Note: the participants are sleepier than usual.

ADAM Beth, why don’t you start, because… well, I don’t know. I was going to say, “because you’re a gay redhead with a flair for scrubbing.”

BETH It’s true. But I don’t have a lot to say about it.

ADAM I got sleepy by the end, but it was no comment on the film.

BROOM I was sleepy at the beginning, and now I’m more awake, but that’s not a comment on the film either.

ADAM While it was more dated than I had ever realized, it’s still very good-natured.

BETH I hadn’t realized how many animal hijinks there would be.

BROOM This is a seventy-minute movie, and of those minutes, about thirty were cat and mouse bullshit.

BETH I think maybe more.

ADAM At the beginning, I counted: there were nineteen solid minutes of just animals.

BROOM That’s right. The stepmother didn’t wake up and set the story in motion until twenty minutes into the movie. Everything prior to that was just hijinks.

BETH I thought they did a nice job making the daughters look really ugly. I don’t think we’ve seen anyone that ugly in a Disney movie yet.

ADAM Certainly no females.

BROOM You thought the undesirable from Sleepy Hollow was more desirable than these girls?

BETH Who?

BROOM The dancing girl.

BETH Oh. Definitely.

ADAM What about Ichabod himself?

BETH He rivaled these girls in appeal.

ADAM What about Casey?

BETH Casey was pretty ugly, but in a different way.

BROOM That reminds me, since I’ve been pointing out these Irish types: the fairy godmother here seems also to be Irish, but in a positive way for the first time.

BETH That’s true; she looked like she could be a relative of mine.

BROOM She had the little chin.

ADAM She was like – who’s the dotty aunt in Bewitched?

BETH She is like that woman. I don’t remember her name.

ADAM But she’s not quite as dotty as that.

BROOM But the honking, Casey-style horrible lower-class caricature was also present here; the guy holding the slipper at the end was one of those. He had the big flapping Tweedledee lips.

ADAM So was Bruno when he was a human.

BROOM He was thrilled to be a human. To be upgraded by one status level, from the class of horse to the class of servant.

ADAM No, Bruno, the dog, who became the footman. The horse was the coachman.

BROOM Oh, right. Well, they each got the same promotion. Anyway, I think the main thing to talk about here is that so much of the movie is mice running around. That stuff plays well to kids. I think.

BETH Maybe, but seeing it now I remembered that as a kid, I was always waiting for it to get back to her and her dress.

ADAM Yes, the one thing I remember vividly from seeing this as a child is the beautiful pink dress garlanded with those beautiful pink bows.

BROOM So the dress was an object of fascination for both of you?

BETH and ADAM Yes.

ADAM And could there be a lusher, more exhilarating moment in the history of cinema than when the sparkles clothe her and she emerges in that wedding gown?

BROOM To me, the sweet spot in the movie was always the “Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo” scene; specifically when the pumpkin walks out and transforms.

BETH I figured you would like that.

ADAM I always thought, “Get past this! Who cares?”

BROOM When you were a kid, you didn’t care about the pumpkin? Just the dress?

BETH I would feel like, “No! Come on! Don’t forget about the dress!”

BROOM Well, they explicitly play that frustration for the character. And it worked on you.

BETH Yes it did!

ADAM When I was Person Of The Week in preschool, we had to make life-size drawings of ourselves on shelf paper and answer biographical questions, and my brother said that he wanted to be a dump-truck driver, and I said I wanted to be a dressmaker.

BROOM Because of that scene?

ADAM No. Just because it seemed so wonderful.

BROOM Well, you each got your wish, in a way.

ADAM And as a small child, when I would draw girls in fabulous dresses, they were always triangular, like her dress.

BROOM How much of that interest stems back to this movie?

ADAM I don’t know. But thinking about it just got me excited and woke me up. Even now.

BROOM So which were the dull parts for you as a kid?

ADAM and BETH Everything else.

BETH It was just waiting around until the dress parts.

BROOM As a kid I was more willing to watch the slapstick than I am now. The parts I wasn’t interested in were them dancing at the ball…

BETH Well, that was pretty dull.

BROOM Or anything talky with the daughters. Althought the moment when the mother sees the other slipper and gasps, as if to say, “I’m ruined!” – that was satisfying to me as a child.

ADAM All the moments of horrible cruelty are satisfying, too.

BETH Maybe now, but I didn’t care when I was little.

ADAM I don’t recall if they were satisfying at the time, but they’re now intensely satisfying.

BROOM This is the first movie I saw in a theater – a pretty girly movie, but I turned out okay – and apparently I was scared by the stepmother. The only place that could have been was when her eyes narrow and she decides to lock up Cinderella.

ADAM But the stepmother isn’t evil in a witchy way; she’s evil in a sort of cruel and haughty way that’s different from Ursula or the evil Queen. I think they did a good job of giving her a refined, ladylike cruelty.

BROOM She was like Joan Crawford. Her hair is nicely designed. And her chin, too. I think the scariness of her character is that it’s almost completely unspoken. The movie mostly holds at bay the underlying fact that Cinderella is totally alone in the world, has nothing to live for, and is only getting by in life through her baseless good cheer – that her stepmother is really just this side of killing her. And in moments like the one where she decides it would be best to lock up Cinderella, that suddenly comes to the surface. But as a kid, actually, I don’t think I was susceptible to interpersonal tension as a source of scariness. I don’t think I empathized with characters enough. Whereas seeing mice go in one hole and come out another hole – that holds a kid’s interest. So this movie, which I found very annoying tonight, would probably still seem fine to six-year-olds.

ADAM I have a vivid memory of the blue beads and the pink sash. Truly, that’s all I remember. Did you remember what the prince looked like, let alone what his voice sounded like?

BETH Of course not.

ADAM It’s totally irrelevant.

BROOM You only see him in close-up once, in the spinning shot while they’re dancing. He looks like a high school football star.

ADAM [hero voice]: But his voice!

BROOM His voice wasn’t nearly that deep or manly!

ADAM I had forgotten that he did not do the slipper searching himself.

BETH Me too. I had forgotten about those doofuses.

ADAM Do you know, in the real Charles Perrault story, how the stepsisters try to deceive the prince?

BETH I don’t know, no.

ADAM They cut off their own toes and heels, respectively, to fit in the shoe. And nobody notices, but as they are on their way to the palace to be married to the prince, their blood, which falls on the snow, screams that they are impostors. Probably that can happen in the Perrault version because it’s a slipper of fur, not of glass. It was vair in French and then it was confused with verre.

BROOM That makes more sense, because a glass slipper would be unwearable.

ADAM And also, the blood would be quite visible.

BROOM So this movie seemed to take place in France. That’s a first for the series. They didn’t do much with it, but their chateau looked a little bit French.

ADAM And the names were French-y.

BROOM That’s right. Their last name is Tremaine. So, anyway, this is it; this is what Disney movies are going to be like from now on. The girl who dreams of a better life…

ADAM Who is saved from danger entirely by her own gentleness and prettiness.

BROOM Actually, I’m wrong; they’re not really going to be this way, are they. This is something that was dormant and they resurrected it for The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast. And this in turn seemed to be an intentional reversion to the pre-war movies, an effort to make one “just like Snow White.”

ADAM Was “Cinderella” a cultural trope before this movie came out? I feel like this defines a whole half-century of retrograde ideas about gender.

BROOM Specify.

ADAM You know, the whole “Princess Syndrome.”

BROOM Well Snow White was a princess too, so maybe we should try to name the elements in Cinderella but not in Snow White that make Cinderella more “princess-y.”

ADAM Dresses!

BETH It is the dresses. And castles. I guess there are castles in Snow White too.

BROOM But that was a symbolic castle, at the end, whereas this was more materialistic. But this movie also made fun of that kind of materialism. I mean, Cinderella’s dress you’re supposed to enjoy sincerely, but King Teddy Roosevelt’s castle, with the enormous doors and enormous paintings, is sort of a joke. You’re not meant to lust for it. Really the only object of specific material desire in the movie is that dress.

ADAM And the tiara. I mean, let’s be clear: the whole outfit. And her hair. I just loved her hair; it’s like a confection.

BETH The first dress looks like a cake, and the second dress looks like a wedding cake.

ADAM I suppose the idea of talking to birds is new; but no, Snow White talks to birds, doesn’t she.

BROOM She talks to them but they’re not fully anthropomorphized; they don’t talk back to her.

ADAM They don’t assist her in her household chores.

BROOM Uh, yes they do, in the famous sequence, “Whistle While You Work.”

ADAM Oh, you’re right.

BETH They’re actually more effective at helping her than Cinderella’s friends.

BROOM I thought it was odd that the mice were characterized as idiots. They can talk but they don’t have fully-formed brains.

ADAM Well, the one in the red shirt could.

BROOM Jaq? Jar-Jar Mouse?

BETH He was smart. They just couldn’t pronounce things correctly.

BROOM “We is coming, Cinderelly!”

ADAM Cinderella also has a little bit more bitterness than Snow White ever has. She’s sarcastic towards the bells at the beginning. “Oh, you mean old thing! I hear you!”

BROOM Oh yeah – the same bells that at the end, I now see, ring for her wedding.

ADAM And she makes a sarcastic comment about the sisters’ music lesson. She’s a little bit tart. But when she says “the prince!” she gets this vacant look in her face, which is very disturbing.

BROOM But the prince isn’t really a focus of this movie. It’s not about wanting men at all. It’s about a better life. It’s about your dreams coming true. And your dreams might happen to feature a dress.

ADAM You’re right. It’s not really about being saved by a man, it’s being saved by money. And royalty.

BROOM It’s the basic Harry Potter dream: you’re nobody, but maybe in some secret way you’re the queen, and everyone will know it someday. She doesn’t actually put into words the idea that she wants everyone to know it. That’s the strange thing – she never really says “I wish I could rise above all this.”

BETH Well, what do you think she was dreaming about in the first scene? Probably the castle she could see from her window.

ADAM Or a boy.

BETH Yes.

BROOM She doesn’t know he’s the prince; she just has a really nice prom experience.

ADAM When was Ken released? Around the same time, right?

BETH The first Barbie was released in 1958, and I don’t think Ken came along for a little while after that.

ADAM Oh, I thought Barbie was released in the 40s.

BROOM So was this movie an influence on Barbie?

BETH I don’t think so. She looks a little like the first Barbie.

BROOM She’s not quite as sexed up as Barbie.

ADAM Barbie was based on some German sex toy.

BETH Well, that’s just how things started to look later in the 50s.

BROOM In my vague impression of Cinderella, I had imagined her to be more sexualized than she is. They really make it all about her face; her body is just something to hang a dress on.

ADAM Her body is slim, but not curvy.

BROOM And she doesn’t move in a particularly sensual way; she doesn’t sway at all – she skitters around like a mouse. Unlike Katrina Van Tassel from last time, when I said “Cinderella’s going to look like that” – but she was to be lusted after, whereas Cinderella is the protagonist. But, really, the protagonist is the cat. You spend more time watching the cat than watching Cinderella.

ADAM I didn’t realize that the fairy godmother is only on stage for about two minutes. Even though she’s such a classic character.

BROOM That scene is the best scene in the movie by a long shot. Not just because of the dress or the pumpkin, but because it has atmosphere and something exciting is happening. Though I actually thought that the staging wasn’t bad in some of the other human scenes. I mean, it was stupid, but it could be fun. Like when the King is “swimming” across his marble table.

ADAM The King and the Grand Duke are amusing enough. I hadn’t remembered them at all.

BROOM And it was clear that the daughters and the mother were heavily rotoscoped, but their acting was pretty good. But the mice were just terrible mice. I didn’t like the way they looked and their stupid Alvin-and-the-Chipmunks voices were awful.

ADAM They sounded like Alvin and the Chipmunks, and she sounded like Judy Garland.

BETH She did sound like Judy Garland.

BROOM The mother?

ADAM No, Cinderella.

BROOM Hm. And a whole song in those high-pitched voices! I guess at the time it was truly a novelty.

ADAM That’s the second most famous song from this movie. Could you have sung any of those songs, other than “Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo?”

BROOM I could have sung “A Dream is a Wish Your Heart Makes.”

ADAM Speaking of “Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo”: to hear a full chorus singing those nonsense words was pretty unintentionally funny.

BROOM Oh, I think it was supposed to be funny. It was supposed to be fun that this was just gobbledygook. It’s a very short song. I would not have been able to sing “So This Is Love.” In fact, when they were calling for “The waltz! The waltz!” I thought, “what’s the melody of the waltz going to be?” And I completely didn’t recognize it when it started. You know, I usually zone out for those sorts of sequences, but I thought it was reasonably pretty.

BETH The love scene?

BROOM Yes.

ADAM Could you have sung the “Nightingale” song?

BROOM That she sings with her own bubble reflections. No, and I can’t sing it now either.

BETH I kind of liked that sequence.

BROOM This movie didn’t have any blowing leaves, but it did have bubbles rising out of an old oaken bucket, which is another popular image for Disney.

ADAM From Fantasia.

BROOM And Snow White. And probably all the other movies too, if we’d been watching for it. [ed. Definitely in Dumbo!] So as I was saying: This movie is a throwback, and then The Little Mermaid is a throwback specifically to this – the kingdom in Little Mermaid is essentially the same castle, the same prince, the same stuff – but I don’t think we’re going to see any princes until then. Are we?

