ADAM That was awesome. I love that movie so much. It’s the best one.

BETH Why?

ADAM Why? Because the whole movie I was quivering with indignation at how mean they were to him; it hurts my feelings. And all of the stock characters are highly appealing and individuated, and the songs are all great. I can sing every song, I think.

BROOM The musical score was miles above the previous ones; I think this was the first one that was done by Oliver Wallace. The movie is notably different from the previous three in that it’s really dialogue-based and contemporary.

ADAM Except that the hero doesn’t say anything.

BETH And neither does his mother.

ADAM She says the words “Jumbo Junior.”

BROOM I know, but the script actually gives weight to the dialogue; they talk out the plot. Timothy Mouse talks freely and there are a lot of verbal jokes.

ADAM Or just a lot of jokes – I mean the other ones aren’t funny, particularly. You can see hints of it in Jiminy Cricket, who is kind of like Timothy Mouse, as I said when we watched Pinocchio. But there’s a lot more adult, jokey humor in this. The gossipy bitch elephants are hilariously funny to me, in a way that I did not perceive when I was a kid.

BROOM In a verbal, scripted way. It allows itself to be funny in a way that the filmmakers thought was funny, whereas Pinocchio, though it did a little of that, felt very calculated and controlled. Here it felt like they did what they would be amused by.

BETH It felt contemporary. I guess working with original material helped it.

BROOM Remember, it’s based on a kid’s book; no one can find it now, but they did buy a property.

BETH Oh, I didn’t know.

ADAM It’s also very warm. The other stories seem stagier than this.

BETH That’s what I was trying to say. It felt less staged.

ADAM I almost cried during “Baby Mine.”

BETH I think BROOM always cries.

BROOM I didn’t this time because Adam was talking.

BETH I think that was calculated to prevent everyone from crying.

BROOM As for the others being more calculated and stagy, I thought this was a huge step ahead of Pinocchio. Fantasia is a weird one because it doesn’t work by the same rules, so you can’t quite tell where they were in their storytelling sophistication – but in this one, for the first time, you aren’t inclined to watch for the craft. They’ve really mastered it and you just watch the story. The sequences play so smoothly. The better musical scoring was a part of it – the underscoring works perfectly and draws you into it. I felt like they had gotten to a level of craft where now they could make any Disney movie.

ADAM There’s not really any showpiece animation in the movie except for “Pink Elephants.” But that’s amazing.

BROOM And creepy. What I never liked about that as a kid is – and I know they’re sort of bubbles and sort of elephants – but that they burst, that they keep being blown up. Or their flesh is torn – those elephants that are sewn together into a curtain and then ripped apart. Or one elephant throws a bolt of electricity at the other one and explodes it. Or they go around the screen and their heads twist together like balloons until they pop.

ADAM I don’t like the one where they turn plaid and then tug at each other.

BROOM It’s also disturbing to me when they turn into cars and a flag comes in and it’s made of an elephant’s trunk. I guess you’re supposed to imagine that an elephant is lowering it down but it seems to me more like it’s a flag somehow made out of elephant matter. That’s upsetting.

ADAM Much of this movie is upsetting. It’s terrible when she goes to the madhouse.

BETH I really did not like this when I was a child, and I think that’s why. Even though the Times review said it was a happy movie, and Disney himself said it was a happy movie, it did not seem happy. And the ending still seems a little bit abrupt. Suddenly he flies! It’s great! The end! There’s no real reunion with his mother.

BROOM They’re saving it for the very last second.

ADAM And all that happens to the lady elephants is they get hit with peanuts.

BETH Yes, and then they love him.

BROOM They love him because he saves the circus. They have a fancier train at the end.

BETH And he’s redeemed them as elephants; they don’t have to be ashamed of him.

ADAM Everyone is concerned with their own dignity: the elephants, the clowns…

BROOM The crows seemed pretty relaxed.

ADAM Well, I leave you to analyze that. Actually, I saw a gay subtext in this movie for the first time.

BROOM Well done!

ADAM Dumbo is excluded by all the grownups and then only discovers his true nature after a drunken evening when no one can remember what happened.

BETH I wondered if that was why you liked it so much. When I was watching it just now, I thought, “Maybe Adam is Dumbo.”

ADAM I don’t think I ever thought about it like that. I just think it’s touching and thrilling and sad.

BROOM When I was a kid I was bothered by things like, “They haven’t rehearsed this and they expect him to do it?” And “why can we see through one guy’s clothes but not the other guy’s?” And what are the clowns? I know it’s sort of a joke that when they take off their suits they’re still clowns, but that’s upsetting.

ADAM I find the scene when they’re erecting the circus in the rain horrible.

BETH I liked it this time, but I thought, “why did it have to be in the rain?”

ADAM And why did the elephants have to do all that work?

BROOM I thought that redeemed it from the uncomfortable lyrics. I know that the crows are obvious racial caricatures, but I find it more upsetting that while you watch the roustabouts laboring, they’re described in the song as being happy-hearted – and then they sing “when we get our pay, we throw our pay away!”

BETH The humans weren’t actually humans, they were just sort of figures.

BROOM Well, they were dark figures.

ADAM The only real humans, apart from the ringmaster, are those boys, and they seemed to be reused from Pinocchio. And the hippos seemed to be reused from Fantasia. I wonder if those are shout-outs.

BROOM They weren’t direct “reuses.” The hippos did look the same, though without the eyelashes. The wicked boys weren’t quite the same but they were certainly cut from the same cloth.

ADAM I think that the shortness of it totally works; it feels packed with incident. The ending is a little abrupt – I thought it was longer. I was wondering where I had gotten the image in my head of Dumbo as a bomber, but it’s from the ending.

BROOM Dumbombers, from Time magazine, or whichever that is. Time magazine is where you see Timothy J. Mouse signing his contract. [ed. actually “The National Weekly”]

ADAM That’s the only time you learn his name, I believe.

BROOM And I don’t know when you learn Jim Crow’s name.

ADAM I don’t think you do.

BROOM When I was a kid, I didn’t understand why the song was “Look Out for Mister Stork.” All the animals in the movie are happy when Mister Stork shows up, but the song is saying “You’d better watch out, or Mister Stork will come!” He’s a good guy – why would you “look out” for him? And I asked my parents, and they gave me some unsatisfying answer. This time through I also noted that all they elephants are female, which, regardless of whether that’s true in the circus, is a necessity for the story. If there were any male elephants in the movie, we’d enter into the question of who his father is.

ADAM Also, it would be harder to orphan him. All the other animals have fathers.

BROOM It would screw up the purity of the stork delivery.

ADAM I can still clearly picture the personalities of the five elephants. There’s the vicious one, and the Florence Nightingale one, and the ditzy one…

BROOM I also think the personalities of the five crows are good too, although we’re not supposed to like them now. But I thought they were nicely differentiated.

BETH I don’t know… how racist was it really?

BROOM As racism goes, I feel like it’s pretty mild. They didn’t have to touch this movie up – we saw it in its entirety; they didn’t change any dialogue as far as I know.

BETH And why is it wrong to take personalities that existed in the culture and transplant them to a cartoon?

ADAM When I was a kid I did not understand that the crows were black.

BROOM I think I understood in a general way. I didn’t think of them as being like people with black skin, but I knew that they were the same general thing that other cartoon black characters were. Aren’t there black vultures in the Jungle Book?

ADAM What is Timothy J. Mouse?

BROOM He’s Walt Disney, he’s from Kansas.

ADAM He’s not a huckster like Jiminy Cricket, but he’s a little puffed up, full of bravado, starstruck little guy.

