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

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.

Cool world is fucking Bakshi (a horribly malformed and studio-castrated Bakshi unfortunately). Backstory about that film is ridiculous.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LcLRR0ONyU0

oh yeah, that's right. I was watching a lot of Bakshi around then, so that's probably why we put it on.

The concept of the film involved a cartoon and human having sex and conceiving a hybrid child who visits the real world to murder the father who abandoned her. Bakshi states that Paramount Pictures "bought the idea in ten seconds".

This would have been sooooo much better if they'd stuck with this plot. Or at least more interesting. Yeah, I don't remember much about it, but I remember it falling flat with us.

One of only two or three movies, I think, that my girlfriend and I have gotten like twenty minutes into and said "nope, this sucks, let's cut our losses now." Just cringe-inducing in every scene. At some level, "it's Roger Rabbit but with a naughty twist!" could have been something, but this was...not it.

Back to Disney though - another great thing about Snow White, which I didn't remember at all, is just how much screen time is given to building up the relationship between Snow White and the Dwarfs. I mean, it's right there in the title, but I'd forgotten that most of the movie is their bonding process - their discovery of the cleaned-up house, their first conversation, them (reluctantly) taking up washing... it really slows down to build up the relationship and so you totally believe in the Dwarfs' loss when she 'dies,' even though they've known each other for less than a day.

The real confrontation with loss and sadness is also crucial to Pinocchio: Gepetto in near-suicidal desperation, possessed by the loss of the closest thing he'll ever have to a child: fuck! It means that Pinocchio's effort to save him isn't some little scripted dose of "growing up" or "learning a lesson," but a real, emotional, existential choice that resolves the whole arc of the movie.

Ahhh, don't mind me - I'm praising this stuff to the skies now because I think I'm going to be real nostalgic for it in another poll or two...

best is yet to come imo

It's odd how much of a divide there was, growing up, in my household about Disney films. Because, as aforementioned, my Dad was seriously into Dumbo. But my Mum was very, very anti-Disney, because she had been FORBIDDEN from watching them as she grew up. Both her parents and her grandparents (who actually raised her) thought they were terrible American Imperialist propaganda, full of messages about capitalism and christianity and other Bad Messages. And I think even after she grew up and realised that attitude was somewhat silly (after we moved to the States) there was still a sense of "keep an eye out for Bad Messages in Disney films" - so they were far more likely to catch, and try to explain, things like the Jim Crow stuff in Dumbo.

So I always had these ambiguous feelings about Disney while growing up - both this sense that "Mickey Mouse is a user-friendly emblem of imperialism!!!!" that I'd been taught, but also the attuned nostalgia, after we moved to the States and got sucked into watching Wonderful World of Disney every Saturday night. It wasn't until I was in my late teens - Junior year in high school - and I really wanted to be a cartoonist more than anything in the world. I ended up doing my end of year term paper on the early Disney-Iwerks era of animation, and watched many of the classic era films in whole - which I hadn't seen as a child - as an adult.

I was four years old when I saw Fantasia during the 1969 re-release for the hippies. It was only the second movie I ever saw in a movie theater, so it's difficult not to vote for it but in fairness it's the only movie on this list that I've seen. Despite growing up in O.C. under the omnipresence of Disneyland and the Wonderful World Of Disney, I never connected with the theatrical animated films at all. Call me the thread heretic.

The thing is that Fantasia was such a singular experience for me that even if I did get around to the other movies I doubt they would have the same impact Fantasia did. Yeah, The Pastoral is a drag and I often skip it, but the first half with the abstracts and Rite Of Spring is some of my favorite anything on screen. It was like finding out how art works: you can do anything you want. Years later I once went through a spell of depression-induced insomnia and Fantasia was the only thing comforting enough to put me to sleep. Just worked out that way...

I'm majorly obsessed with artist Oskar Fischinger who worked on the Toccata and Fugue part.

Really loving everybody's memories/experiences in this thread - thanks.

I guess one great thing about the dominating ubiquity of the Disney corporation and its "classic/timeless/treasure" bit is that lots of people did get to see these, at really different moments in the culture and so on. Love the contrast between Fantasia as pretentious flop in the Forties, as (unexpected?) hippie tie-in in the late Sixties, and as burdensome overhyped Sgt. Pepper's deal in the Nineties - and yet along the way lots of people having a personal relationship with it that sort of obviates the various wisdoms conventional.

The Sgt. Pepper angle, unfortunately, is how I've unconsciously come to view it (born in 1981) and probably why I've never actually cracked the thing open! That and Bambi are my viewing to-do list for the next week.

i didn't see the full length fantasia til I was a teenager

They would show bits and pieces of it on the Sunday night 'Wonderful World of Disney' - I remember they'd use Night on Bald Mountain for the halloween anthology clip show (hosted by the talking snow white mirror). I remember LOVING the dancing mushrooms and the dancing thistles, and I would always call out to Mum & Dad to come see them because I was so excited. and of courrse the sorcerer's apprentice. but I don't think I was aware that it was one big piece until much later.

I think if I had seen the whole thing earlier I would have voted for it definitely. That being said, seeing it as a teen it affected me very deeply, helped give me an abiding love for classical music & encouraged me to explore other pieces by those composers and definitely awakened my artistic side as well, I loved drawing the pegasus and the bald mountain demon. honestly it's probably better and more innovative than dumbo, there's no question... but 5 year old me would be very mad if I didn't vote for Dumbo. So dumbo it is :)

All you Dumbo voters are a bunch of saps

They would show bits and pieces of it on the Sunday night 'Wonderful World of Disney' - I remember they'd use Night on Bald Mountain for the halloween anthology clip show

yes yes yes

We should start a thread on that show's programming. Eisner himself introduced that Sunday's movie. I remember "Mr. Boogedy" and "Bride of Boogedy" (with Eugene Levy!) fondly.

dancing hippos DO help classical music; would help Beyonce too

xxpost you know where you can stick your magic feather

Oh, was Wonderful World of Disney on Sunday night? Jeez, my memory is so terrible!

my Wonderful World of Disney was on NBC, and they tended to show those Fred MacMurray movies

in Australia it was on Sunday, but it could have been another night elsewhere