late at night. How could they not have known how crazy it was? Would you show that to your five-year-old? That would be frightening, honestly.

BROOM I don’t think the sexual quality of it would be apparent.

ADAM Not the sexual quality, just the anarchic quality.

BROOM I loved that stuff when I was a kid. Craziness was awesome; I loved craziness. And I would have loved that stuff, but it would have been on the edge of creepy. Like I said about “Pink Elephants,” I liked it all except that when their flesh tore, that felt a little bit wrong. I mean, I liked it all, I would still watch it. But it felt slightly unsafe.

ADAM I don’t know that this was sexually any weirder than Tex Avery.

BROOM I don’t know if I would show Tex Avery to a kid. Well, I guess I would.

ADAM I saw that stuff by the bucket when I was a kid. It was just on TV! I’m very comfortable with the idea of a male cartoon character’s eyes shooting out of his head at the sight of a busty lady.

BROOM There was just something odd about the use of that concept within this framework, which was ostensibly about learning about the southern hemisphere, or getting presents, or something. Donald was very distractable. There was a lightheaded quality to this movie, where only what’s on screen right now matters. That could be a picture of South America, or it could be an exploding cactus lady.

ADAM You’re not even expected to remember what happened at the beginning of the movie.

BROOM Anyway, I thought this movie was not successful, but was fascinating to watch.

ADAM I’m delighted that we saw this.

BROOM But I was also a little bit sad, because I missed the intelligence and seriousness of purpose that came through in all the previous films. Maybe “seriousness of purpose” is a little strong for something like Dumbo – but just the feeling of smart people working hard. This felt more like something that happened at the studio, and it sent the message “you can’t count on us to be on the ball all the time anymore.”

ADAM But you seem generally more inspired than most by the idea of Disney’s ideals. You have been consistently throughout this process.

BROOM Yes, I am inspired by that. And I feel like I smelled there not necessarily being anything behind this movie in the way of ideals.

ADAM But there was something behind it in the way of something. It may not have been coherent and it may not have had any kind of structure or purpose, but it was definitely trying to go balls out… at something.

BROOM It was going balls out at something that was fairly superficial. The surface of it was absolutely balls out. But the substance of the movie was about getting presents. It was a movie where Donald Duck gets a bunch of presents.

ADAM I think of the opposite of a Walt Disney style of beauty not as being this kind of slackness but as Hanna Barbera cynicism.

BROOM I’m not saying it’s the opposite. I just felt it was a drop, a quantum shift.

ADAM Was Walt alive for this?

BROOM Of course he was. He was alive into the 60s. The 70s even. [ed. note: 1901-1966]

ADAM I thought that the “Three Caballeros” song was pretty successful.

BROOM I thought that was an attractive, funny sequence, actually. I thought that the choreography of that, which was fast-paced and silly, where things switch around comically in time with the music – I thought that was very satisfying and well animated. It reminded me of the recent movies like Aladdin or Hercules that are filled with quick-paced silliness.

[After reading the original New York Times review, linked in the image below as always:]

BROOM That was a basically fair and not absurdly-historically-skewed review. Although I think that today the movie would be taken more to task for making, as the reviewer says, “no tangible sense.”

ADAM I would tell anyone to watch this movie. Particularly people who are not Disney fans.

BROOM Really?

ADAM Yes, I would. I think for people who think “oh, Disney movies are cute and boring,” this is crazy. And for people who like Disney movies, this is also crazy, and they would enjoy seeing it.

BROOM I’m very glad to have seen it after many many years of knowing it existed and having seen a very small clip from it. I’m not sure I will be interested in watching the whole thing again. I will probably skip the penguin part.

ADAM Yeah. Although there is something to the way it totally sneaks up on you that’s charming.

BROOM It’s true. I may have to watch that last sequence again sometime soon.

ADAM Unfortunately Beth only saw the boring parts.

BROOM Yes. Beth was feeling a little drunk before the movie started, so she really didn’t stand a chance. She got a headache and felt a little out of it, so she went to bed, and she will watch this movie on her own and submit her thoughts either as a coda or as a comment. So look below.

Ed. note: Beth watched the movie soon afterward and has had nearly a month to add her thoughts here in the body of the post itself. But has she? No. Despite my urging. I therefore hereby post it and relegate her thoughts to the comments.

I’m also going to add two links here to other people’s blogs, which I don’t normally do, but these are particularly interesting, I think. This person has uploaded scans of the complete “script” of the movie, which shows which animators were responsible for which shots, but – perhaps more interestingly to the general readership – shows how the surreal action was described. After the fact, I think, but still.

And if you got this far you might enjoy reading this bit of Three Caballeros advocacy. Somewhat over-thought and over-sold if you ask me, but I enjoy any contribution to the conversation on a subject like this.

based on the book by Major Alexander P. de Seversky (1942)

story direction by Perce Pearce
scenes with Major Seversky directed by H.C. Potter
animation supervised by David Hand

Subway movie number two, and also an appendix to the Disney canon project. If you’ve been to the wikipedia list that we’re following you’ll have seen that there are several subsidiary lists, one of them being “Live-action films which feature Disney animation.” The first several entries on this list predate Disney’s first live-action film without animation (that being Treasure Island (1950)) and are thus particularly close genetic relatives to the animated features.

