Disney animated features: the golden age (1937-42)

remember watching Bedknobs and Broomsticks at the pictures as a kid and being bored rigid by all the live action stuff, and there was a lot of that compared to the animated sequences

― can't believe people like things (Noodle Vague), Monday, January 20, 2014 10:31 AM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I watched this movie many times almost entirely for the knights-come-to-life scene at the end. I don't know why I didn't just fast-forward it.

ABC used to have the "Disney Sunday Night Movie" when I was young -- I think it was the last time I remember there being a big-deal, family television "event" that everyone would gather for (other than the super bowl or something). Some of those movies really are probably terrible, but I enjoyed them all -- Parent Trap, Pete's Dragon, etc.

Only one I ever took to at all was Escape To Witch Mountain, but maybe some of the others are kinda cool? Still think the blog/project would be interesting, just as a way of more fully reconstituting the whitebread culture of postwar prosperity. Cherry-picking the highs like Mary Poppins misses the fact that they were putting out six pictures a year at one point, all of which presumably had posters, marketing, spinoff crap - had to be a big part of the pop-cultural landscape, even though they were essentially disposable and forgettable. Certainly made up a big part of the yard-sale landscape for ages to come. I got really nostalgic at a video store a couple months ago, seeing a well-yellowed old copy of this:

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/61tTKxz6GML._SL500_.jpg

... a movie I've never watched. But it's kind of what the world looked like in the Eighties, to a kid.

Oh, come now! How bad could they be? "The Monkey's Uncle"? "Lt. Robin Crusoe, U.S.N."? "Follow Me, Boys!"? "Monkeys, Go Home!" "The Gnome-Mobile"? Family-friendly gold, I'm sure!

I used to see these with some regularity as a kid in the 70s, because we were stationed overseas and AAFES would book them into the base theaters for Saturday matinees. My sister and I would get dropped off at the movies, mom and dad would go shopping or run other errands. Then we'd see the contemporaneous ones when those were booked into theaters - Gus, Candleshoe, No Deposit No Return . . . for two pre-teen kids living thousands of miles from home in a country where they didn't speak the language, there was nothing more American than a Disney movie.

PS You left out Darby O'Gill & the Little People, which had some good old fashioned Disney Nightmare Fuel with two appearances by a terrifying banshee.

Pinnochio.

we probably shouldn't turn this thread into a "shitty live-action disney movies of the 50s and beyond thread" though, since that's pretty clearly not what it's supposed to be

Ha, yeah, my bad really - have had them on my mind lately. Could be a great thread/poll/something if someone wants to do it. There are literally dozens of the damn things.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/b/b8/Follow_Me_Boys.jpg

xp wow just glancing over that list, p sure I've seen at least a couple dozen of them

I love Dumbo so much, but due to my son's obsession with Snow White have seen that 10x more, and it really never got old for me. It's pretty much perfect imo, and this is totally otm:

And of course everything is just dreamy to look at; even without the deep-focus shots, there's a richness to the labor-draining full animation that's just totally gone in the postwar features. The fabric, the light-sourcing, the water, everything.

My younger brother used to wake me or my parents up literally every morning (around 6am or so) so we could take him downstairs to put on Dumbo. I think he watched it every morning for something like three months.

He was maybe three or four years old at the time.

haven't seen any of these in way too long, but even as a kid pinocchio stood out -- just seemed so epic and long and crazy and wonderful, renting it always felt like a major event. ppl always remember the scary parts most, but i remember the entire first part in the toyshop being one of the loveliest and most comforting things ever. jiminy cricket is still far and away the most genuinely charming and least annoying 'disney sidekick' character.

that said i still might vote for snow white just for personal reasons -- it's the first film i clearly remember seeing in a theater, on its release in '87 or so. vividly remember being terrified by the scene where the huntsman almost kills snow white. ppl always complain about how disney watered down the fairy tales but not this one, imo -- if anything it's scarier and more traumatic for a kid to watch than the story is to read.

My father was obsessed - OBSESSED - with Dumbo, so tempted to vote for that just because of childhood repetitions of Pink Elephants (and wow, re-watching that sequence as an adult with... drugs experience, that was interesting (double for the Sun-Ra cover)) but the rest of the film doesn't really stand up and all kinds of questionable minstrelry stuff.

But Fantasia? Fantasia has never not blown my mind.

fantasia is an amazing accomplishment but also kind of tiresome to sit through. there are maybe two or three segments that i'd willingly watch again.

