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

(Not entirely ruling out the "reacting to Warner Brothers" theory - but if there's a reaction, it might be easier to perceive in the shorts, which if memory serves mainly just get more boring in this period. The main innovation seems to be "lots of Pluto," and reinventing Goofy as a bland, white-collar suburbanite without even a speech impediment. Mickey virtually disappears from the fossil record.)

I'm probably most tempted by Peter Pan and Alice - my sense is they at least have lots of different scenery and scenarios. Kind of worried about the "Red Indian" stuff in Peter Pan, though.

?! The Donald shorts from the 50s are great

from a purely visual standpoint, I think Sleeping Beauty might be my favorite

xpost I admit I haven't seen too many of them - but do they add much to what he was doing in the Thirties? I was just thinking in reference to balls's "reacting to Warner Brothers" idea.

I should probably vote Sleeping Beauty, mostly because: EYVIND EARLE, who is one of my Anumber1 favourite artists

But really, personal nostalgia requires I vote Lady and the Tramp, for the spaghetti scene, and also those infernal cats. I listened to the soundtrack album over and over and over again, as a small child.

Haven't seen Alice in years, but I just remember hating it, because it deviated so much from the books.

I was a sucker for dog cartoons as a kid. But we won't talk about 101 Dalmations, which I anticipated and anticipated and anticipated, and then OH GOD THEY RIPPED HALF THE STORY AND HALF THE CHARACTERS OUT OF THE BOOK, WTF. So traumatic.

i can't get behind any of these without a bunch of quibbles

i think i like the way Alice looks the best, even as i hate it for fucking with the book and with Tenniel's horrorshow illustrations

they should've based it on Carroll's own illustrations obv

http://www.alice-in-wonderland.net/alicepic/book0/42.jpg

I wonder what alice would have been like with aldous huxley's rejected screenplay. shit probably.

Art-wise I would have to go for Sleeping Beauty for the backgrounds. But along the lines of missing the old-school creepiness of the Alice illustrations, SB's opening raised my hopes that the characters would actually be done in a quasi-medieval style...all Gothic and flat and out of proportion with each other. That was probably too much to ask, but it would've been cool, in the line of the self-conscious attempts at stylization in Dalmatians - or, much later, Emperor's New Groove, Atlantis, Lilo & Stitch, etc. I guess what they ended up doing isn't leagues distant from an Art Nouveau take on the same medievalism but it's too close to Disney house style, not distinct enough from the way Cinderella is drawn.

By comparison, maybe Snow White benefits, today, from being dolled up like an Old Hollywood starlet; it comes out looking so unfamiliar that it enhances the 'long, long ago...' atmosphere of distance. More than twenty years between her and Aurora, and Walt had been in the animation business since the early 20s. Sometimes seem hard to grasp creative careers that spanned that time frame, with so much else changing.

Sleeping Beauty for me, which has a beautiful stillness. The fairies are well drawn and characterized, and Maleficent is truly scary.

It's weird, this thread is mainly making me want to watch Sleeping Beauty again, but on, like, an IMAX screen. Maybe with the dialogue muted or something. But I would love to see those woods and the dragon fight just sprawling across the screen.

tho edward everett horton as hook unfuckwithable.

hook is voiced by hans conried!

alice is the best one by a light-year. ppl who complain that it's not enough like the book should really revisit it, it's actually QUITE faithful to the book imo. a few slapsticky disney touches aside, it's very true to the cold, nightmarish, and malicious tone of the original. plus it's just bursting with gorgeous designs and ideas, maybe more than any other disney movie -- mary blair was a genius.

xp oh whoops sorry i'm dumb. it's cuz they were both in a bunch of jay ward stuff. and yeah alice cuts lots (i mostly miss the footman/messenger/duchess/baby/cook/pepper thing cuz it was the most stressful and hostile part to me as a kid) and invents new transitions to cover the cuts but it largely preserves that tone where everyone is near-constantly impatient and furious with alice for not understanding nonsensical social conventions or for causing destruction. and i haven't seen it in a while but it doesn't tack anything fuzzy on after the all-time YOU'RE NOTHING BUT A PACK OF CARDS! apocalypse ending, does it? carroll's own it-was-all-a-dream ending shields disney from having to make this any tidier/less nightmarish: they can still end on alice+sis walking home. and the tenniel illustrations are great obv but jd is right, dreamlogic rly frees up disney's animators and there's a reason the designs are mallgoth klassiks.