ADAM There’s a prince in Sleeping Beauty.

BROOM Oh, of course, Sleeping Beauty. That’s the last shot at it for a long time.

ADAM Anyway, I really liked this movie. I thought everything in it was gently humorous. Well, I didn’t really like it, but I liked it. It was cheerful, and maybe not especially well drawn, but it had a pleasant liveliness to the drawing. It was totally bearable. Though there were moments when Cinderella seemed a little too much like someone from a 1950s soap commercial; the anachronism of it jarred me a little, but otherwise I enjoyed it.

BROOM I found the mice very difficult to take. I think if you excised all the animal material, you’d have a pleasant 25 minute movie. This was just tedious.

BETH I think it was solid kids’ entertainment, and it felt more contemporary as kids’ entertainment than any of the previous Disney movies. I can imagine kids still watching this. And I guess Dumbo too.

ADAM To me it felt about as contemporary as “Johnnie Fedora and Alice Bluebonnet.”

BROOM But didn’t this feel more condescending and more specific to a child audience than any of the others? This is the first one where I felt like mom and dad were checking their watches while the kids enjoyed it.

ADAM Dumbo still had jokes that went over my head as a child.

BETH That’s what I mean: this is more like a kid’s movie that you’d see now.

BROOM I just felt disappointed.

ADAM That this central pillar of our culture is so thin.

BROOM Yes, it felt thin, and it felt a little cynical on the part of the studio. It didn’t feel like it had anything behind it except for “kids will go to this,” albeit done with a reasonable amount of good cheer.

ADAM But I will say, as a coda, that Cinderella is culturally probably the most influential of all Disney movies, in terms of setting up an archetype for the culture at large.

BROOM And yet she’s such a cipher. She doesn’t have any character.

ADAM That’s the whole point!

BETH She has a castle. It’s the center of Disneyworld!

ADAM Just the idea of “a Cinderella story,” this ideal of mid-century womanhood, is much more influential than, like, Pocahontas. I think it’s interesting to ponder that. And I think it’s all about that one image of the swirling dress.

BROOM But it’s very much the same setup as Snow White. It just has that element of material lust in it.

BETH Glamour.

BROOM Do you think that in 1937, Snow White’s image was also a sort of glamorous, desirable image?

ADAM No. She’s self-consciously girlish.

BROOM Yeah, she’s an innocent, and real dames would have blown her off. Whereas in 1950, our various grandmothers might well have wanted to look like Cinderella.

ADAM Our various mothers.

BROOM Our mothers weren’t born yet. And yours wasn’t old enough to want it.

ADAM My mother was two, which is, I think, just when those messages fall on you most uncritically.

BROOM Two??

ADAM Well, nowadays. Okay, four.

BROOM I did have one more thing I wanted to say about the mice and cats running around: kids have more tolerance for that than adults do, in part because kids relate to that. I related to those kinds of things as a kid because the divide between the animal world and the story world is kind of the same as the divide between kid-world and grownup-world. While you’re watching the cat and mouse games, meanwhile, Cinderella is bringing the sisters their breakfast; that’s what’s really going on the story, but we care about these cats on the floor, which the grownups don’t even notice. And then ultimately it’s like one of these movies where Kid Power saves the day for the grownups. In the end, the mice have to be the heroes. Nobody’s been paying attention to the mice but us, and then suddenly it’s the Ewoks who have to save the day.

ADAM Do the Ewoks save the day?

BROOM At the end of Return of the Jedi, yes they do. Because who notices the Ewoks? So here, it would never even occur to the evil stepmother – it’s so far below her disdain – that mice would crawl into her pocket, steal her key, and carry it up the stairs. And that’s how victory is achieved, because kid-world wins out. Okay, I said it.

— [the Times review is read] —

BROOM I want to register my surprise and dismay that Bosley Crowther says that the mice are the best thing in the movie.

BETH I know; you didn’t like the mice. We get it.

BROOM But he was correct about the pumpkin. So you’re saying that you didn’t mind the mice, you enjoyed the mice.

BETH I didn’t enjoy the mice.

ADAM I didn’t enjoy the mice, but I didn’t hate them.

BETH They kind of reminded me of the mice in The Muppets Take Manhattan.

ADAM They kind of reminded me of when you’re in fourth grade and the only person more unpopular than you is some really, really unpopular kid, and you don’t hate him, but you don’t really want him hanging around you. You know?

BROOM Yes. Well, I hated him, because I wanted to maintain my distance.

ADAM Because he reminded you of yourself.

BROOM That’s right. These mice didn’t remind me of myself though. Okay. GO OBAMA. [Ed. He won.]

directed by Alfred L. Werker
cartoon sequences directed by Hamilton Luske
screenplay by Ted Sears, Al Perkins, Larry Clemmons, Bill Cottrell, and Harry Clork
based on the story by Kenneth Grahame (from the collection Dream Days (1898))

This is another pendant to the Disney animated canon, an only-partially-animated feature from the days before they wholeheartedly made live-action movies. I already saw Victory Through Air Power, but that was out of chronological order. This one comes first.

It’s just a behind-the-scenes tour: TV-special fodder from before the TV era. In 1941 the concept was apparently still novel. A dorky title card at the end of the opening credits feels the need to explain, lamely: “This picture is made in answer to the many requests to show the backstage life of animated cartoons. P.S. Any resemblance to a regular motion picture is purely coincidental.” Oh ho ho is it then.

In the opening scene, Robert Benchley’s wife – not, of course, his actual wife – insists forcefully, but for no apparent reason, that Benchley pitch Walt Disney the idea of making a cartoon of Kenneth Grahame’s story “The Reluctant Dragon.” She seems to believe that they will be able to “sell” the story to Disney somehow, even though the rights are certainly not theirs. Frankly the premise makes very little sense.

Benchley resists, but you know how onscreen wives can be, so the next thing you know he’s on the Disney lot, under the watchful eye of a priggish young nerd, being led to his meeting with Walt. He ends up slipping away on his own – he can’t bear the nerd, and he sees a pretty girl walking by – you know the drill. He proceeds to wander around the studio and learn all about the aforementioned backstage life of animated cartoons.

Every department that he stumbles into is awfully cheery about interrupting their day to put on a little informational show for Robert Benchley and then help him escape from the pursuing nerd, who is, we learn, universally despised. Given that the film is pure Disney PR, why, we might ask, does Disney portray itself as employing this hateful wet blanket? Luckily, his impact on the studio’s image is counterbalanced by the movie’s insistence that Disney also employs a great many PRETTY LADIES. Cheerful ones, who don’t mind at all when Robert Benchley makes wisecracks about how hot they are instead of paying attention to what they’re saying. Such ladies make up a large part of the workforce at Disney, apparently. So we can’t begrudge the company its one irritating eunuch.*

Benchley finally meets up with Walt in a screening room, just as a new cartoon is about to be shown. Punchline? The new cartoon is The Reluctant Dragon. Disney’s already made it. Get it? Then we watch the short, which makes up the last 20 minutes of the movie.

Walt always had a penchant for talking about the technical side of his business. He thought it was interesting stuff and he liked sharing it; he clearly believed that “behind the scenes” had entertainment and educational value. We tend to take it for granted, but on consideration there’s something noteworthy, and praiseworthy, in the fact that his TV introductions frequently featured him holding up models or sketches from the development process of the cartoon you were about to see, sometimes launching into extended educational sequences about the subject matter, or about animation. The Disney product gets criticized by some as slick and impersonal, but I think Walt had a sincere desire to get his viewers to see his shiny product as the result of fascinating and intricate human labor. “The Making Of” has PR value but it also has aesthetic value; the value of seeing an artwork as a creation, full of intention and skill, rather than just as an experience.

Animation is one of those artforms that particularly resists being felt as a truly human creation. The method and materials involved are so far removed from everyday experience, and the illusion so strong, that even if we tell ourselves we are watching a series of photographs of painted sheets of acetate pinned in front of a painting laid flat on a table and filmed from a camera suspended overhead, we can’t do anything, perceptually, with that information. The most delightful part of The Reluctant Dragon is when the camera operator gives Benchley the standard demonstration of how successive images create movement by showing him a few cels in Donald Duck’s walk cycle, and then Donald wakes up and takes over the demonstration himself in fully-animated motion, holding still in the poses as best he can. “First my foot is up here, see?… Then it’s down here, understand?… When I do it faster, I’m walking!” The phony demonstration is a celebration of the strength of the illusion: whenever the film is rolling, we’re on Donald’s time, and we can’t hope to conceive of the technical process any better than he can. From his point of view, “animated” just means “sped up,” and in the moment, that’s about the best we can do too.

This I think is why the Disney product manages to seem irredeemably slick even though he was constantly inviting viewers to consider the dirty work. You can see it, but you don’t believe it. Not in the middle of a cartoon, you don’t. Another highlight of this movie is seeing Clarence Nash talking normally and then launching into the Donald voice, but as with Jim Henson and Dan Castellaneta, he might as well be dubbed, because there’s no way that what I hear Donald saying is actually coming out of that guy’s mouth. Whether or not Robert Benchley is actually seen producing the Donald voice is a legitimately open question. If it’s for real, my hat is off to him.

The Reluctant Dragon short itself is reasonably attractive and reasonably charming, for a short. By far the most memorable thing about it is the mincing dragon himself, whose “reluctance,” ahem, is so spectacular that the critic for the Times assumed the dragon was a “she.” Simpler times, those. Also interesting to note that, in contrast to my attitude above, the Times review had no patience at all for “a lot of shop talk,” and was pleased only by those portions of the film that had been drawn, ahem, and ahem again, “out of Disney’s own gay fairy book.”

Oh, it’s immature of me to find that amusing, is it? I suppose you’re going to say that this isn’t funny either, are you? Be that way, see if I care.

* Sad that I feel the need to answer this seriously, but I do: The nerd is in fact a model employee; his only flaw is that he is too dedicated to have a little fun, and too rigid in his ways to realize that Mr. Benchley is running wild. And we see that his supervisors are dutifully on his case, reprimanding him for the latter fault (and in a vague way, the former) – all part of the healthy process of molding an enthusiastic entry-level twit into one of Disney’s own. Nothing to be ashamed of there!

ADAM That was awesome!

BETH That was one of my favorites. But I don’t think Mr. Toad should be shown to children. There’s just no way they could follow it. It was hard even for me. Was that what it was called? Mr. Toad?

BROOM I would say that section is called The Wind in the Willows.

BETH Well, I thought The Wind in the Willows was pretty interesting but not for kids at all.

BROOM I agree. I thought both segments in the movie required a sophistication of narrative comprehension that kids just don’t have. I remembered seeing both halves, separately, and not being able to really follow either of them. As a kid watching the Sleepy Hollow section, you don’t know what’s going on… and then eventually there’s the headless horseman at the end. And it still seems like a payoff, because it would be a good payoff for any story. But the psychological, interpersonal content is over your head. I think kids would also have a hard time answering the question of what type Ichabod Crane is.

ADAM Namely: a hideous pantywaist. That’s what went through my head the whole time. He’s just this mincing, sly, hook-nosed, homosexual Jew. Well, he’s not really a homosexual Jew, but you know.

BROOM But it’s more complicated than that, because then the question is, why are women into him? What does Katrina Van Tassel see in him? Is she just using him to make Brom jealous? It’s all based on non-standard subtleties of characterization that would never be in a Disney movie today.

ADAM The other women are just desperate mongrels. We’ll see these women again, pursuing the Pirates of the Caribbean.

BROOM And pursuing Gaston in Beauty and the Beast, which borrowed heavily from this.

ADAM Yes. In the first scene, when we saw Ichabod walking down the street with his nose in the book, I kept thinking about Belle’s opening number.

BETH I don’t know Beauty and the Beast.

BROOM Well, you will… in a year.

ADAM Belle, being an untraditional Disney heroine, loves to read, and in the first scene she walks through town with her nose in a book, greeting the villagers, and Gaston tries to get her attention. Gaston being a sort of handsome brute.

BROOM Gaston is exactly the same as the guy in this movie. Except he’s less sympathetic. But that’s another interesting thing about this movie: there are no truly sympathetic characters. Brom Bones is a bully… but you can’t blame him… but you don’t root for him either. Do you?

BETH No.

ADAM I want to put this out there: Brom Bones is the first authentically hot Disney character. Discuss.

BETH I actually had the thought, while watching, that he was nearly as ugly as Ichabod, but in a different way.

BROOM I thought that Katrina was pretty hot.

BETH Did you? She was definitely the fattest yet.

BROOM She was “buxom,” if that’s what you mean.

ADAM She was a blooming rose, and you’re just jealous of her petticoats.

BETH She was buxom but her face was pudgy.

BROOM I didn’t have a problem with that.

BETH She seemed a little stupid-looking, though.

BROOM Smarts don’t really come into it.

ADAM So there have been several attractive ladies, but has there been a hot man?

BROOM Certainly not in the muscled sense.

ADAM Tarzan is hot, we’ll come to see, and Robin Hood is hot.

BROOM Robin Hood is hot in a whole other way.

ADAM Well, he’s a fox.

BROOM He’s like Errol Flynn hot.

ADAM Yeah, whereas this guy was like [my boyfriend] hot. And he’s not really a bad guy.

BETH He’s not a bad guy, but he’s sulky.

