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

I've seen all of these except Reluctant Dragon (??) over the last 30 years, and suspect Dumbo is the answer

Right, so, as I understand it, The Reluctant Dragon is basically cheap self-promotion and filler: some shorts, a medium-short (the title 'toon), and a live-action story where the guy who came up with the dragon story tries to get Disney's attention, in the process getting a behind-the-scenes look at the magic of animation! Perhaps historically most interesting as Disney's first dip into live-action, which would become the major profit-generating arm of the studio a few years later.

Was thinking about that the other night... I'm surprised nobody's running a major blog or A.V. Club feature where they go through and review all those ghastly live-action Disney kiddie flicks from the Fifties on. There's just a billion of them, and only the really top-tier ones are ever discussed or remembered.

Myself, I'm leaning Pinocchio. Just watched Snow White, which has the huge advantage of first-ness, and there's a wondrous gleam of experiment mixed with a compass-point confidence and clarity of purpose: Walt, perhaps alone in the world, knows this thing could be huge, and that faith suffuses so much of what goes on that it almost doesn't matter that Snow White herself is kind of a cheery blank, and the Prince even moreso. You sense that at some level, Disney said, look, if the dwarfs work, this movie will work. And by golly, do those dwarfs work! Charming, funny, moving in their sadness, and not a bit hobbled by their single-trait characterization. Great scenery-chewing by the witch, too. 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. I also just watched Sleeping Beauty, which has a lot of similarities to this in plot and structure, but is really a pale shadow.

But for all that, Pinocchio is more of a story. Disney's great insight here was how to chop down the sprawling, episodic source material into a real character arc, and give us some really basic conflicts that stay in the driver's seat and keep us emotionally involved. And damn, the whale sequence, every frame of it, is just a masterpiece. He could have retired there and been remembered as a genius. Given that the film flopped, it's kind of amazing he didn't retire there...

voted Fantaisia, but havne't seen Pinocchio since I was a kid. Bambi and Dumbo are just too depressing imho

i would say "too adult"

Pinocchio is a horror show. I was seriously wrung out and depressed after watching it for the first time since childhood a fear years back. I voted for it.

*few years back. Poetic typo?

Between Pleasure Island and the growing nose, there's some real body-horror stuff in Pinocchio. It's wild.

Was disappointed by Dumbo to be honest. The most creative and intense sequences (largely by recent recruits from the dying New York studios) are delightful... but a lot of the rest just drifts by, and it's a real problem that the protagonist can't talk, and spends most of the movie largely unable to act on his own behalf. I also thought the mouse was kind of annoying, and I really had a hard time with the crows - would not really endorse that for children.

Fantasia has some of my favorite bits of animation ever, but it doesn't seem fair to weigh it against the others. As full-length, sustained story, and for richness of conception and execution, I think Pinocchio is the pinnacle.

It's kind of amazing how little the template for American animated features has changed since these films. Naif/waif central character, goofy sidekicks, moralistic quests, etc. Basically fairy tales plus vaudeville -- an enduring hybrid.

is there a good disney film history book? Like, behind the scenes animation studio stuff, maybe some trashy "marketing butts heads with creative" stuff.

this is good but it only covers the Eisner years
http://animatormag.com/books/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/disneywar.jpg

nice, thanks. Relatedly, I enjoyed what i saw of this doc about the 80s/90s http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dream_On_Silly_Dreamer

Dumbo alone validates the overachieving evil of so many of Disney's other works.

Fantasia in second on the strength of "Ballet of the Hours" sequence.

I learned valuable life lessons by watching Dumbo, Fantasia, Pinocchio, and Bambi at a very early age. Snow White was pretty, but I didn't really learn anything. I have never seen the other one.

Voted Fantasia for beauty + music appreciation.

The only thing I remember about Fantasia was my mom renting it and Bugsy for us to watch one afternoon and us both getting bored a half hour into the former and switching over to the latter.

dumbo. fantasia's a piece of SHIT!!!

there's a real sense of horror in Pinocchio which was never quite replicated in any other disney movie. someone further up talked about body-horror and that is OTM completely. The chase sequence with Monstro or whatever the whale's name was at the end left a searing impression on tiny tot me. I've not seen it in years, but I'll vote for it over Fantasia, which is excellent but really in its own unique category.

I don't think I've ever seen Bambi, a thing I would genuinely be embarrassed to mention in real life.

Dumbo, Bambi and Pinocchio all upset me in deep, almost scarring ways when I was a small child

yes, I remember watching The Lion King soon after it came out on videotape as a five year old and although I vividly remember Mufasa's death, it seemed much softer compared to these early films, where the traumas were *really* deep. I can't explain why though, there seems to be a much more sinister and "dangerous" atmosphere in these early flicks.

this is the last gasp of children's stories and fairy tales that have that grim (or Grimm) and uncanny darkness to them isn't it? I have a pretentious theory that the rise of the alienated adolescent/teen coincides with the increasing forced cheerfulness of the media they grew up with.

uncanny darkness is an *excellent* way to put it; it totally sums up what I was grasping at. I'd like to hear more about your theory! My very poorly-educated guess would be that life was generally harsher in the 40s compared to the 90s, but there must be more to it than that.

I have a pretentious theory that the rise of the alienated adolescent/teen coincides with the increasing forced cheerfulness of the media they grew up with.