BROOM I still take issue with the idea that Jiminy Cricket is a huckster. When Timothy says “Lots of people with big ears are famous,” is he talking about Walt Disney, or Clark Gable, or who?

BETH I don’t know.

BROOM I would be happy to set kids down in front of this now.

ADAM Absolutely.

BETH I don’t have any reservations but I remember not liking it, so I would not expect them to like it. Maybe boys like it more; maybe boys can handle the material better. I was so upset by it that I did not want to keep watching it.

ADAM But what early Disney movies could you watch? They all have horrible things in them.

BETH So far, Snow White is the least upsetting to my child self. I mean, Fantasia doesn’t really have anything.

BROOM It does have one outright horror sequence.

BETH Which seems removed from reality. I wasn’t relating to any characters.

ADAM What do you think was the most successful song in Dumbo?

BROOM “Baby Mine” is considered the most successful. The catchiest is “Casey Junior.”

ADAM That’s what I was going to say.

BETH It is. They knew it, too. They kept bringing it back.

BROOM Though I find myself humming “When I See an Elephant Fly.”

ADAM I do too. I’ve often wished I could remember more of the puns; now I know more of them.

BROOM “Look Out For Mister Stork” delights me every time I see it, but I can never remember the real melody.

BETH The production of that is that beautiful forties sound.

ADAM “Look Out For Mister Stork” for me blends in with “Pink Elephants on Parade.”

BROOM Oh, I’m sorry, “Pink Elephants on Parade” is the best song. And the entire dance break is emblazoned in my brain. It’s so beautifully orchestrated. And there’s incidental music in the score that’s fantastic too – like when she’s washing him, there’s a lovely little waltz.

BETH All around, thumbs up.

ADAM I think this is an early peak which it will be hard to match.

[Ed. note: First and second halves of the movie (broken at the “Intermission” announced in the movie itself) were screened more than a week apart, both late at night]

ADAM The fact that I fell asleep during both halves of this movie indicates something about my opinion of it. Which is that I think it’s not successful. Although I think it’s charming that Disney attempted it.

BROOM Don’t you think that your falling asleep reflects what time of day we watched it?

ADAM Well, yes, of course it does. It also reflects my opinion about classical music. My difficulty in listening seriously to classical music is that I am too liable to drift off and not pay attention, and that tendency does not need to be facilitated. When watching some of the segments, I found it almost impossible to have any idea what was going on in the music because at best, the music was illustrating points in the animation, and the experience of watching unicorns flying around on the screen completely obliterated the music for me.

BROOM Are you saying that you felt obligated to attend to the music more than to the movie, and felt that the movie was failing when you didn’t?

ADAM No, it was that I could not pay attention to the music because I was just paying attention to the animation.

BROOM Did you fall asleep because you also had difficulty paying attention to the animation? Was it that the visual was boring; did you feel like the movie couldn’t possibly be about the visual?

ADAM No, I probably would have fallen asleep anyway. But the animation was just decorative. It’s not compelling by itself. I mean, it’s charming, but you wouldn’t actually go to a movie theater just to watch a cartoon about unicorns flying around.

BROOM I marvel at the fact that this movie did bring people into a movie theater to look at something very abstract and stylized. Yes, to just watch unicorns flying around, or watch dew being dropped on petals by fairies.

BETH Animation was still so new. We don’t know what it was really like to be an entertainment-seeker in 1940. So I’m not sure that’s so marvelous.

BROOM Well, the movie wasn’t a commercial success, so I don’t think we can explain it on the grounds that it worked differently for the original audience.

BETH You just said you marvel at the fact that it got people to go to the theater.

BROOM I meant that I marvel that the movie is what it is; that it was made that way.

ADAM The concept of it is unique basically in all film history, and it deserves to be admired for that. That said – as someone who’s not a classical music aficionado, I found that this did not in any way stimulate my appreciation of classical music, and in some ways dulled it. I mean, I’m fond of the Pastoral Symphony from when I studied it. But here I just couldn’t hear the music; all I saw was the animation.

BROOM I agree about that particular segment. This is one of my favorite movies, and I think it is successful – and I think everyone would agree that the Pastoral Symphony segment is the weakest.

ADAM Not because it’s laughable, but because it’s programmatic. I found the most abstract sequences to be the most successful, because they interfered least with my listening.

BROOM Going back to what you said earlier about how nobody would want to see animation that didn’t have a story or something else justifying it: the appeal of the Night On Bald Mountain segment is just to see the spectacle. I mean, there’s a story behind it, but you’re really just there to watch design and light.

BETH I thought that was the best one. I thought it was the most stylish and visually rich.

ADAM It was the most creepy.

BETH But I don’t remember everything we saw in the first half.

BROOM I feel like the Nutcracker segment is a high point in animation art.

BETH Yeah, that one is good too.

ADAM I think the two ballets are the most successful for me, in that ballet music is meant to be accompanied with visual spectacle.

BROOM One of them was Dance of the Hours; which are you counting as the other? Rite of Spring?

ADAM No, The Nutcracker. Rite of Spring is a ballet, but here the ballet was heavily counter-programmed in a way that sort of obliterated its ballet-ness. Maybe this just speaks to the fact that ballet music is different from symphony music in some way that I can’t speak to because I don’t have the language for it. Ballet music just goes better with images of people or fairies or hippos dancing. It didn’t feel like the music was being viciously scrubbed out, the way it did in some of the other segments.

BROOM Can’t there be room for the music and the picture to work together in ways that are slightly different from segment to segment? I agree that the Pastoral Symphony section is not particularly successful, but not because of what it does or doesn’t do with the music; mostly because there’s something distasteful about the designs, and about the substance of what you’re seeing.

ADAM That’s also true.

BROOM Various off-putting elements detract from what it could have been. But I don’t particularly mind the idea that they would just let the Pastoral Symphony be the score to something visually appealing on its own terms. It just didn’t happen to work. I enjoy the Rite of Spring section, which has a similar approach.

ADAM For me, the Rite of Spring doesn’t work either. Again, all I could see was dinosaurs. I couldn’t hear The Rite of Spring. And The Rite of Spring is also a work of music that I’m fond of. I’ve been taught it; I like it.

BROOM Who says you needed to really hear it? It sounds like you’re assuming there was some music-appreciation educational intention behind the film.

ADAM Wasn’t there? I mean, how could there not be? The whole thing is organized around a pseudo-conductor figure giving program notes about pieces of classical music.

BROOM It obviously has the trappings of middlebrow music-appreciation. But I feel like the real impetus behind it is that somehow music can be the formally appropriate complement to animation. Whatever animation is good for, they thought maybe that could go hand in hand with music, and be a new art form. I think the music-appreciation racket was just a way of getting that on the screen, and what they really wanted to do was see where they could go with their craft.

ADAM I’m very comfortable with the idea of classical music accompanying animation just as background. I mean, that’s how we know all the classical music that we know – “we” being those of us who are not BROOM – because it accompanied an episode of The Smurfs.

BROOM Fantasia followed on and developed from the “Silly Symphonies,” which we tend to take for granted, as a phrase and thus as a concept. But it was a definite idea at the time, that animation could be accompanied continuously by music and made to sync with it. I don’t remember if Steamboat Willie is a “Silly Symphony” or not, but Skeleton Dance and those other cartoons are; it had been a very successful short feature concept, done in that lighthearted way, and now they were just taking the formal concept further. I feel like the intention here was not to use cartoons to spoonful-of-sugar down some classical music, but to actually try and raise the cartoons to the level of ballet.

ADAM But if that’s true, why are the cartoons so preposterous? I mean, almost all the segments are pointedly juvenile – with the exception of Night On Bald Mountain, and maybe the opening.