BROOM That’s what I’m saying is the odd thing about that story; they wouldn’t make it now because there are no clear heroes and villains. In neither of these stories, in fact.

BETH They wouldn’t make either of these stories now. The first one in particular I just found so inaccessible for kids.

ADAM It’s hard to understand what they’re saying, for one thing.

BETH You have Scottish and British dialects, and the story is about, like, a deed.

ADAM It’s a courtroom drama.

BETH It’s about the ownership of a house.

BROOM Okay, Adam, voice your objection.

ADAM What?

BROOM That the end of Wind in the Willows doesn’t make sense.

ADAM Oh. Well, it’s true that it does not make sense that merely retrieving the deed from Winky would demonstrate Toad’s innocence, let alone that he owns it. It wouldn’t exonerate him. I don’t understand the logical connection there. I must say, I never understood the Wind in the Willows ride – or, I should say, “Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride.”

BROOM It’s based only loosely on the movie. In Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride, you hit a train and go to hell.

BETH Don’t you go up into the sky at some point?

BROOM Well, you hit a henhouse, you break things.

ADAM I knew there was going to be a motorcar in the movie.

BROOM The whole ride is about driving recklessly in a motorcar.

ADAM And there is a cop, and a scene where you escape prison.

BROOM You go to court and a judge slams a gavel, too. And there’s a scene where you drive through Toad Hall and see weasels wrecking everything.

BETH They closed it at Disneyworld. I don’t know if it’s still open at Disneyland.

BROOM But at the end, you escape somehow and you’re on train tracks, and you see the headlight of a train coming directly at you, and there’s a boom, and then you’re in hell and there are devils taunting you. So I wasn’t sure Mr. Toad was going to survive the movie, but he did. But perhaps “you” aren’t Toad himself in that ride.

ADAM Probably fewer than one percent of visitors to Disneyland have actually seen The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad.

BROOM Oh, I don’t think that’s true. Lots of people have seen this movie.

ADAM I guess maybe just I had not seen it.

BETH I thought I had seen it, but I did not remember it.

ADAM I found it totally charming. It was like a Dickens story.

BROOM I remember knowing, when Who Framed Roger Rabbit? came out, that the weasels in that movie were from something, but I had since forgotten what it was they were from. They were from this.

ADAM It’s like a Dickens story crossed with a Wodehouse story. The courtroom stuff was funny.

BROOM It was all very entertaining. I don’t know why The Wind in the Willows is called that, or why it’s a classic of British literature. Maybe I should read it.

ADAM I’m not sure that it’s a classic of British literature any more than, like, “Johnny Appleseed” is a classic of American literature.

BROOM Well, the narrator of this movie said that he thought that Mr. Toad of Toad Hall was the most fabulous character in English literature.

ADAM But it said that on his script.

BROOM Maybe. Anyway, what I was thinking throughout – besides that the movie had no sympathetic protagonists in either half…

ADAM I think all four of the main characters of Toad are sympathetic.

BROOM You were rooting for them more or less, but you weren’t them. There was no clear hero. Toad was the heroic central figure but you didn’t quite like him. I mean, I liked watching him, but I didn’t identify with him.

BETH He was just a goofball.

BROOM Yes. Adam said in the middle, “he’s kind of an asshole,” and he was.

BETH I said he was like a baby.

BROOM He’s some ideal of aristocratic recklessness that’s supposed to be charming.

ADAM And is.

BROOM Anyway, we’ve been saying that with this movie, now we’re “out of the woods” of these second-rate package features, and in many ways this movie did seem like it initiated a new direction, toward what Disney is now.

ADAM Sophisticated adult jokes and lavish animation for children?

BROOM Actually, I think this movie was markedly more adult than what Disney is now.

ADAM They would never end a story the way Sleepy Hollow ended. Obviously the whole point of the Washington Irving story is that it is ironic, and that he does not explain the ending, although it is pretty clear what happened to Ichabod Crane. But for children – I was expecting at least a wink, like Brom’s head popping up through the cape. But they didn’t give you that.

BROOM I remembered very specifically from childhood that you had to put it together yourself. That was right on the edge of what I was able to do as a kid. But I didn’t really understand what the tensions had been. As a kid you just know, “that guy’s trying to make that guy dance with the fat girl, and now that guy’s outside, and now that guy’s telling a scary story, and now there’s the headless horseman!”

ADAM That’s like every time I watched “Three’s Company.” I was too young to understand that Jack was pretending to be gay so that Mr. Furley would allow him to live with Chrissy and Janet.

BROOM Of course you were too young to understand that.

ADAM But I loved “Three’s Company”! So I don’t know that not understanding adult jokes is a bar to children’s enjoying something.

BROOM I think it was a bar to enjoying parts of this where there’s no slapstick for a while, there’s just a lot of walking. There’s a fair amount of watching characters talking and gesticulating in Wind in the Willows – which I thought was interesting, because we’d talked about how they hadn’t really found a convincing way to animate full-fledged humans yet, and, while these were of course still animals, there was something newly human about the way the dialogue was handled.

ADAM I thought it was very funny that Toad was the size of a toad.

BROOM I thought it was funny that he wasn’t the size of a toad but he wasn’t the size of people either. He lived in a house and was about as tall as the doorknob, which is neither the size of a toad nor the size of a person.

ADAM A toad is smaller than a doorknob?

BROOM No, he wasn’t the size of a doorknob; his head reached to the doorknob.

ADAM But when he was in court, he wasn’t more than the size of a toad.

BROOM The animals were like half a person’s height. They weren’t toad-sized, they were hobbit-sized.

ADAM As a kid, would you have understood that both Angus MacBadger and Scrooge McDuck are Scottish stereotypes of stinginess?

BROOM Of course not. I didn’t even process now that he was a stereotype of stinginess. I just thought that he was a serious-minded older guy.

ADAM Well, he’s an accountant type, which is a Scottish stereotype. Would you have understood that he was Scottish?

BROOM I don’t think I even knew that was a Scottish stereotype. To be an accountant?

ADAM Well, not an accountant, but to be concerned with penny-pinching.

BROOM Only Scrooge McDuck. I don’t know it outside of these cartoons. Can you give another example?

ADAM I’ll have to look into it.

BROOM Well, I wouldn’t have gotten that.

BETH You wouldn’t have gotten that he was Scottish?

BROOM Probably not. As a kid?

BETH How old are we? If I was six, no. If I was nine, yes.

BROOM Really? I might have recognized that they were the same thing as each other – I think we’ve had this conversation before.

ADAM I thought it was unpleasant that Ichabod Crane wanted her money. It was kind of clear that he was not sexually interested in her. He’s kind of a weirdo for that reason.

BROOM He was both sexually interested in her and interested in her money, and they emphasized the money to drive home that there was nothing sympathetic about this, and that we should side with the bully. Which was a weird case for a movie to make. Ichabod was just a very strange character all around, and that was the point of the movie, and that was odd for Disney. And the character design, with no chin and a big ugly nose and huge ears, was weird and interesting. And I think it answers – earlier than I predicted last time when we talked about this – our question of “when will they create a person who has distinctive person-like characteristics.” We were complaining about the bland-faced people in Melody Time. You definitely knew exactly what Ichabod’s head looked like, in three dimensions. The human animation was really full of character, and they still looked like people, so I think they achieved what we were talking about. But there’s still room for improvement. But what I was going to say earlier: I felt like this was the first movie where the storyboard work, and the pacing and plotting, felt really sturdy and familiar.

ADAM None of us came close to falling asleep, and I was sorry when Mr. Toad ended.

BROOM I’m glad. I didn’t know what you guys were thinking. I’ve been enjoying the other ones, and then it turns out that you guys didn’t like them. And I was enjoying this one too but I thought, “maybe they’re going to say this is dumb, I don’t know.”

ADAM No, it was good. But it was a little jarring to leave Mr. Toad in his airplane and then suddenly we’re with Bing Crosby in a library. They gotta fix that.

BROOM Well, this will be the last movie where something gives way to something else that has nothing to do with it.

BETH I agree with what you’re saying about the plotting, and I thought, “how refreshing that we’re actually watching stories, here, being told well.” Especially when you think about “Bongo.” It’s a big contrast.

BROOM Well, I think both parts of Fun and Fancy Free – “Bongo” and “Mickey and the Beanstalk” – were had-been-aborted-and-then-were-quickly-wrapped-up projects, and they didn’t represent the full force of the studio.

ADAM Is it relevant that Mr. Disney didn’t come up with these stories, but that they’re adaptations?

BETH I thought it might be relevant. But just that they can take something and tell it well is the big improvement. [ed. worth reminding ourselves that apart from stuff like “Pedro the Mail Plane,” none of the movies so far have been on original stories]

BROOM There’s definitely a different thrust to this from their earlier successes, than Pinocchio or even Snow White. This feels like a more conservative, less visually-oriented type of storytelling. It’s more like normal movie-making. It just had a different rhythm to it, and I felt like, “Oh yeah, this is how Disney movies flow.” Strong caricatures are used to send clear signals to a kid about what each scene is. During the heist scene where they’re lowering him down on a rope, I was thinking that not only is this scene familiar because it’s used all the time, but it’s been set up very purely, so it’s clear exactly what the standard tensions are. I’m not sure how to say this.

ADAM Like… whether the person falls or not?

BROOM Just what the significance of the scene is, and what’s at stake. Like, what kind of function it serves in the plot, and also in itself. It telegraphs its own function and mechanism in such an immediate way.

ADAM What’s the earliest movie where you remember it being a plot device that someone is trying to retrieve something from somebody sleeping, and the sleeping person ends up hugging the would-be thief as if he were a pillow?

BROOM This goes back to the “meme-o-pedia” idea I’ve mentioned several times. There’s “trying to retrieve something from a room full of sleeping people,” “trying to retrieve something from a person holding it while sleeping,” and then as a subcategory of that, what the person does when it doesn’t quite go right. Hugging is one of the several options; there’s also rolling over and putting it where it can’t be gotten; there’s the “they can only get it when they’re yawning” gag, where someone has to tickle their nose with something to make them let it go. A lot of options there. This one had the hugging.

ADAM And the tickling.

BROOM Did it?

ADAM That’s how he freed himself.

BROOM I guess I must have seen that and been thinking of it, but just now when I said it, I thought I was coming up with it out of nowhere.

ADAM I liked that this was not yet in the Disney mold of, like, a spunky hero on a voyage of self-discovery.

BROOM When we started this project I thought we would get to watch the evolution of that very formula. And what I’m saying is that I think this is the first time we’re really seeing a definite step in the process of that evolution. Somehow everything before this had a different emphasis. There’s some kind of divide, during the war, where there’s not a completely direct relationship in style between what precedes and what comes after. Then again, maybe there is. But I felt like here they suddenly have maybe fifty percent of the elements of the Disney movie “brand” in place.

ADAM Well, Pinocchio is in that mold, sort of.

BROOM It’s a quest, but it’s episodic, as we talked about then. It doesn’t quite have that feeling of an outline with sections like “Introduction to characters”; “First stage of conflict”; “Second stage of conflict”; “Climax.” It just has a bunch of linked episodes. This felt very cozy, like we were now in the hands of something very familiar, even though I didn’t remember the details of these particular movies. Just the way it worked was comforting and traditional.

BETH I still think that for these to be the first two stories that they tell as regular stories in ten years was a strange choice.

ADAM Well, these are the two most fabulous characters. They had no choice.

BETH So was this a success?

BROOM Yeah.

BETH It was?

ADAM Oh, you mean commercially?

BETH Yes, commercially.

BROOM I don’t know. It’s hard to find out that information for older movies. We can find out what the Times review said; we’ll read that in a second. Any thoughts about the songs?

ADAM They were out of place.

BROOM I thought it was pretty hilarious when I first saw that they sing a swingy song at the beginning on the phrase “Ichabod and Mr. Toad.” A title song justifying this meaningless assemblage. And then you guys chuckled when they started singing the “Ichabod Crane” song. I think they knew it was a little funny. I think part of the joke was, like, “We got Bing Crosby and we’re gonna use him.”

BETH They were out of place but they weren’t bad, so I didn’t mind them.

BROOM I think that “Merrily Merrily Merrily Going Nowhere In Particular” was pretty bad.

BETH I forgot about that. The ones in the Ichabod story weren’t so bad.

ADAM The ones in the Ichabod story jarred with the colonial American tone.

BETH I was thinking, “He’s not only telling them a ghost story, he’s introducing them to a whole new form of popular music!”

BROOM I think as a kid that stuff all just mixed together for me, because it was all “out of the past.” It was just cozy stuff your grandma might like. Your grandma might have a sampler in her house and she might listen to Bing Crosby.

ADAM Did you find it a comforting idea that a nerd could dance well and almost get the girl?

BROOM That’s what was so weird about it. He wasn’t just a nerd.

ADAM He was a conniving, mean nerd.

BROOM He was talented, and elegant and graceful, and also obsessed with eating sweets when people weren’t looking.

BETH Eating anything! Whole turkeys.

BROOM Manipulating people so that he could get to their turkeys. And yet he also was an idiot.

BETH And he had a lovely singing voice.

BROOM “Ba ba ba boo!” Did Bing Crosby actually sing “ba ba ba boo?” Why was that his thing? What was the context where he would sing “ba ba ba boo?” At the beginning, when the credit came up that said “Bing Crosby,” they gave him a little vocal solo to go “ba ba ba boo!” to signify “Bing Crosby is singing!”