The thing about Fantasia is, I always forget the boring bits as soon as it's over. I just love the abstraction sequences so much; the influence of modern art on animation is just dazzling there. And Night On Bald Mountain giving way to beautiful almost Caspar David Frederich imagery as Ave Maria comes in. So amazing.

Fantasia is not only a stone bore, it's almost an affront to the music: a very forties idea about mass audiences requiring dancing hippos to sit through classical music.

The Queen's transformation in SW is legit scary, and so is her blood-curdling scream when she falls off the cliff (I like the detail of the dwarves rushing to the edge to watch her die).

Can't wait for the seventies/eighties Disney film poll (The Great Mouse Detective, The Fox and the Hound). It's funny how those films were written out of the canon fairly quickly; even at the time they looked like mutts. As a frequent Walt Disney World guest, you know when a film was a big deal by the number of plush toys for sale; these films had none.

oh idk, I think the better sequences from Fantasia are as good as any animation ever. I have no purist sentiment whatsoever about the use of the music either. It was also my first theater experience, so it's sentimental.

my high school humanities teacher took us all to the Fantasia revival when we got to romanticism (this was fall '90). I remember his excitement when showing us the Friedrich painting.

speaking of the Queen:

ime passes and a prince traveling through the land sees Snow White. He strides to her coffin, and enchanted by her beauty, instantly falls in love with her. The dwarfs succumb to his entreaties to let him have the coffin, and as his servants carry the coffin away, they stumble on some roots. The tremor caused by the stumbling causes the piece of poisoned apple to dislodge from Snow White's throat, awakening her. The Prince then declares his love for her, and soon a wedding is planned. The couple invite every queen and king to come to the wedding party, including Snow White's stepmother. Meanwhile, the Queen, still believing that Snow White is dead, again asks her magical mirror who is the fairest in the land. The mirror says: "You, my queen, are fair so true. But the young Queen is a thousand times fairer than you."[1][4]

Appalled, in disbelief and with her heart full of fear and doubts, the Queen is, at first, hesitant to accept the invitation, but she eventually decides to go. Not knowing that this new queen was indeed her stepdaughter, she arrives at the wedding, and her heart fills with the deepest of dread when she realizes the truth. As a punishment for her attempted murders, a pair of glowing-hot iron shoes are brought forth with tongs and placed before the Queen. She is forced to step into the burning shoes and to dance until she drops dead.[1][4]

the arbitrariness of childhood tastes leave me with quite a lot of affection for the lean period, The Great Mouse Detective and The Rescuers Down Under (though that was into the '90s, I see) especially. Oliver & Company, though, there's a film I always saw for the shite it was.

Both Rescuers movies got a great deal of play at our house. I had never seen Fox & the Hound until I bought a thrift-store VHS for my son. I actually really love that one; very sweet and very sad.

i actually kinda like 70s/80s era disney just fine, most of the '90s and onward disney movies just seem so loud and inane and unpleasant, they've got a very different vibe from any of the earlier stuff.

well, they've got Michael Bolton songs, so there's that

as a kid, most "kids entertainment" in general made me sad or (for lack of a better term, but it kind of nails it) "creeped out". warner bros cartoons were the exception. my favorite show when i was super young was probably johnny carson.

I legitimately love the 1989-99 Disney period, but I can see how they might be considered overblown. Not really got on board with any since Mulan/Tarzan...have they stopped making those hideous, hideous sequels yet!?

jiminy cricket is still far and away the most genuinely charming and least annoying 'disney sidekick' character.

http://31.media.tumblr.com/bb0e06dcd335b77db47a8893808f9ab2/tumblr_misbv0ATDK1r1oy9uo1_500.gif

voted for dumbo, made me feel most sad/frightened overall.

i remember when fantasia was set to be released in the theaters i was all dorked out at 9 years old or w/e like "finally i'll get to see this 'thinking man's' disney masterpiece, for ME, the thinking man", and i ended up being bored as hell.

looks like it was 1990 so i was a bit younger, but definitely aware of the erhm.. 'sgt pepper' rep it had at the time and hoped it would reveal to me the secrets of the universe.

lol that's p funny brimstead

Pinocchio also had a lot of very thinly veiled Christian stuff in it. I don't know if that made it less scary for me, since I was raised Jewish, or moreso.

I mean I wasn't aware that it was Christian, but it was moral mythology I wasn't as familiar with -- the particular vision of sin and hell. But also something really perverse about the Pleasure Island sequences, like they came from the mind of someone who had been through something pretty horrible as a child.

