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

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

i used to get so mad when they had 'people movies' or those nature documentaries. I signed on for cartoons goddamnit

lol

oops what I meant was "Disney Sunday Movie," which aired in the mid eighties shortly after Eisner's reign of terror began.

My parents would never have allowed me to watch anything on Sunday night when ~MASTERPIECE THEATRE~ was on.

Was "Wonderful World of Disney" pre-"Disney Sunday Night Movie" or post? I remember both.

i always remembered the Disney movie being wrapped into Wonderful World of Disney, but maybe that's just my kid-brain getting it all jumbled up

as in, I don't remember them being separate thigns

yeah possibly same for me

I actually remember when "Wonderful World of Disney" was "Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color"! Your unwise joke here.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walt_Disney_anthology_television_series

I grew up calling it 'disneyland' -- it was my lifelong childhood dream to one day ride the teacup ride like the people in the opening credits for WWoD (dream achieved in 1999, best day ever)

i used to get so mad when they had 'people movies'

^^^ my whole childhood in a nutshell

that 'beloved' prairie dog film (or maybe it was a squirrel?) was the bane of my existence

original disney show ran on sundays on nbc for many many years, nbc canceled in early 80s. i think pre-60 minutes it was a bit of a ratings powerhouse. cbs got it after nbc, moved it to saturdays (interesting that saturdays - a major tv night not that many years earlier had already started turning into the programming graveyard it is today), it didn't take, canceled again. a few years later in 86 eisner revives it on sunday nights on abc, part of the general revival of disney. it ran there until 2008, though it spent the last part of that on saturday nights. the only disney 'classics' never to air in their entirety on american tv are fantasia and song of the south. snow white didn't air on american tv until 2010.

song of the south def aired on tv in australia -- I think my mum still has the vhs version we recorded off the tv

snow white didn't air on american tv until 2010.

wow, didn't know this.

After my aside about the live-action stuff ahead, realized I didn't say anything about these movies. Definitely voting for Bambi. So, so many childhood memories tied up in that movie -- seeing it the first time and crying like a baby when [SPOILERS] his mother is shot, how genuinely scary the forest fire was, reading the Little Golden Books associated with it, sitting at my grandparents' house listening to this:

http://img1.etsystatic.com/005/0/5674295/il_340x270.400650871_7gie.jpg

They had a whole collection of these, pretty much every one that was issued.

Oh, and just the pleasure and amazement at having the lead characters be animals that were non-anthropomorphized in their look and actions. They could talk, and engaged in social activity that was hardly what you'd see in nature, but they acted like real animals. Watching the behind-the-scenes stuff on the DVD of the animators studying real animals at the zoo and other locations is a lot of fun.

i loved bambi too, haven't seen it since I was a kid

i had the disney read-along book/record of Peter Pan. those things were the BEST

YES. I also had a little box of 45s, each one with four songs from a particular Disney movie (two on each side). I remember it included The Aristocats, Peter Pan, Alice in Wonderland, Cinderella . . . can't remember what else. I used to play "I'm Late," "Scales and Arpeggios" and "The Unbirthday Song" over and over and over, much to my mom's chagrin.

Oh, I think Song of the South was included, too.