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

I'm surprised "twitterpated" never caught on that much. Apparently some people use it but I've never seen it outside Bambi.

I think they probably cheered up the film quickly because if they dwelled on the death, children would be screaming too much. One of my strong memories of childhood filmgoing was if parents made a bad judgement in taking a child who is too young and very likely to cry too much.

I've never known quite what to make of super sad scenes in kid/family films, or what is too much, the whole manipulative aspect. I felt the very end of Toy Story 3 with the teenage boy handing over his toys made it too obvious, like "Cry! Cry you bastards!"

I have strong memories of going to see Bambi for the first time in the mid90s in an ornate old theatre that was really empty, also discovering fizzy popcorn.

I felt the very end of Toy Story 3 with the teenage boy handing over his toys made it too obvious, like "Cry! Cry you bastards!"

i haven't watched a pixar movie since this one. the last ~30 minutes made me badly miss sid.

Compare Bambi's mother with Dumbo's, who is not killed but traumatically removed from his life...that whole grief thing is turned way, way up in Dumbo. When I was pregnant I was trying to describe the plot of Dumbo to my husband who had never seen it, and I ended up incoherently bawling instead. Granted I was a hormonal mess, but even now thinking about that Baby Mine scene...animal abuse + mother separated from baby. It's just TOO MUCH. Can never watch again.

I think it's great that kids' movies can be a place for the careful introduction of big, real themes and feelings... but the how is, yeah, pretty tricky. Especially since there's going to naturally be a real range of ages showing up for the movie, within a single family even. Ebert's review of Bambi touches on some of this ambivalence:

"Bambi" is essentially a fable about how children are born, raised and come of age in a hard, cruel world. Its messages are many. Young viewers learn that fathers are absent and mysterious authority figures, worshipped and never blamed by mothers, who do all of the work of child-raising. They learn that you have to be quick and clever to avoid being killed deliberately, and that, even then, you might easily be killed accidentally. They learn that courtship is a matter of "first love" and instant romance with no communication, and that the way to win the physical favors of the desired mate is to beat up all of the other guys who want to be with her. And they learn that after you've grown to manhood and fathered a child, your role is to leave home and let your mate take care of the domestic details.

Hey, I don't want to sound like an alarmist here, but if you really stop to think about it, "Bambi" is a parable of sexism, nihilism and despair, portraying absentee fathers and passive mothers in a world of death and violence. I know the movie's a perennial clasic, seen by every generation, remembered long after other movies have been forgotten. But I am not sure it's a good experience for children - especially young and impressionable ones.

(...) There's a tradition in our society of exposing kids to the Disney classics at an early age, and for most kids and most of the Disney movies that's just fine. But "Bambi" is pretty serious stuff. I don't know if some little kids are ready for it.

Huh, I thought I'd posted here when I watched The Reluctant Dragon (streamable on Netflix!). I guess I actually didn't finish watching it - once it finally gets to the titular animated sequence, it just feels like a slog. The "guy gets a tour of Disney's operation" story turns out to be the majority of the movie rather than just a framing device - wonder if kids in June 1941 got antsy.

Where it's good-naturedly fun, it's aged surprisingly well, and there is some really gorgeous Technicolor montage in a couple of bits. There's also some bad ethnic-minority humor, the fleeting briefness of which will probably not be much comfort for some. In its goodness, its badness, and its many lame "waaaah-wahhhhhhhhhh" jokes that don't land, it's a period piece.

What's maybe most surprising about it is that it's in no way an actual literal "here's how they do it at Disney" movie. Everything is explained with comic vignettes, some very charming - in particular, there's a good scene where an orchestra of noise-making staff, armed with devices to emulate thunder and train whistles and so on, soundtrack a short cartoon, live. But it's no kind of documentary, and nobody would have come away learning more than they did before about how animation is accomplished, the different steps and workplace roles, what the multiplane camera really does (or even what it's called IIRC), etc. There's no reason it should do that I guess, but maybe a lifetime of non-fiction flicks for kids, like Mr. Rogers going to the post office to show you how they sort the mail, sort of led me to expect something of that nature. I remain fascinated that someone voted for it over, well, anything else in this poll, but maybe they just had a really strong childhood connection with Pete's Dragon and got confused.

Just saw Snow White on the big screen and would mostly stand by my post from three years ago except I maybe didn't praise it enough? A gorgeous, incredible film. Maybe some of the dwarf stuff drags for an adult, but the kids in the audience seemed to get more and more into it, and the fact that most of it had me hooked is amazing. This time around the stuff that really really blew my mind was the woodland-creature animation, which is all perfectly timed pantomime, so easily endearing and engaging. You can just feel these animators' wrists pouring out every trick they've learned from a decade of comedy shorts, and then there's just shot after shot where a dozen or more animals are all on screen at once, tumbling and flying and swooping around.... Jesus Christ. That and the evil stepmother's final ascent to the top of the rocks in a downpour were the really jaw-dropping bits for me.

And I 100% got goosebumps at the finale when the prince arrives, did not expect that of myself. I'd still rate Pinocchio higher but man.... what a thing it must have been to see this in 1937.

Yeah, I also rewatched Snow White last week, and Pinocchio the week before. Both just fantastic works. I'd also add Snow White's escape into the creepy woods as another incredible bit.

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.