I alo found that to be the case with The Hunchback of Notre Dame, which to me as a 7/8 year old was a pretty sinister film.

also*

I get that the minstrelsy of the crows in Dumbo is unpleasant but its weird, you show it to kids today I dont think the crows even code as black. It certainly didnt register w me as a kid in the 80s and when I watched it with my daughter recently she didnt get the implication either.

I dunno how these were in the theater, maybe Disney did some kind of anniversary rerelease or the movie theater just had a summer holiday for kids program idk, but Mum would take me to the city on school holidays and we would see a Disney cartoon in the theater -- I saw Dumbo, Pinocchio, Cinderella and Snow White all on big screen.
Pinocchio scared the crap out of my little sister, she literally hid under her seat during the whale stuff and cried for a lot of the movie. But she was scared of everything - Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Return to Oz, the list is endless.

My personal favorite of all of these is Dumbo. Baby Mine still makes me cry and that scene is so tender, I don't care if it's corny I love it. Pink Elephants, You Can Fly, etc etc. And I learned about believing in myself (or trying to) at a really young age and that kinda stuck with me. Whenever I was scared I would hear a little Timothy voice talking to me <3

As a kid my main impression of the crows in dumbo was that they seemed like would be way more fun to hang out with than any of the other groups in the film

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DCwWU9WKFDE

all the classics were re-released periodically in the 80s and 90s. I think Bambi was the first film I saw in the cinema

Who Framed Roger Rabbit was fucked up

wasn't jessica rabbit in cool world

thread starter is undoubtedly furious at all these derails

Cool World have a different pneumatic cartoon babe

WFRR was one of my absolute favourite films as a kid but I literally couldn't be in the same room when the villain reveal happened

I mean I wasn't aware that it was Christian, but it was moral mythology I wasn't as familiar with -- the particular vision of sin and hell. But also something really perverse about the Pleasure Island sequences, like they came from the mind of someone who had been through something pretty horrible as a child.

i don't remember the carlo collodi book too clearly, but what i do remember is way more bizarre and messed-up than anything in the film -- at one point, i think pinocchio ends up getting crucified by the fox and the cat.

I get that the minstrelsy of the crows in Dumbo is unpleasant but its weird, you show it to kids today I dont think the crows even code as black. It certainly didnt register w me as a kid in the 80s and when I watched it with my daughter recently she didnt get the implication either.

never got this as a kid either. the stereotypes seem so archaic and remote today (which isn't to excuse them).

I also didn't get the Dumbo crows at all. In fact it wasn't until I learned the term "Jim Crow" that I went "Oh, wait a sec..."

And the actual "Jim Crow" character was voiced by a white guy, while the other four crows were voiced by the well-known Hall Johnson Choir, all African-Americans.

Veg: yeah, they got reissued pretty regularly before home video - always a fresh crop of kids to fill the seats! Wish they still did that - even some of the lesser entries seem like they'd be awesome on the big screen.

Haha derails are fine, but at this point I'm pretty sure there will be a series of sequel polls, so save up those Rescuers and Great Mouse Detective anecdotes! I'm just barely holding mine in. Especially since we just tried to watch Cool World...oh well.

Pinocchio book is great IIRC, I had an old copy with great illustrations. I think like the third thing that happens is him killing the cricket out of straight malice.

http://images5.fanpop.com/image/photos/29200000/Empty-Backdrop-from-Dumbo-disney-crossover-29217564-864-576.jpg

<3

when they are putting up the circus tent in the rain I always think of Nick Cave's "The Carny"

I remember those reissues too. My very first cinema trip was to see Lady and the Tramp circa 1994/5.

Was Cool World a Disney flick? The only thing I remember about it is that I watched it stoned with my flatmate a couple of years ago and we found the idea interesting, but not very well executed...

Also chalk me up to not realizing the significance of "Jim Crow" until much later after my first viewing.

I'm surprised how little ILX rated Snow White vs all these others. Pinocchio is definitely very creative, but is it actually enjoyable?

Very much yes! After all these polls and a lot of additional viewing, it's very possibly the best Disney film imho - certainly top five. Barrels of heart and much stronger through-story and characterization, with even more lavish animation. Snow White has about as much character detail as a fairy tale - and is beautiful for that, in a way that gets completely lost in the later fairy-tale films - but Pinocchio is much more of a "movie."

Pinocchio is terrifying.