― ryan, Sunday, January 19, 2014 10:39 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Interesting, but I think the idea of the alienated adolescent goes back at least to the 50s. Which does coincide with a major shift toward commercial culture and mass media, fwiw.

xp I definitely think it's true that some of it was just the old idea that fairy tales reflected the harshness of life, but there's something peculiarly disturbing about Disney films that I feel like comes from Walt Disney's mind.

yeah that's def true I think. something uniquely traumatic. even Fantasia can be unnerving to a child.

something about pinocchio in the whale and the pleasure island sequence especially, it's like david lynch jr

that boy transforming into a donkey was f*cking terrifying to young me.

and how you never see them again. presumably trapped there forever.

wasn't Snow White considered legitimately terrifying even to adults when it came out? I can believe it!

I can believe that too. Snow White is a very adult film, considering the intended audience. The Evil Queen is both menacing and erotic. The original plan was to make her a "fat, batty, cartoon type (and) self-satisfied", a portrayal which would have utterly ruined the film imo.

Is there any other Disney film where the antagonist is depicted as a great beauty? I can't think of one off the top of my head.

Maybe Gaston? But his inflated idea of his own attractiveness is something we're supposed to laugh at. Helga Sinclair in Atlantis, definitely.

re: the horror/dream quality and ideas of kids' entertainment - one thing that really separates these films from the Fifties batch is that the latter are just drowning in comic relief stuff, and the soundtrack is equally relentless about THIS IS FUNNY PART. There's a lot of forced merriment and lack of confidence that things can be funny without all that - and I think that takes away from all of the nightmare stuff, basically. Even just in terms of screen time available for building up intensity and so on.

and how you never see them again. presumably trapped there forever.

― president of the people's republic of antarctica (Arctic Mindbath), Sunday, January 19, 2014 11:03 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I just tracked down the clip on youtube and they were loading the donkeys into these crates that said stuff like "SOLD TO THE SALT MINES" "SOLD TO THE CIRCUS" etc. basically it was a child-donkey slave factory

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=tgmfV5VLHvs

yeah, it's seriously horrifying, dunno how we made it to adulthood relatively unscathed. Poor Lampwick's terror as he's transformed :'(.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgmfV5VLHvs

Pinocchio is the most beautiful of these, Dumbo is maybe my fave but iirc the former doesn't have any fucked-up minstrel shit in it so i'm voting for Pinocchio.

incidentally Snow White is the first thing i remember seeing at the movies, and thanks to being born just at the cusp of video that's how i saw most of these.

Sad to say that the first movie-going experience I remember whatsoever was... Song of the South. But pretty sure we also did one or two others in the early-to-mid 80s; certainly Bambi.

I'm surprised nobody's running a major blog or A.V. Club feature where they go through and review all those ghastly live-action Disney kiddie flicks from the Fifties on.

I was very seriously preparing to do this a few years back before I realized just how ghastly some of those films are.

i saw song of the south in the theater also but i remember it bored me, i kinda hated all live action disney unless somebody from mayberry was in it. similar to how the yearly showing of the wizard of oz on tv was a huge deal i can remember that disney would rerelease one of their classics every year when i was a kid and if you wanted to see bambi, etc you had to go see it then cuz god knows when you were going to get a chance again. they sorta attempted to replicate this when they would release stuff on dvd for a 'limited time' but obv w/ rental places, etc it wasn't nearly the same. voted dumbo.

yeah that's how the cinema releases worked in the UK too. the whole limited time video releases was just pitiful Canutian refusal to see where the home viewing market was gonna go

altho Disney seemed to be one of the few companies that put a substantially effective copy protection on their VHS tapes

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

I was very seriously preparing to do this a few years back before I realized just how ghastly some of those films are.

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!

My aunts, who had kids in the 60s and 70s, had houses full of storybooks and LPs based on all this stuff. Big anthology things, with large-print retellings of the movies, oddly hand-illustrated rather than using film stills.

my kids used to get given books of some of the movies, i think they were freebies to try and entice doting relatives to sign up to long-term book club dealies, and for some reason the prose was always the dullest most literal-minded reiteration of the movie

haha i had forgotten about the gnome-mobile. that matthew garber-karen dotrice team at work again. i can remember those books also, alot of these movies i was able to gather vague understandings of (similar to mad magazine's trips to the cinema). actually there was one non-don knotts live action one i loved as a kid - pete's dragon. i think i just liked lighthouses though. the potential for destruction. not including mary poppins w/ 'live action disney' as it is obv on another plane, thinkpieces on how it 'hasn't held up' be damned.

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.

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]

wow

What's great is how it reveals that the actual movie they made was the product of lots of small decisions, which all seem to have consciously or unconsciously been based on knowing that a basically gentle, unobtrusive depiction of this faun growing up would hold people's attention better than attempts to swing hard for LOLs. The one sequence that jumps out I think is the "twitter-pated" bit with the owl's head spinning around and Thumper meeting his love interest, which feel kind of tonally closer to a Warner Brothers or Chuck Jones short, or even some of Disney's own comic shorts. It's not terrible but it feels like it comes from a slightly more world-wise and vaudevillian place than the rest of the film. Chipmunk Laurel and Hardy could have sunk the whole thing.

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.