Chronologically speaking I have missed The Reluctant Dragon (1941), a behind-the-scenes mish-mosh movie that came between Fantasia and Dumbo. I’d like to see that. Victory Through Air Power is next on the list, though, and happens to fall exactly between Saludos Amigos and The Three Caballeros, which is where we are broomlet-wise as well, so this is a fortuitous time to post about it. But I didn’t actually choose to watch it with that in mind – I just thought it would be an interesting one for the subway. And it was!

This movie is a riveting, remarkable piece of propaganda. “Propaganda” insofar as it exists entirely to put forth a particular point of view, but not in the standard sense that it coats it in entertainment and then sneakily plays on the emotions. It makes its case overtly and directly to the camera from start to finish. Any playing on the emotions is, in a sense, incidental, and completely transparent. Which is not to say that it’s not a vital part of what’s going on here. But the movie was strikingly devoid of that pernicious quality of total condescension that runs through most propaganda. Being manipulative in the context of an outright plea is different from being manipulative from behind a smokescreen of misdirection; this movie is a plea.

What I’m saying is that I found it basically sympathetic as a piece of work, to my great surprise. I don’t know whether the military arguments made here were smart, dumb, or too oversimplified to be legitimate, but I do know that they were presented more forcefully and vividly than I could ever have imagined. Major Seversky had a case to make; Walt Disney found it convincing, and wanted to help. But rather than making some “Disney cartoon equivalent” of Seversky’s argument, he used the considerable resources of his studio simply to make the argument itself, as is. No comedy here (well, a faint tiny bit during the early “history of aviation” segment), and no metaphors or allegories; just a military man telling you what he thinks the military should be doing. I don’t think there has ever been more attractive, better executed animation of arrows, routes, shifting borders, and strategic actions. It’s truly thrilling seeing Powerpoint material run through the Disney studio at its height, and I think even today, in our nerdy era obsessed with visualized data, information design people could learn from, and should study, this beautiful movie.

Seversky’s case, for those of you who don’t want to look it up, is essentially that a) air power is the most important force in the way war is now being fought and the U.S. needs to focus more military and industrial resources on it, and b) the only way to defeat the Japanese military is to bomb Japan, and the only way to accomplish that effectively is to develop planes with a longer range. There’s more to it, and every point is supported by a variety of arguments. History didn’t exactly go as he predicted but it’s not clear that he was wrong, either – at least not to me. A military historian might be able to shed some light on how smart this movie is, and I’d be interested to hear it, but during the watching it really wasn’t my concern.

It is important for me to note that I never once got even the slightest bit bored watching this movie, which is really saying something about the quality of the production.

Disney wanted to turn it around fast so there’s a lot of uncharacteristic “limited animation,” where static images slide across each other, etc. – but it’s some of the most effective, attractive limited animation I’ve ever seen. The paintings of battleships and airplanes are warm and oddly appealing. At least to me. The full animation of explosions and dogfights is generally gorgeous – and the culminating battle between a bald eagle and a world-clutching black octopus is as fine as anything in Fantasia. In its own weird muted way, this movie looks great.

The only other major movie I can think of in the “plea” genre is An Inconvenient Truth, which I didn’t see.

Living as we do in an era when war policy is again a particularly crucial and controversial subject, I was struck by how essentially analytic and rational the nature of the debate was, and saddened by the contrast with public discourse on comparable subjects in our time. Military resource management and strategy is a complicated subject, and this argument unapologetically embraced that as a fact. Nowadays, the public debate about what should be done with our military seems to be exclusively conducted in terms of gut feelings – “we can’t pull out of Iraq, it would be terrible” vs. “We have to pull out of Iraq, enough is enough.” Of course that debate is intractable; it has no components. If Dick Cheney showed me a bunch of animated arrows illustrating his point of view, I might still disagree with him but I would be comforted that he at least had it in him to render his point of view in terms of arrows. What happened to all the arrows?

Of Victory Through Air Power, James Agee apparently wrote:

I had the feeling I was sold something under pretty high pressure, which I don’t enjoy, and I am staggered at the ease with which such self-confidence, on matters of such importance, can be blared all over the nation, without cross-questioning.

That’s fair and reasonable of him. All the sadder that this now struck me as remarkably open and articulate for what it was. Agee’s complaint could today apply to pretty much all public political discourse in this country. No?

But I need to keep in mind that this wasn’t a political speech or an editorial in a paper; it was a movie from Walt Disney, in theaters. I would probably feel nothing but distaste and skepticism if I went to the theater and saw something like this today. Perhaps it’s genuinely unfair for this sort of content to venture into the theaters because it is so prohibitively expensive to get it there that a properly ventilated cross-questioning will never be possible. Seversky’s opponents were never going to be able to find some major animation studio to make their counter-film; perhaps that makes the film an abuse of power on Walt’s part, rather than fair use. Is it appropriate to use your Oscar acceptance speech to talk about Tibet? This is sort of a big complicated question, ethically, and I’m not at all interested in pursuing it right now.

Maybe in the comments section. But only if you insist.