BETH I don’t know.

BROOM Back to what I was saying before: there was a lot more acting in the facial animation. Not just vaudeville slapstick acting, but actual the-way-people-would-act acting.

ADAM Furrowing brows.

BROOM Yeah, all sorts of sophisticated expressions. Like when Ichabod looks in the mirror and thinks “you sly devil,” and he has a funny little crinkled mouth and makes faces at himself, I thought that was a new level of sophistication in what they got into the character’s face. And also when Mr. Toad was going on about his various passions, and being Mr. Toad, he did all kinds of well-characterized stuff.

BETH I liked Mr. Toad’s faces.

BROOM The quality of the acting was at a higher level, and the emphasis on acting was greater.

ADAM Mr. Toad is no one you’d want to hang out with, but he was a charmer.

BROOM “He had many fair-weather friends.”

ADAM Do we think this is one story plucked from a long series of stories in The Wind in the Willows? It seemed to start mid-stream, as if they had just picked out a single story.

BROOM I don’t know what happens in The Wind in the Willows. There might be more to it. [ed. seems like this is the main storyline, streamlined and tweaked]

BETH Sequences that I liked a lot were: the train chase with all the cops shooting at Mr. Toad, and the dance sequence with the fat girl, which I thought was hilarious.

ADAM I liked the courtroom fun.

BROOM I liked the parts Beth liked; I also liked the stuff with the weasels; I thought they had a good look to them. And I thought the spooky sequence at the end was good – the whole thing builds up to it, and it’s very satisfying.

ADAM Although the animation of the headless horseman looked a little too much like a He-Man cartoon.

BROOM I thought that was what was cool about it. Ichabod Crane, looking the way he’s looked for the whole movie, is riding right next to him, and the headless horseman nonetheless is animated in this different style, to make him unearthly. I really liked the first shot, when the camera whips over and you suddenly see The Headless Horseman, rearing up perfectly, and the background goes red. I enjoyed that. But what about the animation and design in general? There was less of an emphasis on…

BETH …lushness?

BROOM On draftsmanship.

ADAM There were no whirling leaves anywhere. [ed. actually, there are a couple, when Ichabod looks up at the moon]

BETH I thought the trees in “Sleepy Hollow” weren’t so great looking. I liked that they were flat, but otherwise I didn’t like the style of the drawings.

BROOM I thought a lot of the artwork was more utilitarian than previously.

BETH Serviceable.

BROOM Yes, serviceable. There wasn’t nearly as much design enthusiasm as in the music movies.

BETH Which is fine.

ADAM Well, wait ’til Rapunzel comes out.

BROOM Right, in the style of Fragonard.

[we read the rather pedestrian Times review, by one “A.W.” Link below.]

ADAM I miss Bosley.

BROOM I had another thought but I can’t remember it.

ADAM Why wasn’t Cyril upset about losing his job to a motorcar?

BROOM Ah, now I remember: anything to say about the undertones of homosexuality throughout this film, Adam?

ADAM What do you mean? Between whom?

BROOM Well, between Mr. Toad and Cyril, and between Water Rat and Mole.

ADAM Water Rat and Mole had just a sort of English ladies’ domesticity to them. Which I didn’t take to be homosexual.

BETH Didn’t Mole have a crush on Mr. Toad?

ADAM Well, didn’t you?

BROOM I thought he just had a charisma crush on him, yeah.

BETH All right, fine.

ADAM And I thought Cyril and Mr. Toad were just, you know, fellow rabble-rousers. Cyril is like a Cockney brawler. I found this movie remarkably free of homosexual undertones.

BROOM Oh. When he was jumping on the horse’s butt and shouting “I won’t get tired of this!” I thought you were laughing.

ADAM Oh, no, it didn’t even occur to me. I just thought they were sort of, you know, the Rat Pack. You know, in rural England. At most, Rat and Mole were like Bert and Ernie. They’re just friends. What a sicko you are.

BROOM I really thought that Mr. Toad had that fey quality and his enthusiasm seemed primarily to be to jump on Cyril’s butt, and I thought you were laughing at that and would want to say something about it.

ADAM No. He did have a vaguely Oscar Wilde-ean quality.

BROOM Yes, exactly. He had limp wrists! He was the first limp-wristed character we’ve seen.

ADAM But he was sort of a wit, you know, and like a…

BROOM …bon vivant?

ADAM Yes. I didn’t take him as coded gay, per se.

BROOM Well, no. But something. And then Winky…

ADAM Yeah.

BROOM Okay, fine, so there were no gay characters in this movie. Thanks for watching, guys. Next time: Cinderella.

BETH Wow.

ADAM A hotbed of gay themes.

BETH That was the best of the “package” films.

BROOM I agree. I think that was significantly superior to the last two.

ADAM Well, it wasn’t better than The Three Caballeros.

BROOM The last two: it was better than Make Mine Music or Fun and Fancy Free.

ADAM That is true. It was slicker and more orderly than The Three Caballeros, but Three Caballeros had an anarchic glee that I enjoy.

BROOM The Three Caballeros is probably more fun overall, but I thought this was an encouraging improvement on both the story and technical fronts.

BETH Mostly technical.

ADAM Yes, the stories were still pretty indifferent.

BROOM They were dippy but there was better timing. There was just a real dead dumbness to Bongo that was depressing, and we’re moving in the right direction from there. I’m not saying that this was great.

ADAM We should say, before we move on, that Beth had been dreading this screening.

BROOM She dreads them all. She’s been dreading all of the 40s movies.

BETH Yes, I have. I want to get to something good.

BROOM I really enjoyed this one, especially because I had no expectations for it. I found myself feeling really pleased that it had some verve and panache. In places.

ADAM In places.

BETH I really expected it to be terrible, so it was nice to see some pretty backgrounds and fun animation.

ADAM But let’s be clear: it wasn’t actually good.

BETH No, it wasn’t good.

BROOM But it was superior to Make Mine Music, which it was essentially a continuation of. Short for short, almost all of them were better than the average of Make Mine Music. Maybe. Let’s talk about them and see if that’s true.

BETH It’s true.

1. ONCE UPON A WINTERTIME

ADAM If you’re curious where I had seen that before…

BROOM Oh, very curious.

ADAM … one of the things we had taped off of the Disney Channel freebie hour was a Valentine’s Day special.

BETH It does seem very Valentine’s-y.

BROOM It was like a greeting card.

ADAM I don’t know if I saw them spiral onto the ice, but I definitely saw the part where the bunnies make the interlocked hearts with their butts.

BROOM A lot of the action was dumb and was rehashing either Bambi or the short On Ice. The thing with ice breaking and going over a waterfall was played out, even by then. It wasn’t very creative on that front. But visually I thought it was very impressive.

ADAM The backgrounds had a stylish two-dimensionality to them, which was attractive.

BETH And the colors used were very unusual and effective.

BROOM Since this subject is probably the richest source of discussion for the movie, I’m just going to go into it a little bit deeper. Part of the depressing quality of the last two movies, and overall of the 40s movies, comes from the fact that the lush storybook quality of the first few movies was no longer suited to the period, but they hadn’t yet really found anything new to do. Mickey and the Beanstalk, design-wise, didn’t have any new place to go, but it didn’t believe in what they used to do. It was between styles and so had no style. It was like they were going through the motions of doing an earlier style that they clearly felt was dated, because they didn’t have any new way of doing things. I think in this movie we saw them finding something new.

ADAM It has a late-Matisse feel, like early pop art.

BETH Yes, it’s the beginning of that great flat style of animation.

BROOM The Mary Blair look. I think that Mary Blair had a hand in some of those background designs, especially in “Once upon a Wintertime.”

ADAM Of course we did see this sort of thing in “Pink Elephants on Parade.”

BROOM That’s slightly different. There’s phantasmagoria and then there’s this stylized surrealist design.

ADAM Well, they’re still thinking of it in keeping with the phantasmagoric style, if you will. That was what “Bumble Boogie” was. They have this tradition of abstract craziness…

BROOM Yes, that’s a mode they have and I’m happy they’re keeping it around, but I think that what we saw in the backgrounds of “Wintertime” was something new, a new sense of design.

ADAM Yes, it was a marriage of the flatness with more-or-less realism.

BROOM I felt like the only precursor to that kind of design was in Bambi, when things occasionally became stylized and angular and they would make very strong color choices.

ADAM But you talked at one point about a scene with a black backdrop with pink and yellow on it, do you remember that? In one of the earlier movies.

BROOM You’re right, the best thing we’ve seen in that style so far was that train scene in The Three Caballeros, which was also by Mary Blair.

BETH Yes, that was great, that black background with bright colors.

BROOM They were really embracing that here. In Make Mine Music, I suppose that one that you guys really hated, that lonely window one, sort of touched on it, but they didn’t seem to know what to do with it. This movie really seized it. And I think by Alice in Wonderland we’ll see them knowing what to do in the foreground to make the most of it.

BETH Here they seemed more excited about the background than they did about the foreground.

BROOM But I think even the animation, and not just the design, also had more kick to it in this movie.

BETH The character designs I didn’t like.

BROOM I guess if we’re just talking about the first segment, I agree.

ADAM It was sort of strange to have those contemporary-looking backdrops with the old-timey people figure-skating.

BROOM But I think that kind of juxtaposition is something they explored quite a bit; I think of that as a particular Disney feeling. I’m not sure but I think we may see a more refined version of that in the next movie, in “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.”

BETH I feel like we talked enough about that one.

2. BUMBLE BOOGIE

BROOM I thought that was awesome. I totally enjoyed that.

BETH It was right up your alley.

ADAM Albeit very similar to a number of things we’ve seen.

BROOM It was most similar to “After You’ve Gone” from Make Mine Music.

ADAM Was that the thing with the instruments?

BROOM Yes.

ADAM They really love this idea that they’re marrying music and animation.

BROOM I thought this was one of their strongest efforts at that since Fantasia. The sync was very satisfying and the atmosphere was fun.

ADAM It was psychologically satisfying, and sort of creepy. That giant snake-caterpillar thing made out of piano keys.

BROOM And the rate at which you were bombarded with new, strong images was satisfyingly high. It was very enjoyable, and it made me sit up and think, “we’re seeing something good again!”

ADAM I agree with that. What did you think of it as an adaptation of Rimsky-Korsakov?

BROOM It’s just a thing that was done in those days, to take a classical piece and boogie it up. It was a pretty rudimentary boogie-ization, but it was fine, and the choice of piece handed them the bumblebee as a character. I thought it was a little odd that when the flowers were scary to him, he got his revenge by boxing the flowers and destroying them. They didn’t really follow through on the concept of what a bee actually does with flowers.

3. THE LEGEND OF JOHNNY APPLESEED

ADAM This was the dreckiest of the segments.

BROOM It was undistinguished. But if you think of it as the descendant of, say, “Casey at the Bat” or “Peter and the Wolf,” it was better animated than those. It wasn’t quite as strong as “Once upon a Wintertime” but it still had some nice design in the backgrounds. It had good atmosphere, a nice autumnal Americana.

ADAM I thought the cornpone Parson Weems quality of it was disturbing.

BROOM Why? That’s what it was.

ADAM Why? Because that’s what’s going to make John McCain president.

BROOM Well, right now may not be the best time in history for us to be thinking about these things, but I think there’s room in life for Norman Rockwellisms, and it’s okay to indulge them sometimes. I thought that Johnny Appleseed was pretty gay, and it made you feel like, “I guess it’s good that we have apple trees, but nobody should want to be like that guy.”

BETH Here’s my problem with this movie as a whole: none of the characters – except for the chipmunk – seem like Disney characters. There were no characteristics of their faces or their bodies that reminded me of classic Disney. They weren’t like Bambi or Dumbo.

BROOM Can you characterize that? Is it a warmth of characterization that they were lacking?

BETH Well, the bodies of the animals – like the bunnies in “Wintertime” – they were husky in a strange way. They didn’t seem as lithe, as nimble, as animals usually do in Disney. And their faces seemed dumber.

BROOM That’s definitely how I’ve felt about a lot of characters we’ve seen in the past few movies. I feel like they’re on their way out of that here, but they still have that look.

ADAM The bunnies in the first segment here were cut-rate.

BETH Johnny Appleseed had this weird, not-quite-characterized face.

ADAM He started out as a bubble-nosed young man – he looked basically identical to the young man in “Once upon a Wintertime.” And not that different from Pecos Bill or Little Toot, frankly.

BROOM It’s a tough job, though. Let’s ask ourselves: have they at any point, all the way back to Snow White, created a semi-realistic human character to our satisfaction? I think they just haven’t solved that problem yet.

ADAM Slue Foot Sue looked a lot like what Cinderella’s going to look like, a couple movies from now.

BROOM I think we’re going to find Cinderella herself to be quite bland. I don’t think that’s the solution either. If you picture the man from 101 Dalmatians – that’s a good solution to making a cartoon person. He’s very gangly and has a very strong cartoony characterization but he’s also a person. He’s nicely in-between. I think that this blandness was just the best they had come up with. Remember Geppetto being so blobby?

BETH I think they tried to make Johnny Appleseed look a little different, and it just didn’t quite work. He looked creepy to me.