Thinking of mallgoth klassiks, I wonder how much the public profile of Alice in Wonderland and Peter Pan owe to these films. I mean, both were very successful things already, but I really am not sure something like Hook or Finding Neverland would have seemed like a logical green-light in a world without Disney burying these books in the back-knowledge of millions of Americans. Sort of like the canon of fairy tales, I guess - lot more people can give the outline of "Snow White" than anything else in Grimm.

Was the musical Peter Pan with Mary Martin (which was staged on Broadway a year after the Disney movie) prompted by the movie, or did they both occur during some resurgence of popularity in Barrie's play, or was it just coincidence?

Hmmm, no idea. Maybe coincidence? Maybe the character resonated in the Fifties for some reason. I could totally believe it meant something personal to someone like Walt Disney, perhaps gazing wistfully back past his empire and his wage disputes and his photo ops, thinking Oh, for the days when it was me, Ub Iwerks, and a couple of drawing boards! Oh, to be young forever! etc. If Pan appeals both to kids and to adults with kids (facing adult responsibility with ambivalence) maybe his recurrence could be tracked against demographic bubble moments.

Peter Pan was in development from the late 30s so I think it's just a coincidence

I don't think Alice deviates too terribly from the material, and as noted its tone is remarkably consistent w the book esp for a Disney movie. it's a lot of hostility, confusion, abrasiveness. it looks great too, albeit entirely different from Tenniel. But I think Peter Pan works better as a narrative, Alice kind of wanders

true but that way madness lies:

On prior versions, Burton said "It was always a girl wandering around from one crazy character to another, and I never really felt any real emotional connection." His goal with the new movie is to give the story "some framework of emotional grounding" and "to try and make Alice feel more like a story as opposed to a series of events."

Right. Any qualms about how Disney handled them material are pretty well moot now that Burton's film exists.

yeah I'm not saying they SHOULD have made Alice a more straightforward narrative, that would have really been a disservice to the material. PP just better suited to the format imho.

iirc there was originally a "jabberwocky" scene but walt decided to cut it because it was too scary or too long or something.

i finally read the barrie novel last year and was surprised by how dark and even menacing the tone of it was -- other than that, the disney version is reasonably faithful, right down to peter himself being kind of an arrogant bastard.

huh. never heard of this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fmd3UwA3SlA

er wait that's just the cheshire cast

cat

this seems to be the only image available

http://31.media.tumblr.com/fb1acedd5f16f57887e436f7c68973a5/tumblr_mm54j7KWpE1rfxftro1_500.png

wow!

looks kinda like an evillll version of Pete's Dragon

Couple more images here: http://disney.wikia.com/wiki/Jabberwocky_%281951%29

not so menacing now that I can see he's wearing a sweater with holes cut out for the wings

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Oop, forgot about this!

Anybody want to speak up for Cinderella? Also interested in compelling reasons to rewatch Lady & the Tramp... all I really remember is the spaghetti scene (from clip shows) and the very dicey "we are Siamese" number.

i remember LaTT as being very mellow and pleasant, nothing too traumatic. also maybe the only really remotely convincing love story in a disney film.

Cinderella is really snoozeworthy. so much so that I fell asleep when watching it w my daughter a few months ago. the story is just so slight, the animators don't have a lot to work with.

L&tT has some good interiors and urban scenes

And also stuff about class which is or is not in the others of this period?

And Tramp has had a bunch of other girlfriends, lives on the wrong side of town, etc, which is pretty different to Princes and Princesses, no?

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

Damn! Well, that's pretty clear. Guess I'll be giving that a watch this weekend.

Kind of shocked at how low Peter Pan ended up. In my head it's full of adventure, but this might be distorted by childhood memories of this: http://goldengems.blogspot.com/2009/11/coming-soonwalt-disneys-peter-pan.html - - - particularly the map, which like all maps of fantasy lands, invites a great deal of filling-in with incident and subplot that may not actually be borne out in the actual story.

Turnout seems good enough to justify continuing the series... I have a couple different ideas of how to split up the next couple batches. Will launch the next poll soonish-like.

Lady & the tramp has Peggy fucking lee

Please continue, yeah, Disney films are films I've never watched critically

The sheer artistry of it really hits you when you keep an eye out for it

yeah def continue dc.