BETH And Rite of Spring.

BROOM What do you mean by “pointedly juvenile”? Which ones are you thinking of, apart from the Pastoral Symphony?

ADAM The Nutcracker is childish – though I think it works. The hippos in La Gioconda, though they are a charming image.

BROOM Hold on – what’s childish about the Nutcracker?

BETH It’s childlike more than childish.

BROOM I feel like what the Nutcracker segment aims to be, and is successful at – and I really like this about it – is like Arthur Rackham, like illustrations from turn-of-the-century children’s books. The fairies seem like the fairies from a British “fairies in the bottom of my garden” J.M. Barrie culture, where children’s stuff is seen as having a kind of ethereal beauty that needs to be taken seriously. We can scoff at that sort of thing now, but I don’t think it was juvenile. I don’t think it was being pitched to kids as something easy to take; I think they were approaching fairies in a highfalutin way that might seem absurd to us now but certainly existed.

ADAM I don’t think that’s true. When I was taken to see this as a child, my parents explained that this was something very special, that it was different from other animated movies and there was no story. I was awfully dubious about that. The only reason I tolerated it was that it had dinosaurs, fairies, cute horses, and Mickey Mouse. I don’t think it’s an accident that all those things are for kids. I feel like the movie is saying, “Hey kids, classical music is awesome.”

BROOM Well, I don’t buy that argument. Those Bugs Bunny cartoons were not “for kids” particularly, but they’re for kids now.

ADAM What Bugs Bunny cartoons?

BROOM All Bugs Bunny cartoons.

ADAM You don’t think they’re for kids?

BROOM They were short subjects before movies, or shown to the troops. Think of all those jokes about Clark Gable and whatever else. They weren’t for kids. They’re “for kids” now because that’s an association we make, and it’s become a stigma for cartoons.

ADAM I suppose Bugs Bunny cartoons at least have sophisticated jokes in them; all that vaudeville-style humor that I didn’t fully appreciate until… what was the show with Babs Bunny?

BROOM Tiny Toons?

ADAM Yeah, thank you.

BROOM I have a hard time seeing any of Fantasia as being essentially “for kids.” Except maybe for the cute unicorns.

BETH It seems like a family movie. It’s for the whole family.

BROOM I don’t know. I mean, Night On Bald Mountain is as creepy as they could make it.

BETH That’s true.

BROOM That wasn’t just supposed to give kids the willies, it was as creepy as they could. And I feel like a lot of the movie is “as beautiful as they could.” I think they were aiming as high as they could possibly aim. It only happens to look like a tacky Greatest Masterpieces of Classical Music-appreciation record.

ADAM But I appreciate the goal of classical music appreciation.

BETH What about The Sorcerer’s Apprentice? That’s as high as they could aim?

BROOM That’s the only piece where they did it absolutely as it was intended. It told exactly the story the composer had in mind. Pretty much moment for moment they tried to figure out what the piece actually was. And making their mascot Mickey Mouse be the lead was like a house in-joke.

ADAM It’s the only image from Fantasia that is truly universally well-known.

BROOM That’s just a reflection of what kind of marketing they used it for later. I think Fantasia‘s a property they couldn’t exploit very much because it did aim too high for what the company later ended up being.

ADAM Well, I’m not unsympathetic to this movie. I appreciate that it’s trying for something astonishing. And it’s hard not to giggle at the interstitial materials, but I’m sure they were meant totally straight.

BROOM They were. Deems Taylor was apparently the most prominent classical music radio announcer in New York, so his voice was familiar to people in that role. He was also a famous composer for a time, but nobody plays his music anymore. I have a recording of his Through the Looking-Glass Suite. The version of Fantasia that I grew up watching didn’t have the long versions of the interstitials. Even when I got this restored DVD, I think I just watched the parts I like; I’m not sure I ever sat down to watch it all the way through like this before. Some of that stuff is just…

ADAM Wow.

BETH Yeah.

BROOM …remarkably pointless. Someone must have had the idea that it would dignify the whole presentation if he gave a real program note for each segment. And the program note ended up being on the cartoon rather than on the piece.

ADAM It brings everything into the realm of camp.

BROOM I find it kind of endearing, because I do see it as this movie of huge ambitions. With their heart on their sleeve, they’re saying “we are trying to establish a new art.”

BETH But that seems so misguided.

BROOM There’s something touching and pathetic about how weird the juxtaposition is; that in Walt Disney’s imagination – or in the studio’s collective imagination – that their conception of greatness was to have that guy from the radio describing their cartoon with as much seriousness as he would describe, you know, a Beethoven Symphony.

ADAM That makes them sound like rubes.

BROOM It’s not that they were rubes, but it’s, you know, an American sort of imagination. That’s what I see in it, it’s like… well, I can’t think of another example, but isn’t that a familiar bit of cultural commentary about Americans: setting out to be great in a European way but ending up with their own E-Z-Bake versions?

ADAM Sure.

BROOM They couldn’t help themselves but put vaudeville crap into it. And I love that. That’s what I said when I posted something about Dumbo a few years ago: that it feels rough, like the work of people who were just trying to put on whatever show they knew how to put on. So Fantasia is like those same people trying very hard to put on the show of “great beauty.” And I find it moving. And then I think there are things in it that are beautiful. I appreciated this time that the backdrops in the Pastoral Symphony section, which is so annoying, are in fact pretty.

BETH That actually bothered me.

BROOM And the color choices there are bold to the point of being interesting.

BETH Yes, I did like the colors in that.

BROOM I’m not saying that I liked them, but they were interesting.

BETH That was the only reason I had to keep watching it, that I liked those colors.

ADAM The horses were pretty cute, Beth!

BETH They really looked like My Little Pony.

BROOM I can’t imagine that there wasn’t an influence on the makers of My Little Pony. Like, “let’s make dolls of those little horses from Fantasia.”

BETH There must have been, because they looked exactly like My Little Pony. They were the same colors and everything.

ADAM Isn’t it true that Stravinsky objected to The Rite of Spring being in this movie, and Walt Disney paid him one dollar, or something?

BROOM Well, there’s an anecdote that Stravinsky wrote, but it’s contested now. Stravinsky wrote all kinds of bullshit about his past when it was convenient. In his memoirs he said that Disney offered him something like a thousand dollars, and pointed out that the piece was not in copyright in the US so they could use it for free if they wanted, and that he went to a screening and was disgusted. But there’s reason to believe that actually at the time he was really into it. There are promotional photographs of him at the studio looking at designs, and it’s recorded that he definitely enjoyed the Sorcerer’s Apprentice segment. I believe that he probably didn’t decide he hated it until later when someone scoffed at it.

ADAM It has to have been embarrassing for Stravinsky that this is the only way that anyone in America knows The Rite of Spring.

BROOM Oh, I don’t think that’s the case. I think they picked The Rite of Spring because people had heard of it. And Stravinsky did all kinds of weird commercial stuff when he was living in Hollywood.

ADAM For me Fantasia has always been synonymous with classical music appreciation, and I found to my dismay that it made me appreciate the music less than if I had just listened to the music.

BETH I feel like it had no effect on the way I thought about the music at all.

BROOM I find it very simple to watch, and I don’t think that’s because I’m better versed in classical music; I don’t think about classical music while I’m watching the movie. I got to know Rite of Spring because of this movie; that was the first time I had heard it, and thinking about the movie later I wanted to hear that music again, because I was still thinking about the lava bubbles bursting. That was exciting, and I still watch it that way. When they do a good job, it fuses together and makes perfect sense, and you can appreciate the music as subconsciously as you naturally would in a movie.

