Been going through Disney's back catalog of animations. Guess I should at least tweet about it.

The 1930's animation style never hit it with me. It's why I skipped Cuphead. Every woman looks like a porcelain doll version of Shirley Temple and it's weird.

Snow White is probably the least worst offender.

Also I never realized the Queen was so obsessed with Snow White that she gave up her beauty forever just to kill her. Doesn't make much sense if the goal is to be the fairest in the land. Guess that's what jealousy does.

Pinocchio was almost completely new to me. I probably only saw it two or three times since Monstro was terrifying.

Fantasia. My little kid mind was so bored. And then completely terrified of Night on Bald Mountain, which for some reason Disney Channel liked to show as an independent short. Like, a lot.

This is me. Terrified.

Adult me is much more happy with the music. But it seems pretty clear to me it was a commercial misfire because audiences who go to orchestral concerts are not usually the same audiences who watch animations.

But they didn't know that then. Animation was a new medium.

Ah, the Art of Skiing. Probably one of my favorite Goofy cartoons. The origin of "Aaaaahoo-hoo-hooooieeeeee!"?

The Reluctant Dragon is a neat part-documentary/part cartoon adventure of the cartoon making process.

But daaang either I'm missing some context or there's a lot of "casual misogyny" in this one, and I swear at one point the actress it was directed to was struggling to maintain composure and not grimace.

Now that I have a two year old, oh my God does Dumbo hit completely differently. The boring part in the middle is now a major sob fest.

The "Pink Elephants on Parade" song is truly filled with Haunted Mansion style creepiness. So bizarre.

The vocal harmonies really give it that Haunted Mansion feel. Same people singing both songs, I'd wager.

"When I See an Elephant Fly" is the third rail of Disney songs if you don't count Song of the South.

Performed by Cliff Edwards of "Singin in the Rain" fame, a white man, and also by the Hall Johnson Choir, an all-black ensemble, formerly the Harlem Jubilee Singers.

Hall Johnson is credited with making the African-American spiritual into an art form according to Wikipedia.

http://Allmusic.com  suggests Johnson never would have taken part in an overtly-racist depiction of African Americans.

Lending credence to that idea is Timothy the Mouse's speech to the crows after the song about how Dumbo is treated like an outcast, a situation perhaps all too familiar to many blacks in the Jim Crow era, and to which the crows are depicted as completely sympathetic toward.

Of course what would be considered anti-racist in the 40's wouldn't be in today's context, since many things are different and human attempts at enlightenment are always deficient in some way because humans are fallible and imperfect. So of course there's room for criticism.

But that's the extent of my knowledge on the subject, so I will stop talking and leave it others to chime in and add something if they want.

"How to Swim" is another great Goofy Short. Also correctly predicted the sound of skipping rocks on ice even though the cartoon shows an ocean.

See:

Watching Bambi (1942). Notable scene: Young bucks enter the meadow with great energy, flocking across the plain. The music is wild, signalling danger in a way you wouldn't hear in cinema today. Bambi almost gets trampled. Male energy is exactly that way if not disciplined. 1/2

And then the King appears, a great Stag, and they come to attention as one, deferring instantly to the authority figure. They are disciplined after all. 2/2

Pretty sure I've only seen Bambi one time, so I hardly remember it. I thought we saw the hunter who shot Bambi's mother, but the antagonist isn't shown.

And it's still pretty heartbreaking but nowhere near as scary as it felt seeing it as a kid.

Will Wright is a standout in his performance as the owl. Perfectly cast.

Also probably a bit typecast. ;)

This film, The Fox and the Hound, and The Lion King are the only Disney animated features I can think of where the characters grow up on screen.

Bambi's plot also seems to only be something like "Bambi learns the joys and sorrows of life". I'm not sure there is an antagonist.

Ah, there's the antagonist. Man.

I swear seeing a silhouette of hunters in Bambi when I was a kid.