ADAM He grew up from being just “a young Disney man” to being like “The Martins and the Coys.” The same way that Pecos Bill looked just like “Casey at the Bat.” They’ve only got like six types.

BROOM And are any of them human enough to really relate to?

ADAM I’ll bet it seems worse to us having watched them all in a row, because we can recognize them as stock characters.

BROOM I recognize what Beth is saying as a basic reaction: “I don’t relate to that character. I understand what the character represents, but I don’t feel like I’m in the company of a person.”

BETH I’m saying that they don’t feel like the Disney characters that were established in the late-30s, early-40s. They don’t have that look, and they don’t have the 50s look. They have an uncertain look.

BROOM Just a pale face with some features stuck on it.

BETH Just uninspired. They care more about the backgrounds than the people.

BROOM There’s an impersonality to a lot of these. And I think that’s why my favorite ones are the ones that have to do with music and splashes and lights. Fireworks displays instead of stories. Okay, so the “Johnny Appleseed” one was a little disappointing.

ADAM Also weirdly Christian.

BROOM Yes. All that emphasis on the bible, and the song about “my lord.” I was surprised.

ADAM It comes up also in “Trees.”

BROOM Is this the first explicit Christianity in any of these? Previously he seemed to avoid it – every time things went in that direction, it would just be a castle in the sky, or trees curved like the arch of a church. But never a crucifix and god and a bible with a cross on it. I was surprised. Anything to say about Johnny Appleseed’s dramatic death in the course of the cartoon? I thought that was surprising.

ADAM I thought that was surprising too. It would have upset me as a child.

BROOM “That’s just your husk, John.”

BETH “That’s just your husk” is an upsetting thing to hear.

BROOM And yes, that chipmunk did seem to be either Chip or Dale. And the red Indians? Comments?

ADAM It was historically inaccurate.

BETH It was the time.

4. LITTLE TOOT

ADAM I thought it was pretty adorable, in spite of myself.

BETH I enjoyed “Little Toot.”

BROOM I thought the effects animation, and other features of the animation, were very impressive. He was rounded and shaded in complex ways the whole time.

ADAM His dad was actually a pretty well-designed character; you saw a family resemblance but also a stern, proudly working-class quality. He seemed like an individual.

BROOM He’s not a person, he’s a tugboat. They’re okay with things and animals, I think we’re saying.

BETH I thought the characterization of those tugboats was better than any of the animals or people in this movie.

BROOM Those buoys with angry faces and claws made of water were quite scary.

BETH That scene was scary! And that chanting…

BROOM “… bad boy! …”

ADAM “… shame! …”

BROOM And then they sang “Do or die!” There was an intensity to “Little Toot” that surprised us all.

ADAM It beat the pants off of what happened to Pedro the mail plane.

BROOM It was reminiscent of Pedro the mail plane, but in “Pedro,” there was a wink in the narrator’s voice the whole time. This one, even though it was the Andrews Sisters, was more intense.

BETH This was also easier to relate to because it happened in the city rather than some remote place where only an airplane can fly.

BROOM It was within sight of the New York skyline that I see every day. The terrible, terrible catastrophe that Little Toot causes was out of proportion to your expectations.

ADAM That was like a Cloverfield level of violence.

BROOM It was Speed 2. Thousands of deaths, surely.

BETH He didn’t mean to. He didn’t know. He just should have figured it out sooner.

BROOM Anyway, “Little Toot” was pretty good.

5. TREES

ADAM This was the campiest thing I think we’ve seen in any Disney film. Certainly in the top three campiest moments.

BROOM There were interesting things in the look of it; when the wind was blowing in the trees and their shapes were strange and elongated, I thought that was neat. But it was not a good of visualization of the poem and the whole concept was just kitsch.

ADAM It was pious and weird.

BROOM Again, I think that their draftsmanship has improved significantly since the last couple of movies, and you could see it watching those leaves blowing around. They can’t help themselves but draw those – we saw those leaves blowing in the wind in Fantasia, in Bambi, and again in Make Mine Music, and we might even have seen it in Fun and Fancy Free. And then we saw them again here. But they were better here than they’ve been recently. In fact I thought it was very cool when the scene of the tree and the sunset becomes the smear of colors on another leaf blowing away. There were nice effects in this segment, but they just sort of flew past and we didn’t notice them because the piece itself was stupid.

ADAM Joyce Kilmer. Man. I think my brother performed “Trees” at the poetry festival in second grade. It’s a terrible poem.

BROOM So “only God can make a tree” – there’s no actual reference there to the “tree” on which the Lord Jesus was crucified.

ADAM Lord Jesus was not crucified on a tree!

BROOM “On crosstree” – that term is in Ulysses. [ed. It’s a nautical term]

ADAM There’s no reference to the cross in the poem.

BROOM Well, I don’t know about the poem, but it seemed like the Disney studios, whom I’ve never known to go Christian when they don’t need to, went Christian at the end of that segment. The tree turned into a cross with a halo around it.

BETH It wasn’t the cross of the crucifixion.

BROOM It wasn’t?

BETH I mean, I guess any cross is that cross, but I don’t think it was meant that way.

ADAM I agree. It was just a throwaway.

BROOM You think it was just a God-signifier?

ADAM Yeah – “let’s throw in some Christian appeal.”

BETH Anyway, “Trees” was no good.

ADAM “Trees” was the worst.

BROOM I thought that, for bad kitsch, it was better than the one in Make Mine Music that you guys also didn’t like. It had more going on visually. But yes.

6. BLAME IT ON THE SAMBA

BROOM A little bit sad that that was the showing for Jose Carioca. I had high hopes for his reappearance, but he didn’t say anything. Donald didn’t say anything either.

BETH It was colorful. I enjoyed it.

ADAM Ethel Smith was no Aurora Miranda.

BROOM I thought it was cool that this Tex Avery mayhem threatens a real live human. It had sort of a Roger Rabbit quality – the Aracuan bird is going to blow up the actual Ethel Smith? But she seemed to be okay.

ADAM She was not a very good actor. She didn’t convincingly interact with Donald or Jose Carioca.

BROOM Well, when she was on fire, it wouldn’t have been appropriate to the tone for her to look like she was actually on fire. I think her mock-surprised look was exactly right. I really enjoyed when they were blue and then listening to the music cheered them up and gave them their proper colors. I enjoyed that fairly sincerely.

BETH You did? Even though you knew that was exactly what would happen?

BROOM I’m not saying it surprised me. It was just a nice visual. That when you’re in a bad mood, the sound of the cabasa can put the red into you and then the purple, and then you’ll shine because you’re happy again. I also liked that the segment wasn’t just a callback to the characters, but was specifically a callback to The Three Caballeros in that they were walking into a pop-up book restaurant. But the song wasn’t as good. It wasn’t as good as the music from Three Caballeros.

BETH No, but it was still fun.

7. PECOS BILL

BROOM This had the pre-Roy Rogers segment, the Roy Rogers segment, and then the story of Pecos Bill.

ADAM It was much too long.

BROOM Obviously the part with Pecos Bill being wild was the fun part, and they took ten minutes to get there. They warned us they were going to be slow about it, but that still doesn’t make it fun, especially at the end of the movie.

ADAM My favorite thing in the whole movie was when the state of Texas fills up the entire continent, including the peninsula of Florida, so Florida has to grow its own subsidiary peninsula.

BETH I thought that was funny too.

BROOM I was interested in the fact that Sue was…

ADAM …brutally dispatched?

BROOM No, not the story. That when she arrived, she was basically showing it all. She was wearing little white panties, but her dress flew all the way up so you could see them. She was riding a catfish down the river. She was a pin-up drawing that they put in the cartoon. That’s something that they wouldn’t venture again until the 90s.

BETH Do they do that now?

BROOM Well, they don’t exactly do that…

ADAM But the female characters are much sexier now.

BROOM The pin-up drawings that the animators do in their spare time have gotten much closer to being in the movies these days. And that’s clearly what Sue was, with a little demure face put on her. I was a little surprised to see that. It was also a little creepy to see her pretty face kissing the googly cartoon face of Pecos Bill. He wasn’t the male equivalent.

ADAM It was weird that the horse murdered her.

BROOM Yes. It was weird that Pecos Bill sucked at the teat of a coyote just off screen.

ADAM It was weird that he kissed the horse on the lips. Much of the psycho-sexual quality of this short was disturbing. And I thought it was fairly misogynistic. She’s killed because of her bustle? What a terrible terrible thing.

BROOM What was the rhyming line? “It put the classy on her chassis?”

BETH Something like that. “It was quite classy and it completed her chassis,” or something.

ADAM It just goes to show that they can’t abide a strong woman.

BROOM And when they first mention her, Bobby Driscoll groans, “A woman in the story?”

ADAM The interaction of the live action and the animation was not very successful.

BROOM They didn’t even try. I really liked those little quails running through the desert with the long shadows. I know, it was the same quails from Bambi and several other places.

BETH They really love doing that.

BROOM I liked the atmosphere of that, with that weird music playing, and them running through the desert with those long shadows. I know you guys were saying “get this over with” at that point, but I thought it looked cool, and I thought the pencil-drawn tumbleweed effect was a cool, smart choice.

ADAM I liked that. I also liked when Trigger participated in the storytelling.

BROOM I’m not ready to say I liked that.

ADAM That was a staple of popular culture, right?

BROOM Roy Rogers and Trigger? I think so. They were the absolute first billing in this movie, before the title.

ADAM And who was the female counterpart? Dale Evans?

BROOM Yes, but she wasn’t here. But Luana Patten was back.

ADAM I’m glad to know she escaped that party.

BROOM And this party.

ADAM Yes, instead she became apprentice to this harem of sexless cowboys.

BETH She was kidnapped.

BROOM She got out of that house somehow but just ended up in the desert, where these men were happy to entertain her with more creepy stories in the middle of the night. But Bobby Driscoll was there with her this time. The two of them were the kids from Song of the South, and, as Leonard Maltin said in one of those countless Leonard Maltin featurettes, Disney was trying to cultivate a stock company of performers. By bringing back Luana Patten over and over he’s trying to work on the brand. “If you see a Disney movie, you’re going to see that cute little girl!”

ADAM She was the Dakota Fanning of her day.

BROOM Well, she was the Dakota Fanning of these two movies. And of Song of the South and of that other companion movie to Song of the South [ed.: So Dear to My Heart]. Anything to say about the interstitials, or the singing mask at the beginning?

ADAM I thought that the paintbrush theme was not that successful.

BROOM Even that I thought was nicer than Make Mine Music.

ADAM We all agree that Make Mine Music was the nadir.

BROOM I think Fun and Fancy Free was the nadir.

ADAM Oh. I get them confused.

BROOM We’re clearly coming out of the woods. Things are going to be better. I feel it.

[we read the New York Times review]

ADAM I think that Bosley Crowther is getting archer as he ages.

BROOM I think Bosley Crowther is pretty good, based on these.

ADAM He must have been gay. [ed. I don’t think so!] I’m picturing him as being like the second Mr. Wilson on “Dennis the Menace.” [ed. this guy?] He looked like he should be in a smoking jacket.

BROOM Every time, Bosley Crowther says exactly something I’ve already said, and I feel vindicated. But I don’t agree with him that the Johnny Appleseed songs were catchy. I thought they were pretty bad. Okay, next time: The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad.

ADAM We’re coming out of the tailspin, Beth.

BETH That was not my favorite. That sucked, okay?

ADAM Yeah. That was pretty bad.

BETH The first half was truly bad. It wasn’t at all entertaining.

ADAM Do you want to talk about them in order?

BETH Yes.

ADAM First let’s talk about the framing device.

BETH Okay.

ADAM I thought it was lazy of them to resurrect Jiminy Cricket and Cleo for such a shoddy purpose.

BROOM They resurrected more than just those two. There were all kinds of callbacks.

ADAM The crows.

BETH It’s like they weren’t even trying, like they weren’t even thinking.

BROOM A whole lot of it was stuff they had done before that they were doing again in a calculated way.

ADAM It was terrible. It was an uneven pastiche of all sorts of crazy things.

BROOM It was thrown together in the most ridiculous way.

ADAM There was no thought whatsoever apparent in the construction of the stories.

BETH But it was after the war. It’s not like they have an excuse for being that lazy.

BROOM I think the studio was shaken pretty seriously by the war.

BETH Okay, but it was two years after the war. I don’t know. I don’t know anything about what it was like. But – creatively they were shaken? Could they not have come up with a story? The story of that first section was… not a story!

BROOM It takes several years for each of these to be in production. I don’t completely know what the history was, but I read somewhere that both “Bongo” and “Mickey and the Beanstalk” were things they’d been working on for a while, and then they just decided, “okay, we’re putting them together.”

ADAM I thought the story of “Bongo” was okay, but it was just a little derivative of Babbitt. You know?

BROOM I didn’t think it was “okay” at all.

ADAM I was joking.

BROOM I know.

ADAM It was like, here’s this circus plotline, and then here’s this unfit-for-the-wilderness plotline, and then here’s this… bears slapping plotline. Also, as a paean to spousal abuse, it was irresponsible.

BETH That was one of the worst Disney things I’ve ever seen.

