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

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.