But I guess it didn't happen. Man, the antagonist, is never depicted on screen. He is disembodied and faceless. Anyway, on to the next!

Next up is Saludos Amigos (1943). This is a unique animated "documentary" about South America.

Might've been inspired by the Goofy "how-to" shorts, but it was commissioned by the US state department as part of a goodwill tour to counter Nazi influence down South.

Watching The Three Caballeros (1944) today. It's another of the South American good will films by Disney.

I've seen both this and Saludos Amigos before, but they aren't my favorites because they aren't a single narrative.

As a kid I would mix up the title of this film with The Three Amigos all the time.

It's probably hard to underestimate the effect these two films had on US citizens' understanding of South America over the next 50+ years, before the Internet made it possible to see for themselves.

Oh hey, The Three Caballeros looks like the first feature film to incorporate animation together with live action. Not the first piece of film to do so, just the first feature-length one.

I completely forgot about Victory Through Air Power (1943), an animated adaptation of a non fiction military strategy book. It's not on Disney Plus, but it's here. It's a war film so probably not too useful today.

But if you want, you can watch it here:

Fascinating moment: Nobody cared at the time that Orville and Wilbur Wright flew.

After The Three Caballeros comes Make Mine Music (1946). This baby is a package of shorts and was only made because the rest of the studio got drafted into WW2.

It's not available on Disney Plus, but it was portioned out into individual shorts later for Disney Channel iirc.

You should be able to piece most of it back together from various Youtube videos and playlists, and Wikipedia's listing of shorts here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Make_Mine_Music

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLdqEcpT6uMy0Q_Ch1O2rRWId00IN3NRYQ https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL6fSFoLvHNd89RXVoUFeXnCZVD4l8xWyZ

The first segment is The Martins and the Coys. Here's a high rez version:



The song is a favorite Boy Scout song my uncle Bob would sing when I was young.

Uncle Bob was an Eagle Scout. In another lifetime, he worked for DuPont on the Manhattan Project in Richland, WA, and handled uranium by hand (because they didn't know it would kill you). He lived to a very ripe old age. Only died a few years ago. Then he became an optometrist.

I mean he became an optometrist after being a Dupont chemist, not after he died. lol.

Sometimes my asides get out of hand.

I think I prefer the Fantasia version of "Blue Bayou" which was scored with Clair de Lune. It was cut from Fantasia and reused here with the song Blue Bayou instead.

Here comes Peter and the Wolf. This one is under some pretty stringent copyright protection, so you can sync up the picture from this video...



...with the audio track from this video.



You'll have to babysit it tho.

Fun Fact, I'm pretty sure the Wolf was my first nightmare fuel as a little tyke.

Next up on the Disney Through the Years watchalong is supposed to be Song of the South (1946). For what are perhaps obvious reasons I can't watch it. But you can read about it on its Wikipedia page here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Song_of_the_South

I do remember the song Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah, it was kind of my 4 year old self's theme song for a time. Never saw the animated part of the movie it came from. But I do remember the Brer Rabbit cartoons.

Continuing my journey through Disney cartoon history, I saw "Fun and Fancy Free" (1947) this weekend.

I do not remember that cartoon bear very well, but I definitely remember the retelling of Jack and the Beanstalk with Mickey, Goofy, and Donald.

Except the version I watched was a standalone version, and it didn't have the ventriloquist and his dummies chiming in every few minutes.

Ah, a quick Wikipedia dive reveals that I probably saw the version voiced by Sterling Holloway (he voiced Pooh). It was essentially the same, except without the dummies' sarcasm and cutaways to live action segments.

Also in the theatrical that I've never seen before is Willie the Giant lifting the roof of Edgar Bergen the ventriloquist's house to peek inside.

I thought that gag was original to Mickey's Christmas Carol, but nope. It was done here first.

After that came Melody Time (1948). Another package film from the war, but also kind of a follow-on to Fantasia, except this time using popular music instead of opera and orchestral.