BROOM What I was thinking while we were watching the second half was: “This isn’t very good either – but it’s better than the first half – but it’s not very good… but really, what it’s like is an ordinary Disney cartoon.” If you watch one of those shorts where Donald chases a bear through Yellowstone Park, or bees try to eat him…

ADAM Or Goofy and the volcano.

BROOM I don’t know if I’ve seen one with Goofy and a volcano.

ADAM I’ve told you about this one in the past. Goofy goes on a Hawaiian vacation and ends up getting sacrificed to the Polynesian god Pele.

BROOM That really happens?

ADAM Yes.

BROOM Anyway, you watch those and you think, “Yup, that was another one.” You don’t feel offended, like, “Oh my god, Disney, what happened to your standards?” They’re just shorts, and a lot of them are stupid. The only thing that’s distinctive about these is that they were packaged as a feature-length movie and included in the feature canon. But it’s just some shorts, of not very high quality. It’s not that shocking.

BETH But it is offensive that it was packaged as a movie, because that means it should have been better. They should have known that. They had their own standards that they had already met and defined. What happened?

ADAM Let’s play devil’s advocate for a second. There were some cute things in “Bongo.”

BROOM That’s the harder one to redeem, I think.

ADAM The second one is easy enough to redeem because it’s just a story that already exists. With creepy child-molestation interludes.

BROOM The value of any of these is not going to be whether the story is interesting, but I do think it was a particular weakness of “Bongo” that the story was nothing. Just nothing. I thought that what happened to him in the forest was going to be somehow connected to his past. I thought he was going to have to go back to the circus – or go to a better circus – because he would have to accept what he was. But no. It was just about getting a girlfriend. Even if he’s a sissified city bear, he can still get up a tree; other animals will push him up. There’s just barely anything there.

ADAM What was the title of the slapping song?

BROOM “Say it With a Slap.” Bears say it with a slap.

BETH “Say it With a Slap”!

BROOM And did you hear the lyric that was like, “When a whippoorwill’s in love, he can whip her?” [ed. online sources give the lexically doubtful “he can whipper.”] I thought the best thing in “Bongo” was at the beginning, when he was dreaming and the voice was singing, “Bongo, come out!…”

BETH When he saw a vision of himself, translucent and large, sliding down mountainsides. That was okay.

ADAM It was sort of like a picaresque.

BROOM That’s what was a callback: all of that first sequence was stuff from Dumbo. The circus train, and the tent. I liked when the tent got sucked in and out of the train; that was cute.

BETH Well, I give it all a C-minus.

BROOM The pacing was just terrible. Another major problem with it was that Bongo was not well drawn. He didn’t look good.

BETH Neither did his girlfriend.

ADAM It was lucky she had that bow on, because it was hard for me to tell apart the male and female bears.

BROOM And the bad-guy bear was just so disappointing in every way.

ADAM Again: what did Sinclair Lewis have to do with this story?

BROOM I believe he wrote it as a story for a magazine or something. Here’s something I wanted to say: I watched the opening titles of this movie on Youtube last week…

ADAM Cheater.

BROOM I did cheat. And I watched a little of the opening song…

BETH I liked the titles.

BROOM Beth liked the titles because they looked like a party.

BETH That was the only thing that looked like a real party in this movie.

ADAM Not the party with Miss Luana and Edgar Bergen and some creepy fey clowns.

BETH That was no party.

BROOM We’ll talk about the party in a second – I just want to say one thing, which is that I watched a little of Jiminy Cricket’s song about being fancy free [ed.: “I’m a Happy-Go-Lucky Fellow”] – which sequence I didn’t mind – anyway, when he stands on the newspaper to show us why it’s important to enjoy ourselves, and the headline on the newspaper is “Catastrophe Seen As Crisis Looms!!” – I saw that, and thought, “that’s somehow familiar to me.” So I googled it, and found where I had seen it before: in The Incredibles, that’s a newspaper headline. Which must be a reference to this. And no one on the internet had made the connection.

BETH You’re going to be the first one!

BROOM I’m speaking it so I can type it!

BETH Hey, that’s cool!

BROOM That’s Disney nerds working at Pixar.

[ed.: This needs further comment. I just now tried to find the visual of the headline in The Incredibles but couldn’t – it’s possibly hidden in there, too small to be seen in Youtube, but in that case it’s not what I’m remembering, since I originally saw it on a tiny airplane screen. However, Brad Bird apparently used “Disaster Seen as Catastrophe Looms” prominently in The Iron Giant (so maybe that’s what I’m remembering), in relation to which it has been pointed out that the headline is taken from a newspaper in Lady and the Tramp. In this forum posting someone reports that Bird was unaware, when told, that a similar headline is also in the earlier Fun and Fancy Free; he only knew it from Lady and the Tramp. Anyway, what this adds up to is that people have in fact noticed this before.]

ADAM Can we talk about the party?

BROOM Okay, let’s talk about the party, which is the most interesting thing about the movie.

BETH What is it?

ADAM Just as in The Three Caballeros, the terrible shock of seeing live-action people is almost physically upsetting.

BETH It was! Because it went from a cartoon of the house to the real house.

BROOM Part of what was scary about it…

BETH What was scary was that you weren’t expecting those puppets!

ADAM You expect to see her body in a closet twenty minutes later.

BROOM She’s alone with Edgar Bergen, who even without the puppets doesn’t seem like he would be nice. He’s wearing a bathrobe – he’s dressed like Hugh Hefner…

BETH And the craziest party hat ever.

BROOM Yeah, like a bag on his head. They’re alone in a house, dimly lit…

BETH It’s an ugly, awful house.

BROOM It’s not even like he threw a party for her; it’s as though she was tricked into going to a so-called “party” by that invitation that he sent to her cartoon house across the way. And there she is, listening to him cheerfully.

BETH It’s so awful.

ADAM I imagine her realizing with a shock of horror, “Charlie and Mortimer aren’t people!”

BROOM Like Ten Little Indians, where they’re isolated and one of them must be the killer, and the puppets would fall dead and she would realize that the only one who could have been doing it was Edgar Bergen. Anyway, the setup is creepy, but what’s also creepy is that you know the house is surrounded by animation. It’s so claustrophobic; it’s like being in a submarine. There’s nowhere they can go.

ADAM Charlie McCarthy is an asshole. I had never seen him before. What a…

BROOM …wiseacre?

ADAM …like, a little… I don’t know, I was going to call him “a little fag,” but that’s not appropriate. And he’s gotta be all meta all the time, and keep interrupting the story. Which is a weird choice also. What is that movie that everyone loved where the old man is telling the story about the guy with the six fingers –

BROOM and BETH The Princess Bride?

ADAM Right. Why do they keep interrupting that? It was just like that. Well, less dramatic.

BROOM You were annoyed with The Princess Bride by the fact that there were interruptions?

BETH How could you be annoyed at that?

ADAM I just think it’s a weird meta choice. You’re quaking – if you are – that Mickey is in danger, and then Charlie McCarthy’s asshole little voice comes wafting through the air.

BROOM In defense of The Princess Bride, I think there it was a smart choice, because it made the fairy tale be meta in itself. That’s the premise of the original book, that’s it’s about what we make of fairy tales, and intentionally is about indulging in tropes recognized as tropes. Whereas here, they made a short, and then their scheme for fitting it in to the feature length was to have it narrated by a celebrity! “How about Edgar Bergen? And Charlie McCarthy will make wisecracks?” And they just put that on top of it. Seemed like the animation had been done independent of them. Well, except for the red barn, I don’t know about that. But apparently somehow they were able to de-Charlie-McCarthy it for later releases.

ADAM How weird that they never even knew Jiminy Cricket was there.

BROOM That is a little weird. He was purely a voyeur. And that’s also weird: if they’re going to sandwich these two things together that have nothing to do with each other, you’d think they’d have made the frame have something to do… with each other.

ADAM At least in The Three Caballeros, it was like, “Donald’s opening presents. Now he’s opening another present.” Here it was like, “First he finds a record in her deserted room, and then he goes to a party with her.” It was just really shoddy.

BROOM I found more atmosphere to enjoy and be creeped-out by in the frames than I did in the actual stories. But I will say that my favorite part of the whole movie was the vine growing in “Mickey and the Beanstalk,” the ballet of the vine growing and them flipping around. It was like in “Clock Cleaners” where they keep almost falling off the building. And the vine was really nicely done. There were also a couple of special effects in this movie that were new. Like when they showed the record coming out of its sleeve and the real printed label moved with it.

BETH That was nice.

ADAM It reminded me of the technique in “Bloom County” where a realistic photograph of a celebrity is pasted into the drawing.

BROOM It’s harder in animation, because they made it move. When the record spun around, the shape changed with it. It was very well done. And something else was similar, just before that. I forget what [ed.: the newspaper].

ADAM So who would Dinah Shore and Edgar Bergen be equivalent to today?

BROOM Pretty big people!

ADAM But it would be, like, weird people, right?

BROOM It would be like, “hey, it’s… Mariah Carey and Jack Black!”

BETH It wouldn’t be Jack Black; it might be Mariah Carey.

BROOM Jack Black is too big? Edgar Bergen was pretty big.

BETH He’s just not quite right.

BROOM There are no ventriloquists these days.

ADAM David Blaine.

BROOM He would do a terrible job.

BETH Fred Willard.

ADAM Edgar Bergen was a novelty act.

BROOM But back then, doing a novelty act wasn’t itself that novel. Today it would be a throwback. Then he was just a celebrity who happened to do ventriloquism. Maybe it would be Candice Bergen!

ADAM He’s not a very good ventriloquist.

BROOM He’s terrible!

BETH They shouldn’t even be showing him.

BROOM It’s remarkable that he was so successful. He was a bad ventriloquist, his jokes weren’t that funny – that’s assuming that he had some influence on the script. Which didn’t seem very Disney-like, so I assume he did.

ADAM He didn’t have anything to do with the script, but he wrote his own wisecracks, obviously.

BROOM That’s what I mean: the script of the wisecracks.

ADAM “It’s a dragonfly!” “Flyin’ in the front, and draggin’ in the rear!”

BROOM That was a great one. But worst of all – he’s not endearing or appealing or anything. He brought the maximum possible creepiness to that party.

BETH It wasn’t a party!

BROOM All right, I’m just going to face it: it wasn’t a party. Is there anything else to say about this?

BETH No! It sucked, the whole thing sucked. I hope I never have to watch it again and I’m really glad you didn’t buy it.

BROOM I told you guys this was going to be the worst one. And I believe that’s the case.

BETH Okay, I hope it really was.

ADAM Is it really worse than the preceding one?

BETH Yes, it was.

BROOM We all enjoyed Make Mine Music better than this.

BETH A lot of bad shorter pieces are better than two long really bad pieces.

BROOM The second half of this was not “really bad,” but we had been hurt by that point. When they ate the translucent slices of bread and a sliver of a bean…

BETH Yeah, that was kinda cool.

ADAM And when Donald freaks out.

BROOM When Donald got murderously crazy, that was fun.

BETH That was my favorite thing in the whole movie.

ADAM I love Donald.

BROOM It was also cathartic that after all of this “oh my god we’re watching Bongo” and then Edgar Bergen, Donald shouts “SHUT UP! SHUT UP! I CAN’T TAKE IT ANYMORE!”

ADAM It was also cathartic to see Donald, Mickey, and Goofy after all these off-brand characters.

BROOM That was the flavor of this whole movie: “Let’s just get out the stuff that we have, and use it, and put something in the theaters.” There’s also a feeling of nostalgic sadness saying goodbye to them, because we’re not gonna be seeing them again in this project.

BETH But the audience did not know that.

ADAM Is that true, we never again see Donald, Mickey, and Goofy?

BROOM In the features.

ADAM What about Fantasia 2000?

BROOM We will see Donald in it.

BETH And Mickey, right?

BROOM And they reprise the Mickey portion from the original Fantasia but it’s clearly old footage. Is Mickey in the interstitial stuff? Does he say “thanks, Mr. Levine!”?

BETH I thought he was.

BROOM I don’t think we see Mickey again; I don’t think he’s in any other movies. I mean, he might make an appearance as, like, a Mickey doll on someone’s desk in one of the nouveau-Disney movies, but I don’t think he’ll be squeaking at us ever again.

ADAM Well, that is sad.

BETH But we as 1947 moviegoers were not aware that that would be our last time.

ADAM That’s often how life is.

BETH And it’s sad that that was it, I think.

BROOM It’s not exactly sad, though, because the reason it’s going to be that way is that they’re going to hold themselves to a higher standard for features from now on.

BETH Yes, that is good.

BROOM Well, not from now on, from two-movies-from-now on.

[Here we read the New York Times review, linked below.]

ADAM Oh, Bosley.

BROOM Too positive for you guys.

ADAM Well… maybe he didn’t know that they would ever return to form.

BROOM I thought his affection for “Bongo” was too strong by any standards, historical or otherwise.

ADAM It is true that “Bongo” featured that ridiculous scene with the bear cupids.

BROOM That was the high point of “Bongo”; I was wrong about it being when the spirit called to him.

BETH It was the hearts exploding.

BROOM For me it was the other stuff in that sequence, it was, like, a little trap door opening in a cloud.

ADAM And a spout of water coming out.

BETH Yeah, that was crazy and fun. That was fancy free.

