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

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.

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!

I used to see these with some regularity as a kid in the 70s, because we were stationed overseas and AAFES would book them into the base theaters for Saturday matinees. My sister and I would get dropped off at the movies, mom and dad would go shopping or run other errands. Then we'd see the contemporaneous ones when those were booked into theaters - Gus, Candleshoe, No Deposit No Return . . . for two pre-teen kids living thousands of miles from home in a country where they didn't speak the language, there was nothing more American than a Disney movie.

PS You left out Darby O'Gill & the Little People, which had some good old fashioned Disney Nightmare Fuel with two appearances by a terrifying banshee.

Pinnochio.

we probably shouldn't turn this thread into a "shitty live-action disney movies of the 50s and beyond thread" though, since that's pretty clearly not what it's supposed to be

Ha, yeah, my bad really - have had them on my mind lately. Could be a great thread/poll/something if someone wants to do it. There are literally dozens of the damn things.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/b/b8/Follow_Me_Boys.jpg

xp wow just glancing over that list, p sure I've seen at least a couple dozen of them

I love Dumbo so much, but due to my son's obsession with Snow White have seen that 10x more, and it really never got old for me. It's pretty much perfect imo, and this is totally otm:

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.

My younger brother used to wake me or my parents up literally every morning (around 6am or so) so we could take him downstairs to put on Dumbo. I think he watched it every morning for something like three months.

He was maybe three or four years old at the time.

haven't seen any of these in way too long, but even as a kid pinocchio stood out -- just seemed so epic and long and crazy and wonderful, renting it always felt like a major event. ppl always remember the scary parts most, but i remember the entire first part in the toyshop being one of the loveliest and most comforting things ever. jiminy cricket is still far and away the most genuinely charming and least annoying 'disney sidekick' character.

that said i still might vote for snow white just for personal reasons -- it's the first film i clearly remember seeing in a theater, on its release in '87 or so. vividly remember being terrified by the scene where the huntsman almost kills snow white. ppl always complain about how disney watered down the fairy tales but not this one, imo -- if anything it's scarier and more traumatic for a kid to watch than the story is to read.

My father was obsessed - OBSESSED - with Dumbo, so tempted to vote for that just because of childhood repetitions of Pink Elephants (and wow, re-watching that sequence as an adult with... drugs experience, that was interesting (double for the Sun-Ra cover)) but the rest of the film doesn't really stand up and all kinds of questionable minstrelry stuff.

But Fantasia? Fantasia has never not blown my mind.

fantasia is an amazing accomplishment but also kind of tiresome to sit through. there are maybe two or three segments that i'd willingly watch again.

The thing about Fantasia is, I always forget the boring bits as soon as it's over. I just love the abstraction sequences so much; the influence of modern art on animation is just dazzling there. And Night On Bald Mountain giving way to beautiful almost Caspar David Frederich imagery as Ave Maria comes in. So amazing.

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.

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.