ADAM The only ones that really worked for me were La Gioconda and The Nutcracker. And La Gioconda more because…

BROOM And Night On Bald Mountain? I thought you said you liked it.

ADAM I liked it, but…

BROOM But you fell asleep.

ADAM …but I fell asleep, so I’m not in a position to say fully.

BROOM It’s hard to imagine that anyone under less middle-of-the-night circumstances would fall asleep during that segment. It’s really scary.

BETH It is. I thought it was beautiful.

BROOM When those creatures in his hands change into weirder and weirder things…

ADAM There’s one we haven’t talked about.

BROOM The abstract one, the first one.

BETH I liked that one.

BROOM Beth, now you’ve actually seen the work of Oskar Fischinger.

BETH Yeah. I wish the whole movie was more like that. I wish it had been more abstract, and not cute cartoon characters running around. I think that the music is easier to appreciate when the animation is abstract. It’s also more fun. I think the movie would have held up better over time.

ADAM I like when the abstract animation fizzes or kicks in time with the music, and emphasizes the contours of the music. Whereas they tried similar things in the other pieces – like when there’s like a flute solo in the Pastoral Symphony, and it’s represented as some little Pan playing on his lyre. That made me cringe.

BROOM On his aulos. A lyre is stringed.

ADAM Thank you.

BROOM That reminds me of something that struck me this time. The Pastoral Symphony is famous for being illustrative and that seems to be why they chose it – that’s how he introduces it – and the passage most famous for being illustrative is the moment when the woodwind actually imitate birds. And yet that’s the passage they chose to portray as being played on actual instruments – they handled it in the exact opposite way. I don’t know if that meant anything. It’s interesting that you said you wanted it to be more abstract – I feel like the abstract parts are the most dependent on the viewer actually listening to the music. Those sections don’t give you the option of not caring about it.

BETH That’s true, but it seems like the music fit with the images more precisely when the animation was abstract.

ADAM I like the abstract ones for that reason, that they do make you pay more attention to the music. The animation can be a little bit hokey. But I admired what you tried to do for your final project in the animation class, which was sort of a more tasteful execution of the idea from that first one.

BROOM That first one, as I said, was made in imitation of – and actually with the participation of – this animator Oskar Fischinger. We saw a retrospective of his work.

BETH He participated?

BROOM He did designs. And the animators had all seen his work.

BETH I see. It was like him but not as good as him.

BROOM Yeah. He did designs and then other animators turned his doodles into, say, a violin bow instead of just a pure abstract form. I remember when I first saw some Fischinger films in class, and my animation teacher told me, “If you like Fantasia, you’ll like this better; it’s purer.” But my feeling then was that it was too pure to be anything in itself. I felt like I was watching an experiment, whereas Fantasia had been worked into something. By now I’ve seen enough of Fischinger that this time I was able to see it from the other point of view. But, again, I like that lowbrow-meets-highbrow quality of it. When it sort of looks like frost, or like the land rolling by, or like a sunset, I can enjoy that. I don’t think that pure abstraction should necessarily be held as a higher ideal than partial abstraction. I think the section that looks like glints on water is lovely.

ADAM There were also notes of abstraction in the Nutcracker section. Yes, they’re fairies, but they aren’t doing anything except for scattering leaves or…

BROOM Dust. Sparkles. Frost.

ADAM …on things, and it approaches the abstract. Though I disliked the parts of the Nutcracker that were like the Chinese mushrooms dancing.

BETH I like that part.

ADAM I thought the choices were clever, but…

BROOM The movie is a constant back-and-forth between things that are cute and based on showmanship, and things that are justified only by pure art. My favorite thing in the movie may be when the leaves blow by in the Waltz of the Flowers, which is somewhere in between. It’s just leaves, but handled as though they’re pure beauty.

ADAM In terms of formal execution, did you guys really think this was an advance on Pinocchio?

BROOM Absolutely.

BETH I think parts of it were, yes.

BROOM I feel like shot for shot there are artistic choices being made in this movie that are the boldest things Disney ever did. For example, in Night On Bald Mountain, a remarkable number of different techniques are used in a short span – the pastel effect, and the reverse image, and that incredibly creepy effect at the beginning, when reality seems to bend as the hands of darkness come down.

BETH Night On Bald Mountain seemed really ahead of its time.

BROOM But even in The Pastoral Symphony there were weird little choices. At the end when everyone’s going to sleep, there’s one shot where the centaurs have become part of the background art, which is a weird and interesting choice. And at the end of the Russian Dance in the Nutcracker, when the dancing flowers all jump back into an arrangement, they’re suddenly drawn in a different style.

BETH And you like that? I don’t always like that.

BROOM I’m not saying all of them work, but I like that the movie is chock-full of bold choices. I guess a lot of Disney movies have similar things to savor in them. That’s something I’m hoping to rediscover here in the movies I haven’t seen in years – “Oh, look at how much design thought there is behind Bambi.”

ADAM Well, I can’t wait for Dumbo.

BROOM There are just constantly things to look at in Fantasia. During Ave Maria, I was thinking about the intense Magritte weirdness of where it ends up. At the end of the movie you just tend to shrug at it because you’ve seen so much other stuff. But if we just came across it flipping channels and had never seen it before, we’d wonder “What is this crazy, intense thing?” The movie maintains a remarkable level of lush intensity the whole time.

BETH Can we go to sleep now?

BROOM Yeah, you can both go to sleep now. This is all me talking because I’m the only one who likes this movie and I’m the only one who’s awake.

BETH What are you talking about??

ADAM We talked plenty!

BETH I was obsessed with this movie when I was a kid.

BROOM You were?

BETH Yeah. Most of the drawings I did from around fourth through sixth grade looked like things in this movie.

BROOM Really? Which things in the movie?

BETH The dinosaur world. I made a diorama of dinosaurs in fourth grade that was supposed to look just like that, and I thought I succeeded. And I would draw skies that were purple with lines shooting up from the sun, trying to make it look like the very end of the last one.

BROOM Those last few moments were always lost on me as a kid. Because what exactly are we watching? People with lanterns?

BETH I think they’re people with candles or lanterns, maybe monks. I don’t know.

BROOM Is it supposed to look Chinese? It has a sort of Asian art quality to me.

BETH Because of the tall thin trees.

BROOM The reason that section sucks so much is because the musical arrangement is terrible.

BETH Yeah, it’s a weird arrangement. Oddly overwrought.

BROOM It’s been Disneyfied, with goopy chorus. That’s not how Schubert’s Ave Maria really goes. I hadn’t even really recognized it before today.

ADAM How does it go?

BROOM “Ave Maria…”

ADAM Well, yeah, right.

BROOM Everyone knows that melody.

ADAM Yeah.

BROOM I didn’t know that was what we were listening to!

ADAM What do you mean you didn’t know?

BROOM When I was a kid, maybe I’d heard that melody a few times, but I don’t think I connected it with the name, and in the movie the tune is very hard to pick out because what you mostly hear is the chorus murmuring in this weird swoopy way. Tacky.

ADAM Well, I think we all gave that a fair shot.

BROOM I don’t think you didn’t give it a fair shot. You’re just falling asleep.

BETH I like it!

ADAM What are you talking about, we’re falling asleep? I feel very lively!

BETH It’s 12:42! I want to go to bed now! Can we go to sleep?

BROOM Yes.

BROOM I liked it. I thought it was a lot better than Snow White and I enjoyed it a lot more.

ADAM It’s a lot more dramatically taut than Snow White. Although it’s still not a fully developed story. It’s a picaresque with three episodes. But that’s definitely better than the interminable doodling of Snow White.