BROOM And that those little bear cupids were idiot bears, that they had really goofy faces with little pinpoint eyes. And that they dropped snow on our heroes until they became puffy white teddy bears for a second. As though they weren’t already teddy bears. Beth, during the watching of that, you said that it looked like an attempt to be like a Warner Brothers cartoon. I think that bears saying again. Say it.

BETH Okay. I thought they were definitely, with that cartoon, inspired by Warner Brothers, but, as I said at the time, they didn’t know how to do it. It wasn’t as funny, it wasn’t as slick, and it just looked like an imitation to me.

ADAM I agree. In conclusion, Mary, I don’t think even you will enjoy Fun and Fancy Free.

BETH Do not watch this!

BROOM I don’t think that’s the case; this isn’t very good, but Mary has a place in her heart for second-rate thirties cartoons. I don’t know about second-rate forties cartoons, though.

BETH Okay. Everyone else: avoid Fun and Fancy Free.

BROOM You guys are good sports and I’m glad you’re still with me in this.

BETH You owe me five dollars.

[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.

ADAM That was totally meta. That was crazy. People paid money to see that in a theater?

BETH That’s what I was thinking.

ADAM I found it really entertaining, but it’s hard to imagine that it would be entertaining as anything other than a curiosity.

BROOM It was like something to show to schools. It was a promotional travelogue.

ADAM Do you feel more warmly disposed toward South America, having seen that?

BROOM Honestly, I would say yes.

ADAM Okay.

BROOM I especially found the last sequence very inviting. When they were walking in a watercolor world, I thought, “that does seem like a nice fantasy – and maybe it would be like that, if I were in Brazil. A little bit.” It made me think about how I like to be outside when the weather is nice. When it painted that cafe for them, I thought, “it would be nice to be there.”

BETH Yes, the cafe was nice.

BROOM Yes, I think it did its job on me. Also, it was about specific South American things that I hadn’t been overexposed to. It wasn’t tired material. Lake Titicaca, and gauchos – I’ve never had this particular stuff shoved down my throat before, so I’m perfectly happy for Disney to show me some cartoons about it.

ADAM I imagine most people don’t have a very differentiated sense of the countries in South America. Maybe they know that Brazil is Carmen Miranda, but before seeing this they probably didn’t have a sense of Bolivia versus Argentina.

BETH I’m not sure they’re going to after seeing this.

ADAM I don’t know. Well, Chile we didn’t get a very clear sense of. That one was the least successful.

BROOM Why, because it was just about airplanes? You at least got a sense that Chile was a narrow strip bordered by very tall mountains. If I had seen this movie as a kid, I think that I would attach many more associations to those countries than I do. Even if they were mostly inaccurate. You have to start somewhere! But what do we think about the fact that this is what Disney did next? That it appears in this canonical list?

BETH If they were commissioned to do it, then I don’t understand why it’s in their canon. I thought it was going to be a feature, not a bunch of shorts.

BROOM They seem to consider it their sixth feature.

ADAM What did the State Department think they were getting?

BROOM I might be wrong about it being commissioned by the State Department. It was some kind of government thing.

ADAM There should probably be an editor’s note here. (Ed.: how’s this?) Were Donald Duck and those guys popular in South America at this point?

BROOM I don’t know but José seemed pretty happy to see him.

ADAM Presumably yes. I’ve heard the term “Pato Donald” before. That’s what José Carioca says to Donald when he presents his card. It would be funny if they screened this in South America as a way of showing South Americans that Americans were thinking about them. I was at a conference of Latin American law professors, in Peru, where the dean of my law school spoke and terribly offended everyone when he told them that the secret of understanding Washington’s attitude toward Latin America is that Washington only has room to think about two countries in Latin America at any given time, and one of them is Cuba.

BETH Wow. That’s really offensive.

ADAM Dean Koh told them that there was Cuba and one other, and right now it’s Venezuela. So Washington thinks about Hugo Chávez, and they think about Castro, and that’s it. And that’s probably true, but everyone there was profoundly offended. But this movie sort of says the opposite; it suggests that Americans take many countries in South America seriously.

BROOM I appreciated that it knew all along that it was just a tourist movie, made by tourists, about the tourist’s attitude toward things. Donald was just a tourist, obsessed with taking pictures and getting superficial experiences of things, and that’s what the movie offered.

ADAM Well, he mostly has mishaps. He didn’t really make going to Lake Titicaca seem that appealing.

BROOM Yes, I know, he got a ringing in his ears. I found the movie pretty charming. But it’s totally not in the category of “feature film.” For obvious reasons.

BETH I thought it was really great, actually.

ADAM Which segment did you like most and least?

BROOM My favorite thing in the whole movie was when Goofy got caught on the wipe. That was really funny to me.

BETH I also liked the transitions in that. I think that might be my favorite one.

ADAM And what was your least favorite?

BETH What was the first one again?

BROOM Donald at Lake Titicaca. It was the least well-conceived of them.

BETH It was the least memorable.

BROOM We were all chuckling at the cutesy airplane one. We all had a good time watching that. Stupid as it was.

BETH Yeah, I did enjoy that.

BROOM But they knew it was stupid too; that narrator knew.

ADAM None of the planes had any dialogue, it was just that voice. That’s the narrative voice that often fucks with the characters.

BROOM I think it’s the same guy who narrates all the Goofy shorts. “There, that wasn’t so bad!”

ADAM Yeah, he provides ironic contrast to whatever Goofy’s doing by saying something like “Behold the majestic athlete!” while Goofy’s doing some idiot thing.

BETH What was your favorite?

ADAM I liked the José Carioca one, because it was the catchiest, the most rousing.

BROOM That was my favorite segment too, and I feel like the movie knew it too. When I said what my favorite “thing” was, a minute ago, I just meant that one moment, but the Brazil segment was the best overall.

BETH That’s true. I did like the watercolor stuff.

BROOM All that stuff with the watercolor and the paintbrush – I liked when Donald used a little bit of ink to do his own drawing. Everyone’s in a joyful mood. And that’s such a catchy song, as you were saying before we started recording.

ADAM Right, I was saying that I recognized the tune immediately but didn’t realize it was from this – or from Brazil, for that matter.

BROOM I had been aware that the song “Aquarela do Brasil” was from Saludos Amigos – but then they said that it had been the hit of Carnaval that year. So it wasn’t “from” this movie.

ADAM But rather popularized by this movie.

BROOM I guess so.

ADAM Was it a novelty to U.S. audiences in 1942 to see color travel footage?

BROOM I don’t know. It had that Technicolor-y look.

ADAM It looked like early National Geographic photos.

BROOM It looked like postcards.

BETH Would other things with footage like this have existed in theaters at the time?

BROOM Well, there would have been newsreel segments about all kinds of stuff, but they would be black and white.

BETH But would they be about tourism?

BROOM Yeah, you know, like, “Let’s take a look at the Eskimo!”

BETH But wasn’t this wartime?

BROOM I’m pretty sure it was 1942.

ADAM I actually don’t know anything about the geopolitical attitude of South America to World War II, except that Argentina sheltered Nazis.

BROOM Afterward.

ADAM Afterward, but presumably implying that there was some sympathy there.

BROOM I don’t know what the political motivation was such that they thought Disney, or anyone else, should be a goodwill ambassador to South America.

ADAM I think of goodwill toward South America as being a late-50s, early-60s thing. Like, when did they rename 6th Avenue?

BROOM You mean “Avenue of the Americas?”

ADAM Right, and you’ve seen the placards up and down Avenue of the Americas, right? They have flags of every Latin American country on the lampposts. And where Avenue of the Americas dead-ends into Central Park, there are statues of Simón Bolivar and people like that.

BROOM Well, on this DVD, there’s a documentary about “Disney South of the Border” that surely answers all our questions, but we’re not going to watch it now.

ADAM Is this movie a thing that we would tell people to watch?

BETH I would tell them to watch it if they see it on television.

ADAM You would not tell them to buy the DVD.

BETH I would not.

BROOM I gotta say, I am delighted to own this. I was watching it and thinking, “if I have kids, they’ll watch this.” I may watch it again some day, when I’m feeling like I want to curl up and watch something.

BETH Yeah, sure, it’s a good rainy day movie.

BROOM It’s very comforting, light fare.

BETH Very low-commitment.

ADAM Yes. You knew that the plane was going to live.

BROOM But you guys both seemed truly dismayed when the plane fell. That plane thing was so stupid and yet very effective.

ADAM Beth, for the record, was also stressed out when Donald and the llama were hanging from the suspension bridge.

BETH It did really stress me out.

BROOM I have something to say about that sequence. In 2000, Disney made The Emperor’s New Groove with a long, elaborate sequence of comically crossing a suspension bridge with a llama and falling into the gap. They do exactly the stuff Donald was doing – but I didn’t realize until now that there was a Disney precedent for that scene.

ADAM There are only so many Inca memes, you know.

BROOM I didn’t realize they’d gone Inca before. Not that that’s interesting.

ADAM I’m trying to think if I’d seen any clips of this before.

BROOM The only clip of this that I recognized at all was when Donald and José were walking down the stairs and the brush was painting each stair in front of them. The rest I had absolutely never seen before.

ADAM I was also under the impression that José Carioca was the same character that appears in the Tiki Room.

BROOM That is not correct. But José Carioca will reappear in The Three Caballeros. The third caballero represents Mexico.

ADAM Who is the second?

BROOM Donald Duck.

ADAM Oh, I see. I was interested in the way that all the stories in this movie were told before they were told. They made it very clear that these were just filmed anecdotes. They show the artists thinking up the plane before they show you the plane. Which was weird.

BETH That was neat.

BROOM I thought those “meta” aspects were cool. I liked when they showed the first moments of the script, so that, in fact, instead of seeing what they had scripted, you were seeing a picture of the script.

ADAM Well, it did make it easier to take, because there was no real suspense about what would happen to the plane. It was just whimsical storytelling on the flight to Santiago.

BROOM I’m looking at Wikipedia where it says “According to Jack Haley Jr.’s documentary Life Goes To War, the United States Department of State commissioned this movie during World War II to be shown in Central and South America to build up relations with the Latin American populace. Several governments (e.g. Argentina) had close ties with Nazi Germany and the most popular US figure there was Mickey Mouse.” Or so Wikipedia says.

ADAM Wikipedia’s probably right.

BETH Okay, I’m going to bed now.

BROOM Just a comment about what I just read, in relation to the “meta” thing: it makes sense to show the people behind the film and make them an important aspect of the film, if the real purpose of the film is to show that the sentiment should represent relations with the actual populace of the U.S., rather than just with Mickey Mouse.

ADAM Yes, it certainly showed Disney artists loving South America and feeling warmly received and warmly sent off.

BROOM And the movie was called “Saludos, Amigos!”

ADAM Last question: do we think that there is a place for such blatant propaganda in our current propaganda battles? Should the U.S. Government be doing this today? Was this a diplomatic success, do you think?

BETH I doubt it could have hurt anything.

ADAM Should Dora the Explorer visit Saudi Arabia?

BETH Well, “Deal or No Deal” went to the Philippines. As we saw earlier tonight.

BROOM Do you think if Thomas the Tank Engine had a tour of Iran, and then we showed it to Iranians, they would find it reassuring?

ADAM I don’t know. It’s a funny concept when you put it that way. Iran’s not a good example, but what if it was touring our allies, like Turkey or Jordan?

BROOM Right. I would watch it!

ADAM It seems like the bigger problem in the world today is Americans’ ignorance of other places, not other places’ ignorance of our goodwill towards them.

BROOM I like the concept behind this, that benign superficial tourism and just the beauty of a country can be sold as a reason that we should have good relations with that country.

ADAM I think if Americans knew how beautiful China was, if there was a way of widely popularizing the gorges, or something…

BROOM I have not outgrown my positive impression of China from “Big Bird in China.” That worked!

ADAM I don’t know if I ever saw that.

BROOM It’s good.

BETH So these things do work.

BROOM They work on me! If you showed me beautiful pictures of Iran, I would feel much more like we need to find common ground with them. I’m sure there are great beauties there.

ADAM I’m sure there are. Okay, I agree it’s time for bed.

BROOM Okay. This was an interesting thing to watch in the middle of the night. Thanks for watching it, guys.

ADAM Mary, you should watch it.

BROOM Mary, you would like it but I’m sure you’ve seen it. You probably watched this movie over and over when you were a kid. It’s right up your alley. Hope you’re doing well! Bye.

ADAM A greater contrast with the preceding movie could not possibly be imagined.

BROOM You say that because you found this boring?

ADAM It’s not just that. The politics of Dumbo are very subversive, whereas Bambi is just a paean to conformity. It’s all about doing the socially accepted mating thing; the animals are all exactly like one another despite their superficial species differences.

BROOM Is this the “queer theory” reading?

ADAM It’s not even that; it’s just what stood out to me while watching it. I thought, “God, this is so” – not even “hetero-normative” – just “normative.”

BROOM Well yes, exactly. It’s about discovering the cycles of life.

ADAM But Dumbo was about finding your inner weirdo and reveling in it, and that had much more joyous humor and excitement in it, to me.

BROOM Bambi took a cosmic perspective, presenting the “Circle of Life,” as they would call it 50 years later in The Lion King. Inevitably that’s going to be a different worldview from Dumbo. I don’t think it’s fair to say that one is more progressive than the other. So, given the subject matter of Bambi, do you feel they should have presented it in a more progressive way?