Disney animated features: magic on a budget (1961-1973)

*Our* Alice always enjoyed the style of this movie, but was always disappointed that they made her a golden blonde (as is almost every other version of Alice since), whereas the actual Alice was dark haired (like herself)

Alice in Wonderland is up there with Jungle Book, Sword and the Stone and Robin Hood. I'd say it's the second best of these two but my other half would disown me.

Kind of shocked at how low Peter Pan ended up.

The whole "What Makes the Red Man Red?" (and with it, maybe 30% of the movie) thing makes it hard to enjoy Peter Pan. A shame, cos it's easily the funniest Disney animation. The broad physical humor of Captain Hook repeatedly getting swallowed by the alligator always makes me laugh out loud.

you are high that is not a third of the movie

Does Cinderella know that she’s dancing with the prince during the ball? Or does she think he’s just some random hot hunk? And it’s not until the following morning that she overhears Lady Tremaine talking about “the prince” that she finally realizes it and drops the dishes in shock?

Following on from Disney animated features: the golden age (1937-42) , and skipping over the "package films" of the Forties, here's a little pack of postwar fantasies.

was dismayed to see that the '42-'50 era was not covered because HOLY SHIT imo the peak of the studio was '40-'55 or so, and those package films are a big reason why. The Three Caballeros has been in heavy rotation in my house for years, but thx to Disney+ other stuff from this era is now readily available and some of the sequences strewn across in Melody Time, Make Mine Music, Saludos Amigos, Fun and Fancy Free are top tier:

- Mickey and the Beanstalk is the best of the trio (Mickey/Donald/Goofy) shorts. Great physical comedy, combined with gorgeous visuals, the night-time beanstalk-growing sequence is perfect.
- my eyes practically fell out of my head when I saw Blame it on the Samba for the first time last week: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hn22ofUCNvs
- Peter and the Wolf!
- Benny Goodman "After You've Gone": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OteJW-nraLw

The studio was downright psychedelic at this point, running riot with the ideas and techniques from Fantasia.

I know I'm in a minority of those sadly clinging to physical media at this point, but thankfully most of that era is available on Blu-ray via Disney Movie Club.

dunno why the youtube of Blame it on the Samba is labelled 1955 - that was 1948 (from Melody Time)

xps

haaa, i've actually been thinking about returning to these polls to finally do one for the package films! i've seen a few of them recently thanks to Disney+ and yeah they all seem to at least have some moments of bonkers trippy inspiration and masterful, labor-intensive, full animation. also some really square, boring dross imho. but yeah i should track down a copy of make mine music and get on this....

We had Make Mine Music taped on vhs, watched the parts I liked - Peter and the Wolf and the Singing Whale - over and over. But my problem with the package film is that they are really uneven, and I had more fun watching taped compilations of the shorts.

they are uneven but the heights are very high

I've realized as an adult that a bunch of the individual pieces from the package films were things I initially saw *in school* because teachers had access to filmstrips of individual shorts

this was cinderella, obviously, for the songs and the zuckerberg/lucifer prophecy

the zuckerberg/lucifer prophecy

the whatnow?

https://yarn.co/yarn-clip/c3a79d14-93b4-4e5e-bd17-258f0ae9acfb

Lady and the Tramp and Cinderella are two of my all-time faves – I think they’re both pretty great, and I like their (comparatively) light and welcoming vibe. Sleeping Beauty is an animation triumph, but kind of a snooze (pardon the joke). Alice in Wonderland? It’s OK, I guess; surprised to see it dominate this poll. Haven’t watched Peter Pan since I was a kid.

if sleeping beauty's story/characters were anywhere close to the quality of the animation, it'd be inarguably in the top 3 all-time disney, maybe one of the most celebrated films of its era.

Word!

Sleeping Beauty is the first movie I remember seeing in a theatre. It's my favorite of this era by far. I don't really care about the weak characters. The fairy godmothers are good enough.

The problem with Alice is that they shoehorned a generic villain into it. The first half hour is great.

Love the music / sound design in Alice

Recently watched several of these with my 5y old daughter.

She liked Alice but I don't get its appeal at all. Not only is a major example of the 'it was all a dream' type of terrible story endings, it's really all one extended fever dream. Every character she encounters is impossible to reason with. Perhaps it is all a poetic take on various psychological issues but I find it way to frustrating to enjoy.