BROOM It may not be like a normal plotted movie in form, but it’s something legitimate in itself. While we were watching, Beth said that the movie was like…

BETH ….a terrible dream. It is.

BROOM I think that’s a legitimate thing for a movie to be. There wasn’t a point where I wished it were more plotted or had more of an arc. It has its own kind of arc.

BETH Where does the story come from?

BROOM It’s by an Italian author, Carlo Collodi, but I don’t know what the original is like; I don’t know if it’s stories or a novel or what. I’m curious to read it.

ADAM Would anyone in 1940 have known the original source material?

BROOM The opening shot of the storybooks implies that it was on par with Peter Pan and Alice in Wonderland.

BETH Was it their goal to make movies out of all of the canonical fairy tales and children’s literature? Both these movies start with a book. Alice in Wonderland does too, I think.

BROOM A lot of them start with books, to show that “we took the beloved book and brought it to life.” I don’t know if it was a goal, exactly, but it was clearly something they thought was a good idea.

ADAM Last time you talked about the “beautiful European classic” quality of Snow White. That was largely removed here. Jiminy Cricket speaks in a wise-guy vernacular, which is much more amenable a voice than the “Once upon a time” tone of Snow White.

BROOM It felt like they had relaxed into storytelling the best way they knew how. But it was still within a European framework. It seemed maybe to take place in southern Switzerland. You see the Alps.

ADAM Except that it’s also somehow on the sea. It seemed to be Northern Italy. Turin.

BETH It seemed like Italy.

ADAM It occurred to me that the character of Jiminy Cricket is exactly the same character as Timothy Mouse, from Dumbo. And I like that character. But Jiminy Cricket was not a fully realized version of the character; in many parts he was plainly just a Greek chorus.

BROOM I think their idea was that he would guide the viewer through. I could imagine them saying something like, “How will we get Americans to relate to this Italian story? I know, we’ll have an American character who’s the liaison between the audience and the protagonist.” But the idea of a cricket being his conscience probably comes from the original book.

ADAM It was still clunky. The use of the same character in Dumbo is smoother. I want to return to talking about the nightmare quality, which is easily the most compelling thing about the movie. It’s really frightening.

BETH I hated Pinocchio as a kid. I remember being made to watch it in school and just wanting to run away.

BROOM I remember it being quite scary but I don’t think I hated it.

BETH I really didn’t like it. Maybe it’s more of a boy’s movie.

BROOM I remember there being many things in children’s movies that scared me so much, as a child, that I would avoid them and would worry that I might be forced to watch them. But though I certainly remember thinking of this as very scary, I don’t remember thinking of it as too scary to watch.

BETH It’s very unpleasant, because the entire time, he’s in situations that you don’t want him to be in. It lasts the whole movie; he just moves from one situation to another, and it makes children feel uncomfortable.

BROOM It’s supposed to be a story about moral choices, about discovering morality in a complicated world, but it doesn’t read that way to children at all, because the moral choices are indicated in peculiar vaudeville ways. The supposed “temptation” to run off and become an actor becomes a comedy of whether or not he’s being physically turned around by Honest John. It doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the question of choosing a life for oneself.

BETH Even to me as an adult, it still doesn’t seem to resonate because Pinocchio is just a kid. He doesn’t have any knowledge of what his choices are.

BROOM He’s a complete innocent. When he’s at Pleasure Island it makes a little more sense; when Lampwick says, essentially, “isn’t it fun to chop up a piano with an axe,” Pinocchio says, “yeah, being bad is fun!” He understands what’s he’s doing.

ADAM But those other boys are not saved! They all become donkeys and there’s nothing to save them. It’s awful! I don’t think they’d be willing to do that in a Disney movie now.

BROOM I think that sequence was morally effective for me as a child. First of all, the shot of him smoking a cigar and then becoming ill in three different ways – that shot was more effective than any anti-smoking ad. It gives a visceral idea of what it will be like to suck on a cigar: your eyes will spew water and you’ll turn green and things will spin around. But beyond that, the whole situation is recognizable. You get in a situation like that and it’s familiar from that scene. Any situation where you have to ask yourself, “who is this kinda creepy, noisy guy I’m hanging out with, telling me to be bad?”

BETH Did you truly ever think about Pinocchio in a situation like that?

BROOM I never actually made the connection. I’m just saying that, unlike the business about wanting to be an actor, the psychological environment of Pleasure Island was recognizable to me in my childhood. And it does teach a little bit of a moral lesson. But it’s also bizarre, because the morality of it is cloaked in this weird sort of magic. Supposedly they become donkeys because they’ve gone down the wrong moral path, but as a kid I was obsessed with the question of what force could possibly be physically creating the donkeyness. When Pinocchio gets over the rocks, will it have ceased to affect him, and why? How far away does he need to go? What kind of power is it, and how is it getting inside him?

ADAM When the creepy British man asks, “And what is your name?” and the donkey says “Alexander! I wanna go home to my mother!” and instead he just gets put in a pen to wait for his humanity to be altogether destroyed, and you never see him again – that’s awful.

BROOM Although in that scene, the moral explanation breaks down, because that donkey boy is no longer indulging hemself immorally. He wants to go home. He can still talk; he realizes the error of his ways. So what force is now going to continue the transformation? Maybe it’s meant to be like drug addiction: even when you realize you are now in the gutter and homeless, you’re still trapped with the error that brought you there.

ADAM Or like contracting AIDS. “There’s nothing you can do about it now – sucks for you.”

BROOM Well, I doubt they were thinking about AIDS.

ADAM I was thinking recently about Pinocchio because of the W.H. Auden poem “Pleasure Island,” which is about Fire Island – where I have a house this summer – as a place of wreckage and dissipation. It’s creepily moralistic, and the moralism gets to me in a crude way.

BROOM When the coachman says “I take ’em to Pleasure Island,” and Honest John says, “Pleasure Island? But the law!” – we’re to understand that there’s some legal document that actually mentions Pleasure Island, and says “don’t go there” or “don’t bring children there” or something like that?

BETH Who created Pleasure Island, and are they constantly restocking it?

BROOM Yes, you have to wonder how they’re gonna get it ready for the next round of kids. They need to buy a new grand piano… But isn’t it ironic that this movie portrays Coney Island and amusement parks in the light of being the path to iniquity… and then twenty years later Disney builds an amusement park… and now they have an actual resort called “Pleasure Island” at Disney World, for adults.

ADAM They do? Oh, how awful.

BROOM How could they resist? Here, right in the Disney canon, is this reference to amusement parks. But the amusement park is hell, home to all the devil’s lures.

ADAM I wonder if this movie is the original source for the popular image of the horrible abandoned amusement park.

BROOM There were many images in this that became established imagery – much more from than in Snow White, I thought. When you see the church bell, and birds fly out of the steeple, and the camera zooms through them down to the village below – it feels like that’s been in every animated movie since.

ADAM Or being locked in a swinging cage in a gypsy wagon. I think there’s a clear line from there to 101 Dalmatians, for example. I’m pretty sure there’s some kind of gypsy wagon in 101 Dalmatians.

BROOM In a lot of these movies, a child gets kidnapped by a lowlife and locked up.

ADAM The pathos of Geppetto probably did not occur to me as a child, but really made me feel bad now.

BETH I felt so sorry for Geppetto.

BROOM Psychologically, the relationship between the child and the parent wasn’t entirely absurd. Like when he comes back at the end and has donkey ears, and his father asks sadly, “What happened to you?” It’s like he’s been tainted by the world to some degree. That’s what happens when you send a child out into life.

ADAM And he still loves him. It’s heartbreaking.