BETH At least a more entertaining way. It was really dull. Didn’t you think so?

BROOM I sensed that you guys were bored.

BETH It was really boring! You liked it?

BROOM I had mixed feelings.

BETH I thought some of the animation was beautiful, like the fight in rainbow colors. All the stylized stuff was nice. Even the snow.

ADAM I had seen two of the scenes, I realized, on the Disney Channel when we would get it for free for three days. One was when Bambi and Thumper skate on the ice; the other was when Flower, Thumper, and finally Bambi are each gobsmacked by the wiles of the feminine.

BROOM All of the cutesy stuff was very familiar to me, and the rest of it I think I had seen only once. I must have had an expurgated version on tape.

ADAM The sole dramatic event that I was already aware of was his mother’s death, and yet nothing really happened.

BETH Yeah, it was all off-screen.

ADAM Nobody mourned her or mentioned her ever again.

BROOM Well, years passed.

ADAM Three months passed!

BROOM However long it was, everyone grew up.

BETH But they made it seem like everyone had been out of touch.

BROOM That was just so they could reintroduce their adult selves.

ADAM I thought it was that in the winter they had been out of touch, and in the spring they all had antlers. But on that same point: The first forty minutes are all about motherhood and babies and babies and mommies, and then all the mommies vanish. Mommies don’t play any role whatsoever as soon as you have antlers. If I were a woman I would be creeped out by the gender politics.

BROOM I understand what you’re saying about the movie’s politics, about it being “normative,” and I was bothered by some of those things too, but I was trying to see it first for what it intended to be. Did you find its intentions baffling, or dated, or misconceived?

BETH Poorly executed. I just didn’t think it was engaging. I thought the idea behind it was nice, but I don’t know if there’s a way to do it that could keep you interested in the characters, because the characters aren’t the point.

ADAM I was interested in Thumper as a character.

BETH Thumper was the only character with a personality. And the owl.

ADAM I thought the owl was going to get a girlfriend.

BROOM He was gay, Adam.

ADAM In retrospect I understand that. But I thought it was going to be like Beatrice and Benedick for him. But no. All the characters were cardboard. I think my ideological complaint and Beth’s entertainment complaint are related, because the one-dimensional, mechanistic view of human life portrayed here is what makes it uninteresting.

BROOM Well, let’s be careful about using the word “human,” here. I looked up the original book the other day and it seems to have been an early ecological awareness sort of book, purporting to show what life is “really like” in the wild, where humans are the bad guys.

BETH The movie was obviously anti-hunting.

BROOM As for it being boring and having no characters – I was reminded of what it was like to watch movies as a child, because when I was a child, those scenes that now seemed too long were perfectly satisfying. I remembered what it was like to watch the sequence where they were on ice, and it worked for me exactly as they planned it: first they try one thing, then another, then he has to unhook his legs, then he finally manages to get going, and then they slam into the snowbank! That felt like a perfect little skit to me as a kid. That was enough event; each of those moments mattered. A lot of the construction of the movie is like that, based on choreography rather than plot events.

ADAM I don’t think it’s unfair to contrast this with Dumbo. Dumbo was wickedly funny, it had a fine eye for social observation, it had actual catchy songs – the music in this was appalling. This just seemed like a shoddier effort.

BROOM The songs in Bambi were poor; the music in general did its job. The chorus stuff hasn’t aged well, I’ll grant you, just like the chorus at the end of Fantasia hasn’t aged well.

ADAM The movie is like Mickey Mouse to Dumbo‘s Donald Duck.

BROOM Yes, it obviously is that. The question is whether that is in itself invalid, or just not as much to your taste.

ADAM Well, it certainly is not as much to my taste, but I also get irritated at its universalist stance. And maybe I do get upset because it’s kind of hetero-normative, but it’s hard not to see it that way. And it’s kind of fucked-up, psychologically. I mean, what a recipe for creating smothering mothers and absent fathers! Why can’t Bambi stand next to his wife when the babies are born?

BROOM That is upsetting. During the movie I was thinking that it was a perfect movie for kids because it’s so basic, but there were things like that in it that I wouldn’t want kids to internalize and grow up with. What I did admire about it, this time, was the way it portrays sex as a cute, sympathetic part of the scheme of life, while still being overtly sexual. That seems like a good thing for kids to see.

ADAM I’ll give it that. This was not babies and storks. Thumper was really thumping hard there.

BROOM I thought that wouldn’t be a bad way for my kids to have an impression of sex. But the image of the father standing on the cliffside is no good; neither is the way that the mother just disappears. I feel like both of those were ways that the movie said, “This is the wild world of animals,” like a nature documentary. “This young deer will never see his mother again.” I think they were going for “primal wildness,” meant to be intriguing because we recognize ourselves in it but only partially. “The nobility of the stag,” and all that. But it rode an uncomfortable line between complete anthropomorphism and nature documentary.

ADAM Regarding the normative aspects of it that bothered me: I was irritated, at the very beginning, by the overt monarchism of it. He has to be a prince, and everyone has to come pay obeisance to him and simper, “good morning, sweet prince!”

BROOM They weren’t paying obeisance to him at all; it was just a scene of what it’s like to go look at a new baby. There was nothing royal about it; they just happened to be calling him “prince.”

ADAM Well, nobody went to see the baby possum being born. To me it almost felt a little bit like Song of the South.

BROOM What’s like that in Song of the South?

ADAM The white children being fawned over by the black “uncle.” Now, this wasn’t racialized – I’m not saying that – but, you know… hierarchy portrayed as a benevolent thing creeps me out.

BROOM I take issue with the way that you seem to have been offended by the mere shapes of things that would be offensive if they had specific values attached to them. Are you saying that life should never be portrayed in a “normative” light? “Normative” is such a strange word. The movie wanted to say, “A child comes into the world and learns about the way things are; here, this is the way things are.” Are you saying it’s never fair to say that? Or just that this movie got some of the details wrong?

ADAM Of all the “life in its grandeur!” content in the movie, I was most sympathetic to the portrayal of the way a baby comes to perceive things in the world. I was sympathetic to him learning to walk, discovering objects around him, learning about reflections. That all seemed genuinely universal, as opposed to constricting social mores thinly veiled as universalism.

BROOM You have to acknowledge that “thinly veiled” is just your analysis of it now. All that stuff is in this movie because at some point, to some people, all these things seemed to be on an equal plane. You can argue that learning to walk isn’t on an equal plane with, say, having sex with a woman…

ADAM Deferring to your elders. Leaving your friends to go off with your wife.

BROOM Well, that’s something that happens, and the dudes in an office in L.A. thought, “we should put that in!”

BETH You don’t think there were any gay animators?

BROOM I’m sure there were gay animators!

ADAM And Flower was so promising… Look, I’m not calling for a gay manifesto in Bambi. I just feel that Dumbo shows that something different is possible, and I was much more sympathetic to that than I am to this. I found this depressing in the way that I would often find it depressing to watch an episode of The Jetsons right after I had watched an episode of The Flintstones – depressed at the idea that despite the fact that everything is different in all of its superficial particulars, in reality we’re programmed to the hilt. George Jetson and Fred Flintstone have the exact same life, regardless of the fact that thousands of years have passed. That always creeped me out a little bit – or maybe I’m projecting backwards, but certainly it creeps me out now. You can wear stone age clothes or space age clothes, but you are the same zhlubby office drone with a boy and a girl, and a maid or a dinosaur.

BROOM So what I’m hearing is that you personally need to be reassured that individualism will hold the day in giving shape to your life.

ADAM I don’t know that I need to be reassured, but I find a story that’s all about “try as you might, you can’t escape our tropes” to be dismaying.

BROOM But that’s not at all what the message of the movie was! The message of the movie was: “We all experience life, from birth to death. It has common aspects in it. Life is cyclical, and there’s something beautiful and poignant about that. Here in the world of animals it’s abstracted, and we can see life in its primal beauty.” Do you think that’s an illegitimate motivation for a work of art?

ADAM No.

BROOM Is it a perspective that you would never like, or was it the particular execution of Bambi that made it impossible for you to enjoy it?

ADAM No, it’s the execution of Bambi. If you think forward to The Lion King, that’s a more deftly handled version of the same thing.

BROOM I’ve only seen it once, but as I recollect, I thought that The Lion King invoked the “circle of life” thing undeservedly. They sing a song about the circle of life at the beginning and then again at the end, but most of the movie is about, like, the machinations of Jeremy Irons. It isn’t about the life cycle. Bambi was really about the life cycle.

BETH It definitely was.

BROOM It wasn’t about individuals.

BETH No.

BROOM It was about the life cycle.

ADAM Do you concede why that might be boring to watch?

BETH You seem to be defending it, and I’m a little surprised.

BROOM Because you found it that boring?

BETH Yes.

BROOM I am defending it. I didn’t think it was successful on every count. I had mixed feelings, but I wasn’t struggling against the kind of gut distaste that you guys seem to have had. I saw what it was trying to be: primal beauty – and adorable – and a couple of other things. They didn’t quite fit together, but I understood and could sympathize with what each moment was supposed to be. My problem was proportion. This is the first truly “cute” Disney movie, the first one with really big eyes, and now we make fun of that sort of thing immediately, but during the first “cute” scene with the baby prince, I thought that the cuteness was actually being done conscientiously. It didn’t feel like it was going for cuteness in a cheap Hallmark card way, as a ploy. They were trying to be genuinely adorable. But then there were three scenes in a row that were trying to be adorable, and that was too much, too one-note. I just kept feeling that the proportions weren’t right.

BETH Early on, when they introduced the rabbits, I thought that they had found a way to make very cute rabbits not be cute. Rabbits are inherently cute, but these rabbits were cloying and annoying; I didn’t like watching Thumper. That turned me off. I’m fine with the animals saying hello to the prince; they just weren’t appealing enough. Things like that weren’t working for me and eventually I decided that it was all misguided. I think they had good intentions, and it seemed like the animators got excited every time they had to do something dark; I thought the forest fire and the fight were really excellent and interesting. Finally! That all came in the last fifteen minutes of the movie.

BROOM I thought the fight looked beautiful but was actually boring. The shots kept coming and I was thinking, “none of these shots signifies anything different from the previous one.”

ADAM I will concede that the baby animals were legitimately cute. I was moved by the lines of quail.

BETH I also thought the quail were the cutest.

ADAM When we call something “Disneyfied” now, we mean saccharine and over-cute, and this is where that starts. To the extent that it inaugurated a thing in culture, it was well done. It became the basis for a lasting trope.

BROOM I like that you’re granting it respect for being the place where something annoying started.

ADAM Well, yes, something that becomes iconic, even if later copies are irritating, deserves credit.

BROOM I wanted to give it credit for being that kind of cuteness but not yet being some kind of quick and easy formula like “just slap some big eyes on it!” It seemed like they had to think about what they were doing.

ADAM They essentially invented filmic neoteny here. The whole science of making things exaggeratedly babylike had not yet been invented at that point, I don’t think.

BROOM I want to say that I thought the atmosphere was strong in several places. I thought the first time they go out into the meadow was very nicely done. And the lushness of the forest. Even the rain sequence, which was longer than I needed – maybe not more than a kid needs, but more than I needed – it was sort of like being in the rain. And after his mother dies and he goes out in the snow looking for her, and his father is there with heavy snow in front of him, I thought that had a nice feel to it. I’m not just granting the art department its due; I thought it actually felt right. And as with Fantasia, I want to give the whole movie credit for being a bold and risky thing to do.

BETH It wasn’t a story.

BROOM That’s right, it was an art picture. It just happened to be kitsch art.

ADAM I thought “Bambi” was a curious name for the über-butch king/savior of the forest.

BROOM It comes from a German book. Was the name “Bambi” not as effeminate in Germany? Now it’s like the name for a porn star.

ADAM A lady porn star.

BROOM Yes.

[After reading the original New York Times review (link in the image below as usual!), which criticized the self-defeating effort toward greater naturalism:]

BETH It does bother me to see a perfectly drawn forest, with depth, and then see flat cartoon characters jumping through it. That’s why I liked the snow scene, because the snow was covering the flatness of the animals, so it all looked cohesive.

ADAM I did think it was striking when they moved from the long pan at the beginning, with careful blurring as things come in and out of focus, and then suddenly the camera turns sideways and the blurring stops.

BETH It looks like Colorforms pasted in to a world.

BROOM I disagree with the reviewer almost entirely. I admired throughout that they were moving like real deer.

BETH Me too; I like when they get close to reality.

BROOM The value of animation is not necessarily to be a complete fantasy, but just to be denser with fantasy, with aesthetic affect, than real photography can be. Everything is “colored” to the highest pitch; it can still benefit from looking like the real thing.

ADAM Like the beautiful rotoscoped fairy in Pinocchio.

BROOM Well, that didn’t work as well, did it? This looked much better. Everything here in Bambi seemed truly expert. The thing I love in Fantasia with the leaves falling, they did that ten times here, and beautifully.

BETH Did you notice all the extreme close-ups that they suddenly discovered they liked? Like the owl.

BROOM Or when the sexy bunny came right up to the camera. The only one of those we’d seen before was in Pinocchio when the coachman said “they never come back…AS BOYS!”

ADAM It was a little weird that the dogs were the only animals that didn’t get to have personalities.

BETH They were part of the human world.

ADAM Well, I felt badly for them.