Sleeping Beauty has lovely art and I enjoyed the one joke with the fairy godmothers arguing over the colour of the dress. It would have been better if the movie had more jokes than the one joke.

I remember liking Peter Pan a lot when I was a kid. It didn't age well. Peter is a pretty unlikable jerk, the bits with the Indians are bad & it's also pretty dated in its treatment of the female characters. But all of the scenes featuring the crocodile were excellent.

Haven't watched the other two yet.

I hate to be that guy re: source material, but the Lewis Carroll book is so famous (and I’ve read it so many times), it’s kind of hard to get into any adaptation.

(re: Alice)

Jan Švankmajer's Alice is an amazing film, one of my favourites, it has lived in my head since I first saw it 30 years ago. The Disney one is a absorbing fever dream, agreed, I do not need a gripping plot or dialogue from a Disney film, the visuals and (especially) the music are what I'm here for (this sounds like the arguments I have with people about Antonioni) so it will always rank as my #1.

The Tim Burton Alice is the fucking worst, could not get through more than half an hour.

XXP

I’d say the two kings bickering in Sleeping Beauty holds up pretty well.

One of my favorite elements of Cinderella is the king who really wants a baby (grandchild) – it’s such a nice (and “against the grain”) touch.

oh wow, i couldn't *stand* the Sleeping Beauty kings! different strokes.

I watched all the disney animated features up to y2k-ish in chronological order about 2 years ago.

Peter Pan was one of the most fun, and i anticipated its offensiveness . Lady and the Tramp otoh was *shockingly* offensive.

I much prefer Svenkmajer's Alice to Disney's, found the Disney version boring.

The Little Mermaid was one of the contenders, but Karel Kachyna's Little Mermaid is also insanely beautiful. Likewise Beauty and the Beast/Cocteau.

Disney Alice for me as an adult now is all about the art (and the music).Background artist Mary Blair brought that gorgeous modernist style that is so different from their classic “house” style & every time I watch it I just get lost in those gorgeous colors & illustrations

Also it was the one I rewatched the most as a kid because of the humor & weirdness of it

sleeping beauty is just so gorgeous and ornate and brilliantly done that i can forgive the weakness of the story and some of the characterizations. i remember how surprised i was when i read the original fairy tale and discovered that the princess originally fell asleep for a hundred years (as opposed to the movie, where it seems to be only for a couple hours).

"All one extended fever dream" and "every character she encounters is impossible to reason with" should be elements in any decent Alice In Wonderland adaptation imo.

One of my favorite elements of Cinderella is the king who really wants a baby (grandchild) – it’s such a nice (and “against the grain”) touch.

He needs a successor to the bloodline, this is king stuff 101

He’s specifically enchanted with the idea of a baby, though (that’s why I put “grandchild” in parentheses; to acknowledge that obvious point). He wants to play with a baby, lavish love upon a baby. This is not a traditional way to portray a king.

(...or a man in general, really!)

It's weird, this thread is mainly making me want to watch Sleeping Beauty again, but on, like, an IMAX screen. Maybe with the dialogue muted or something. But I would love to see those woods and the dragon fight just sprawling across the screen.

― Doctor Casino, Sunday, February 2, 2014 11:13 AM bookmarkflaglink

So I finally caught a film screening of this, in 70mm at the Museum of the Moving Image on Saturday! And I gotta say... it was great! The big screen really favored all the background and deep-focus stuff, even if the character animation shows a few shortcuts that would not have passed muster before WWII. But probably the real benefit was just seeing it with an audience; the energy in the room really changed my whole response to the extended comic antics with the fairies. And I'd remembered there being like four tedious scenes of dumb nonsense with the comical kings, but it's really just one scene, and that mostly played well too!

ALL THAT BEING SAID... it's still not as "magical" as it ought to be, IMHO. The genuinely strange, uncanny, fairy-tale wonder and danger of Snow White definitely shows up in the art, and in the most vivid sequences (basically the last act). But the sheer quantity of goofy midcentury newspaper-strip antics, even with the jokes landing better, kinda takes something away for me. Really, we're already on the slide towards cartoons full of dumb contemporary references. Although I'd probably enjoy an extended discussion of the fairy material as a commentary on the purported automation and ease of housework within the postwar domestic ideal. There's at least one line by the fairies that makes it explicit they expected audiences to "get" this though I can't recall what it was.