BROOM I didn’t see it as a challenge to his love. In that scene, I felt like the donkey ears represented whatever about him has changed, whatever makes him no longer quite the child he was.

ADAM The smudge of experience.

BROOM Yes, it’s how experience has changed him. And it’s also made him stronger: now he’s ready to do something brave, because he’s been to Pleasure Island, and been through the ocean. The bottom of the ocean stuff, which I had mostly forgotten, is really beautiful.

ADAM What did you think of this visually? In many places it seemed to me a little more slapdash than Snow White. Like they spent less time on it.

BROOM I don’t know if that’s true. Whereas in Snow White we were made to say, “Oh, look at the water,” I felt like in Pinocchio the water actually looked better and they didn’t make as much of a deal about it.

BETH They seemed more confident. But I thought the cat wasn’t animated very well.

BROOM The white-on-black shading makes the cat stand out.

ADAM There was a distracting white boundary around black objects.

BROOM Geppetto’s hands and feet weren’t done perfectly. Geppetto’s animation in general was a little uncomfortable because he was a non-rotoscoped person, and obviously they were still unsure how to execute that.

ADAM What does that mean, “a non-rotoscoped person”?

BROOM Rotoscoping is where they film something and then they trace it to a degree – like the Blue Fairy, who was very clearly taken from live footage. She also looked prettier in a more contemporary way than anyone in Snow White.

BETH Yes, she looked like a 40s movie star.

BROOM The movie was a technical advancement in every way, even though they did allow in a few things that weren’t quite right.

BETH At the end, the trail of the raft in the water wasn’t done right.

BROOM I didn’t notice that. I did notice that a lot of the water in that climactic sequence was fantastic and yet you weren’t really supposed to be watching it. There was a shot where the whale was coming at the camera and the water was zooming away under it that looked as accurate as computer animation. They showed a lot of tight control like that. Some of the mechanisms at the beginning, like the whistler that Jiminy Cricket watches, would turn through space perfectly and never lose a convincing solidity.

ADAM I really enjoyed that clock sequence at the beginning. Not only was it very pretty and an effective way to establish time and place, but I thought it worked as a representation of Geppetto’s curdled bachelorhood. Intricate tinkering as a substitute for intimacy. It was upsetting.

BROOM Geppetto is not a strong figure. He’s a bit clueless. As a father he’s not able to be the source of any answers.

ADAM All he is is love; he’s not guidance. He’s just as naive as Pinocchio.

BROOM And he’s all that Pinocchio knows. As for what you were saying earlier about Jiminy Cricket’s personal character – Jiminy Cricket is Pinocchio’s conscience, not his mentor. He’s Pinocchio’s conscience, which means that he’s only as good as the best part of Pinocchio. When Pinocchio’s trapped in the cage, he says “well, I’m gonna try and pick the lock of the cage,” and then he can’t, and then he says, “well, I don’t know what we’re gonna do.” He can’t necessarily do anything to save him, he can only make the best effort Pinocchio could make.

ADAM Maybe he can’t take always take action, but I really do think of Jiminy Cricket as an operator, whereas Pinocchio’s just an idiot. Pinocchio’s weak-willed and easily led astray, whereas Jiminy Cricket is a slickster.

BROOM I think you’re confusing a slickster with a tramp. Just because Jiminy Cricket has no home and needs to sleep in their house for the night doesn’t mean that he’s an operator.

BETH Yeah, I don’t see him as an operator.

ADAM He just seems very willing to take the good things that come and not question where they came from. He’s primarily pleased to become Pinocchio’s conscience because he gets a snappy new waistcoat and top hat.

BROOM I think we’re supposed to see that as innocence. He’s sort of like the Charlie Chaplin character. He’s got a good heart; he just doesn’t have any money.

ADAM I’m not saying he’s bad, I’m saying he’s morally easy. You know, he talks this talk about taking the straight and narrow, but it’s not convincing until he too learns to not do the easy thing.

BROOM I don’t think that’s the plot of the movie.

BETH Jiminy Cricket wouldn’t have run away with Honest John.

ADAM That’s only because he’s savvier than Pinocchio.

BROOM As he says, he’s Pinocchio’s little internal voice, he’s his conscience. You can take the cricket out of the movie and think of him as Pinocchio’s actual inner voice.

ADAM But he’s not Pinocchio’s inner voice, he’s an external figure who gets arbitrarily assigned the role of Pinocchio’s inner voice.

BROOM It’s another conceit that kids don’t understand. “A cricket is his conscience?” As a kid, you just barely know what a conscience is. For a kid it’s hard to know what to make of Jiminy Cricket being his conscience and also singing “Let your conscience be your guide.” It’s a strange device.

ADAM Oh, I felt comfortable with that.

BROOM Well, it seems like even now we’re disagreeing about what that device means.

ADAM As a kid, I had a series of books, “The ValueTales,” which were about prominent figures from history, and in each of them, their conscience or inner voice is represented by a cartoon animated animal. Like “The Story of Harriet Tubman,” in which her special friend is a talking mouse or something. [Ed: Actually a bright star named Twinkle]

BROOM Did you read The Golden Compass? No, neither of you did.

ADAM But I know what you’re talking about.

BROOM They each have a little thing that talks to them. But it’s just a part of them. I don’t think Pinocchio makes sense if you think of Pinocchio and Jiminy Cricket as individuals learning from each other.

ADAM I don’t think the movie hangs together as a plot, but I do think it’s got a lot of very suggestive and interesting elements.

BROOM I think it does hang together, as an allegory about boyhood and encountering the world. And it hangs together for children in a different way, as a dreamlike succession of compellingly weird things.

ADAM Yes, it completely hangs together imagistically, and as an entertainment, but I maintain that as a plot, it’s creaky.

BETH Do you want me to be a tiebreaker? I side with BROOM on this. It may be thin, but I think it does hang together.

BROOM I thought it was thin in a lovely, legitimate way. I actually felt that it was really successful as some kind of art, whatever it is they were trying to accomplish with these feature-length animated movies. I feel like whatever they accomplished here is a pretty good thing to have set their sights on. New line of questioning: was the coachman Irish?

ADAM No, he was English.

BROOM And was Lampwick Irish?

ADAM Lampwick was from Boston or New York. He had an American east coast urban accent. It was interesting that the villain should have a British accent in a movie made in 1940.

BROOM Was Honest John a Jew or an Englishman?

ADAM Neither. He wasn’t a Jew. He wasn’t coded as a Jew.

BETH I didn’t think he was a Jew. When you first saw him, did you say “Jew?”

BROOM I remembered thinking, when I saw it in college, that he and Gideon were these sort of Shylock-y characters – but actually they’re those two guys from Huckleberry Finn. [ed. note – I am confusing Shylock and Fagin]

ADAM The Duke and the Dauphin. Stromboli is a gypsy.

BROOM He’s an Italian gypsy. He mutters in Italian under his breath. In fact, he’s clearly an Italian. He’s a gypsy only in that he moves around.

ADAM They refer to him as a gypsy, and he’s in a gypsy wagon. He’s a swarthy gypsy.

BROOM Yeah, all right, fine.

ADAM Well, I thought this was thoroughly good, and it works better than any of the fairy tale stories.

BROOM Snow White was a technical showcase. In this, all the technical advances were used in service of the story. I thought the underwater effect, when he’s in the distance and seen through wavy glass of some kind, was really well done. The rain also looked really good. And there were a lot of fancy sweeping shots where the camera moves over a complicated background, zooming in on something as it pans.

ADAM Did you like the scene where Jiminy Cricket was hopping toward the house, and you could see his point of view hopping up and down?

