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

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.

I think I have to vote for Dumbo because, while all of these have moments of *realness*, Dumbo is the one that, when I think of it, induces in Pavlovian fashion a childlike sadness that is like the deepest sadness imaginable so yeah voting Dumbo cuz it's real.

Of course, as bad as the crow stuff is in Dumbo, the tent-raising scene is even MORE racially . . . uh, problematic, with all of the "happy-hearted roustabouts" being a) black and b) drawn as faceless, undetailed blobs of blackness, with the song including lyrics celebrating their illiteracy and stating "We slave all night until we're dead."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C6c-bCSSKMo

ooh wait I had Cinderella and Alice in Wonderland and I *think* I had Babes In Toyland too but I still to this day have never seen that movie, which is weird

Yeah, I think the roustabouts' depiction is more disturbing than the crows. I have a bigger problem with the name "Jim Crow" than with anything they do onscreen.

wow, I really really had not been aware of the racial overtones of that scene before now

re: the stylistic and tonal shift from the pre-WWII like Snow White and Pinnochio to post-WWII pics, it seems pretty obvious to me that this maps closely to the American shift in attitudes towards Europe. The first period has a kind of "hey Europe is old and scary and eerily beautiful!", post-war it's more like "Europe is dead to us, America is the best let's all be happy about it"

ethnicity of roustabouts had never registered with me (although their facelessness did), sorta assumed their skintone had more to do with that scene being, y'know, at night.

the language does read as vaguely "negro" or something ("Boss man houndin', keep on poundin'" "there ain't no let up" etc.).

OTOH there's a parallel with their labor and the forced labor of the elephants which sort of suggests sympathy?

I'm gonna vote "Fantasia" cos it has Oskar Fischinger in it and why on Earth they didn't continue to make a bunch of animated abstract films rather than piss away goodwill w live action crap I'll never know. Plus the live action stuff in "Fantasia" (the silhouettes and all the gorgeous colored lights) are just beautiful.

"Dumbo" DOES have the Pink Elephants on Parade thing, which seemed so much more terrifying to me as a kid before I knew what intoxication or hallucinations were. It also tied into a few old Donald Duck cartoons I remember where he has insomnia or paranoia or something and you watch him alternately confront and cower before his uncontrollable madness.

I'm gonna vote "Fantasia" cos it has Oskar Fischinger in it and why on Earth they didn't continue to make a bunch of animated abstract films rather than piss away goodwill w live action crap I'll never know.

from wiki:

Fantasia ... received mixed critical reaction and was unable to make a profit. In part this was due to World War II cutting off the profitable European market, but due as well to the film's high production costs and the expense of leasing theatres and installing the Fantasound equipment for the roadshow presentations. Also, audiences who felt that Disney had suddenly gone "highbrow" stayed away, preferring the standard Disney cartoons.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

audiences who felt that Disney had suddenly gone "highbrow" stayed away, preferring the standard Disney cartoons.

i like the idea of a parallel universe where disney just kept burrowing into abstruse expressionism while people complained that they preferred the early funny ones

war sucks

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

buncha saps

Wow, great turnout. Expected Fantasia to do well, a little surprised Dumbo was so far out in front!

Thanks for voting, everyone. I think I will make this a series after all! Part II coming in a few...

Winner is correct. Top 3 are all correct. Good job.

i saw about the first 15 mins of Snow White a couple months ago, and the real drag on it is Snow

Disney animated features: the Mouseketeer years (1950-1959)

Finally took on Bambi. Not sure what to think yet. Beautiful to look at, that's one thing for sure. Might have to let this one sit for a couple days. Kind of wonderfully without structure, just as comfortable lingering over this as that. Could just about have done it as a silent film, and there are parts that really seem to want to have been that. Outstanding physical comedy and facial expressions throughout.

Oh also, I picked up Fun and Fancy Free at the thrift store and am thinking again about doing that poll of the "package films." Meanwhile, I just discovered that Netflix has The Reluctant Dragon on stream. Might finally have to take a look-see.

Bambi was one of the first movies I saw in the theater. I think I already knew the ending because I had the little Golden Book of it, Mum had kinda prepared me maybe? I remember being sad but not traumatized. It's so beautiful though even now, the backgrounds are gorgeous - Snow White's too

Really beautiful. And so much attention lavished on little things, as in all these: individual leaves blowing through the wind, ripples and reflections, flocks of individual birds. Each animal moving in its own way. The animation is so smooth and gentle it looks great even fast-forwarding the tape.

I believe I watched it as a very young child - five or under - where for half of this viewing I was unsure if I'd ever seen it at all, and then something would happen that would hit a flash of memory. What struck me is that, while I'm a severe softy with movies, the death of Bambi's mother (which I did know was coming, and is well foreshadowed anyway) didn't reduce me to tears. It's such a different kind of movie death than I'm used to. For a child's first death in a movie it would be shocking, traumatic, abrupt, bizarre and most of all hard to grasp or have explained. For an adult used to these things in movies and sadly real life, it's striking how much it just happens and is done, with the main signal of its significance being the disappearance of the omnipresent orchestra. Bambi's period of loss and confusion seems so brief, less than a minute maybe.

It's still powerful, mind you, and absolutely holds your attention close to every cel, but it doesn't linger to work the tear ducts by the book. A couple of shots later, it's springtime and the birds are chirping and Bambi is much older; if he grieved the mother or missed the mother, we don't know about it. That's not a criticism; it's just a different kind of movie, and I liked its difference.

Wikipedia has some great details on the development of this picture btw, mainly this chunk which suggests the perils of such an open, episodic structure:

There were many interpretations of the story. As Mel Shaw claimed

"The story of Bambi had a so many possibilities, you could go off on a million tangents. I remember one situation when Walt became involved with himself. He said 'Suppose we have Bambi step on an ant hill and we cut inside and see all the damage he's done to the ant civilization'. We spent weeks and weeks developing the ants, and then all of a sudden we decided, you know, we're way off the story, this has got nothing to do with the story of Bambi. We also had a family of grasshoppers, and they get into a family squabble of this or that, and Bambi is watching all of this, and here's the big head of Bambi in the grasshoppers. And what's that got to do with the story, and this would go on many times."[8]

Originally the film was intended to have six individual bunny characters, similar to the dwarfs in Snow White. However Perce Pearce suggested that they could instead have five generic rabbits and one rabbit with a different colour than the rest, one tooth, would have a very distinct personallity.[9] This character later became known as Thumper.

There originally was a brief shot in the scene where Bambi's mother dies of her jumping over a log and getting shot by man. Larry Morey, however, felt the scene was too dramatic, and that it was emotional enough to justify having her death occurring off screen.[8][9] Walt was also eager to show man burned to death by his fire that he inadvertently started, but this was discarded when it was decided not to show man at all.[8] There was also a scene involving two autumn leaves conversing like an old married couple before parting ways and falling to the ground, but Disney found that talking flora didn't work in the context of the film, and instead a visual metaphor of two realistic leaves falling to the ground was used instead.[9] Disney and his story team also developed the characters consisting of a squirrel and a chipmunk that were to be a comic duo reminiscent of Laurel and Hardy. However after years of experimentation, Walt felt that the story should focus on the three principal characters; Bambi, Thumper and Flower.[9]