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

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.