BETH No, I didn’t. I thought it was like when you walk with a camera and you see that violent bouncing – I don’t think he would actually see so dramatic a bounce.

ADAM I agree.

BROOM Those creatures that close the doors at Pleasure Island…

ADAM The “blokes”?

BROOM The black things. Demons…

ADAM It’s interesting to me that everything I really enjoyed about both this and Snow White were the ghoulish and disturbing elements. The only good thing about Snow White was the witch. There were many more witchy things here, and they’re the best parts.

BROOM I asked Beth this the other day: why is it that pretty much every children’s movie has something scary in it, and most grown-up movies don’t?

ADAM I don’t know. Maybe because kids don’t have a sufficiently subtle or complex ability to react to events. In a movie, fear is an outsize stimulus, relative to anything else.

BROOM Maybe that’s why you like those parts.

ADAM Kids don’t get the jokes. Jiminy Cricket made a lot of grown-up jokes that would have totally gone over my head as a child.

BROOM Do we have anything to say about the butt humor? It’s going to be a running theme in this film festival.

BETH I’m surprised at how many butt jokes and shots of butts there were. I think I counted six. That’s a lot. It started in Snow White too.

BROOM Really? I didn’t remember any.

BETH When Grumpy plays the organ…

BROOM Oh, right, with alternating buttocks.

ADAM There was another example in Snow White too, I believe.

BETH I don’t remember what that might have been. But it really happened a lot in Pinocchio.

BROOM I think the Disney people – and it’s in Warner Brothers cartoons too – I think at that time it was just deemed an admissible sort of low humor.

BETH Harmless.

ADAM Acceptable under the Hays office.

BROOM Right. It’s a little bit risque – there’s sort of a sexual side to it, far off in the distance, and there’s sort of a scatological side to it – but mostly it’s just about the fact that you’re not supposed to show your butt, or talk about butts. And yet they do! So kids will laugh at that.

ADAM The scene where the unwitting sleeper thinks there’s a monster in the house and is frightened of what turns out to be our innocent hero was almost identical to the same scene in Snow White.

BROOM Paced better here.

ADAM Yes, because it wasn’t ten minutes long. I liked that Figaro was kind of a jerk – totally self-absorbed and obnoxious. That appealed to me.

BROOM Any comments about the songs?

ADAM They were mostly lame.

BROOM I was surprised that “When You Wish Upon a Star” was so little used. It’s just barely sung at the beginning, and then just barely sung at the end, by the chorus. It doesn’t figure very much in the incidental score, either.

ADAM But, like, “Give a Little Whistle?” That’s not a good song.

BROOM I think it’s a pretty catchy song. Snow White was like a series of discrete musical numbers. Here there were several semi-integrated songs, but there were only a couple full-fledged numbers, and even those were incorporated more cleverly. “I’ve Got No Strings” he does on stage as his performance. “Little Wooden Head” is only half of a song. And like I said, “When You Wish Upon a Star” is just bookends, it doesn’t actually show up in the movie.

BETH There’s also the song that the bad guys sing when they’re leading him astray.

BROOM “Hi-Diddle-Dee-Dee.”

ADAM …”(An Actor’s Life For Me).”

BETH Which was also the theme played at the amusement park when they first enter.

BROOM It’s the theme of temptation.

ADAM Temptation represented here, curiously, as pool and cigars and breaking things.

BROOM Hooky.

BETH It’s just a boy’s life circa 1940.

BROOM Yes, but they made it actually seem like a dirty dirty world.

ADAM And also legitimately appealing. I wanted to chuck a rock through a stained glass window.

BROOM But his first temptation in life is to be an actor. That’s really from a different era. Nowadays that might be a dangerous temptation after high school – or after college! But back then, no stage of your education was quite a sure thing, and people would still run off to join the circus at the age of 8.

BETH Well, it was the depression.

BROOM But that doesn’t read now. When you see it as a kid, you just think, “Okay, now he seems to be in a show!” All right, that’s all I wanted to say.

First screening in an ongoing festival in our apartment reviewing the 40-some canonical Disney animated features. Roundtable discussion immediately following the screening, liberally transcribed.

ADAM It has certain iconic images that are competitive with anything else Disney produced, but as a story it’s much too slow. It’s archaically paced and boring.

BETH I had thought that the last scene, where she was in the glass case, took fifteen minutes of screen time. My memory of it was that it was much longer than it actually was, and the rest of the movie was much shorter – I guess because I was so upset by it.

ADAM Upset? Or entranced by her on her bier, as a child?

BROOM It’s a fine line between upset and entranced, as a child.

BETH I think mostly upset.

ADAM I don’t think as a kid I knew enough to root for the queen, but I was definitely rooting for the queen this time. She was much more charismatic.

BROOM She’s much more interesting. Ninety percent of the movie is quasi-comic business with the dwarfs that doesn’t completely work.

BETH When the dwarfs were chasing the queen up the mountain, I thought it was very strange that these bumbling, comical dwarfs were intimidating this scary creature.

BROOM I think in the earlier scenes they overshot how much the dwarfs came off as clownish. I don’t think the characters were originally supposed to be that ridiculous, but somehow those scenes got bloated.

ADAM Those scenes just felt like an outgrowth of “Steamboat Willie” – like when he plays on the teats of that pig.

BROOM It’s a “short feature” kind of thinking. There’s a series of gags on the same theme, which is how you construct a short. Here there were a lot of gags about washing.

BETH Well, they had never done a full-length feature.

BROOM But full-length plays and movies had been done before. They chose to construct it in a weird episodic way. Whereas the whole plotted first sequence, with the huntsman, works well.

ADAM It was like eight visual setpieces. There’s the one where they’re washing up, and there’s the one where she’s washing up… I wonder whether that was because they were thinking of them in terms of animation setpieces, rather than as one flowing story. Pinocchio‘s not like that.

BROOM Well, Pinocchio is also episodic, but the story itself is episodic. First he wants to be an actor, and then there’s Pleasure Island, and then he goes searching for Geppetto and goes into the whale…

ADAM I feel like Pinocchio is just much more exciting, though maybe I don’t remember it very clearly. Whereas I fell asleep in the middle of this.

BROOM Did you actually fall asleep, or just drift?

ADAM I wanted to fall asleep but I didn’t allow myself to.

BROOM I looked over when I thought you might be asleep and you didn’t seem to be.

ADAM I opened my eyes when I perceived you turning to look.

BROOM I thought this was very pretty. I liked the backgrounds. I just liked the lush feeling. It seemed like they wanted to make it feel like a children’s storybook had come to life and you could enter into it – I liked that you could get that feeling from it. I even liked the way it feels in their house, where the most boring parts of the movie take place. Even when it was boring, I still liked the way their chairs and doors looked.

ADAM I was really annoyed by her voice. It got upsetting. And her nanny-ish coquette thing was really annoying. “Now, now, now!” “Wash your hands!”

BETH Yes. They were obviously doing just fine before she came into their lives.

ADAM I also don’t like her outfit. I think of the signature Disney princess outfit as being Cinderella’s ballgown, and maybe that’s ruined Snow White’s outfit for me. But the yellow and blue and red thing was much too primary-color for my taste.

BROOM I think it was their idea of what lavish royal garb looked like, except toned down and not actually made of ermine or whatever.

ADAM The queen’s outfit totally holds up.

BROOM What is that skintight wetsuit she wears?

ADAM I’ve seen it on nuns.

BETH Is it just so that you admire how beautiful her face is?

ADAM I assume it’s for concealing her hair out of modesty.

BROOM I think it’s to give her a cold and sterile kind of beauty instead of a sensual one. If she had flowing hair she would be more inviting. It’s still a pretty bold costuming choice. But she does look good.

ADAM She looks great. And as the hag she looks even better.

BROOM I liked when she asked the skeleton if it was thirsty and then kicked the jug at it.

ADAM And then a spider crawled out.

BROOM Just to show you the water was long gone.

ADAM It’s funny, there’s no actual bit of dialogue or interaction that’s particularly memorable. But all the songs are pretty memorable.

BROOM I dare you to sing “The Silly Song.”

ADAM I can sing “Whistle While You Work.” And everyone can sing “Heigh-Ho.” And as Michael Eisner points out on the DVD, most people can sing “Some Day My Prince Will Come,” including the greatest voice of our time, Barbra Streisand.

BROOM But can you sing “One Song,” the prince’s theme? Can you sing “Bluddle-Uddle-Um-Dum,” the washing song?

ADAM I would call this a promising first effort for Disney. But it’s no Ratatouille.

BROOM But when I think about what movies were like in 1937, and then I compare this…

ADAM Well, Gone With the Wind and The Wizard of Oz are from 1939.

BETH There were great strides made between 1936 and 1939.

BROOM But let’s even compare this to The Wizard of Oz, which is also a visual spectacular that holds up well. It’s still stagier and blockier than all the crazy kinds of motion you see in Snow White. In Snow White the camera spins all around. The scene where the witch transforms – what else looked like that back then?

ADAM Well, I don’t know. That’s become a visual cliche.

BROOM And when she’s in the scary forest, there are all those zooms. There’s a dynamic quality to what’s on screen that must have been incredible at the time.

BETH That’s because they were completely unlimited.

BROOM I imagine if I had been an audience member then I would have been just blown away by how much of an entertainment it was. And the fact that most of it was vaudeville crap of one kind or another wouldn’t have been noteworthy, because that’s what everything was.

BETH I guess, but some scripts at that time were certainly better than that.

ADAM If my choices were to see this or The Little Tramp, I’d rather see this.

BROOM I’ll bet audiences going to this expected a spectacular, like a kickline show, rather than a truly plotted movie.

BETH How would they know what to expect, since it was the first ever of the form?

ADAM This movie was entitled Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, correct? So they knew there were dwarfs coming. Nobody actually thinks the beds belong to children and then is surprised when dwarfs show up, correct?

BROOM That’s right.

ADAM Just asking.

BROOM I think audiences knew they were going to see a spectacular feature-length animated movie, and that was probably a lot like going to see an Imax movie of Mount Everest. You know it’s not going to have a plot – or if it does have a plot, it’s going to be something like: “Oh no, how do we get to the mountain?” And then you see the incredible mountain! In Snow White they say “Oh no, how are we going to wash our faces?” And then animated water splashes all over the screen!

ADAM Maybe we should ask our grandparents what it was like to see Snow White when it was new.

BROOM Their expectations probably weren’t quite so specific as that, but I do think people were probably very ready for the movie to be whatever justified looking at the visuals.

ADAM 1937 was not that long ago.

BROOM I think my grandmother remembers seeing it.

BETH My dad’s mom was eleven. Or maybe thirteen.

ADAM When was Dumbo?

BROOM 1941.

ADAM Because Dumbo is a riot.

BETH I’ve always thought it was a real masterpiece.

BROOM Dumbo holds up a lot better, although in parts of it, the visuals cut corners more than in Snow White.

ADAM You’re right, even the pink elephants scene in Dumbo is a little bit schlocky in certain ways.

BROOM I think that’s one of the better parts. There are just some other parts of Dumbo that look a little chintzy. But you’re right, Beth, the aesthetic changed so much over those few years. Dumbo feels very like the 40s, like the war years.

ADAM It feels jazzy.

BROOM But Snow White was designed to feel like something from the old Brothers Grimm tales. There are hints of the actual period a few times, like that musical interlude when she’s being brought to the cottage. She sings “With a Smile and a Song,” and then you hear a sort of 30’s dance version of it. What’s another movie from 1937?

ADAM Let me look it up. I’ll tell you what won the Oscar in 1937.

BROOM I’ll tell you that Snow White won the special “seven little baby Oscars” Oscar. And I’m sure you can see footage of Shirley Temple giving it to Mr. Disney on this DVD.

ADAM The 1937 Best Picture was The Life of Emile Zola. In 1936 the winner was The Great Ziegfeld and in 1938 the winner was You Can’t Take It With You. Here is the trailer for The Life of Emile Zola.

BROOM I feel like that shows a world in which Snow White would have been a huge splash of life. When we were watching it now and saying things like “that water looks pretty good,” do think that we were trying to find something worth noticing about a movie that we were bored of, or that we were watching in exactly the same spirit that the original audience would have watched it?

ADAM Isn’t that the same spirit in which you watch Beowulf 3D?

BROOM Yes, I think that’s exactly what it was then. Even though now it may feel now like going digging for something, to admire those sorts of details.

BETH But the water in that shot is what they wanted you to look at. Just like the curtains falling realistically when the queen swished them. The quality – the lushness, as you said – is what Disney wanted you to notice.

BROOM The movie offers a lot of that. And I can still enjoy that. What do you think about the fact that kids today are still given Snow White to watch? I personally don’t remember watching it that many times when I was a kid. It’s kind of boring.

ADAM I think I only saw it once. Whereas there are some that I watched a lot.

BETH I think girls probably like it more, because they want to be Snow White.

BROOM But the parts that bored us wouldn’t be particularly appealing to girls or boys.

ADAM How much of the fact that all Disney movies are about princesses stems from the fact that they happened to pick this story for their first movie and it happened to be very successful? What if their first movie had been about Mickey Mouse?

BETH Well, they also made a lot of mouse movies.

BROOM I feel like an undercurrent to his first few movies – especially Fantasia – is that Disney wants to show that what he’s doing is artistic, so he picks something with class, something with an old-world, European kind of legitimacy, and puts all the trimmings on it. I think the book that opens at the beginning of Snow White is a completely sincere signal indicating that “You are now going to see something classic and dignified.”

ADAM What if he had picked Red Riding Hood instead? How would our culture be different?

BROOM I think they intentionally picked something with a royal setting.

ADAM Not that many of the 40-some Disney movies are actually about princesses. It’s only sort of laterally, in the last fifteen years, that Disney has decided that “princesses” is a killer concept. Beth, when you were a girl, do you remember thinking of the Disney princesses that way?

BETH I was a princess for Halloween when I was nine.

ADAM But were you obsessed with princesses?

BETH No. I know people are really obsessed with princesses now. We had My Little Pony.

BROOM I don’t think that’s necessarily just because of Disney. That’s been around for longer. In “You’re A Good Man Charlie Brown” there’s a whole routine where Lucy talks about her fantasy.

ADAM But Lucy wants to be the queen. She’s going to have a queendom. I don’t think that’s about frilly femininity. That’s something very different; that’s just about imperiousness.

BROOM I don’t think this movie was about frilly femininity, either.

ADAM No, but now all the Disney princess stuff is about, you know, “When You Wish Upon A Star…”

BROOM A cricket sings that to a marionette.

ADAM Yes, but now it’s about princessdom. My little cousin is obsessed with princesses. She goes to Disneyland solely to be photographed with all the princesses.

BROOM I don’t think that Disney realized at some point that they should make more movies about princesses. That’s a marketing thing from the last twenty years.

ADAM Yes. It was a conscious branding decision about 15 years ago that they were going to incorporate all their princess movies into one line of Disney royal princesses, and co-market them.

BROOM I don’t think that really happened until after The Little Mermaid, which was a very intentional, calculated effort to recapture something that would seem like “classic” Disney.