In 1934, Walt Disney Productions, today known as Walt Disney Animation Studios, announced production on their very first feature-length animated motion picture. As of this writing, the studio has produced an official total of 54 feature films, with two slated for release in 2016.
SNOW WHITE AND THE SEVEN DWARFS
Released 4 February 1938 (Premiered 21 December 1937)
Directed by David Hand (supervising director), William Cottrell (sequence director), Wilfred Jackson (sequence director), Larry Morey (sequence director), Perce Pearce (sequence director) & Ben Sharpsteen (sequence director)
Featuring the Voices of: Adriana Caselotti, Lucille La Verne, Roy Atwell, Pinto Colvig, Otis Harlan, Scotty Matraw, Billy Gilbert, Moroni Olsen, Harry Stockwell, Stuart Buchanan
83 minutes
Based on"Schneewittchen" (English: "Snow White") from Grimm's Fairy Tales (1812) by The Brothers Grimm
It's difficult to overstate the importance and impact of SNOW WHITE AND THE SEVEN DWARFS on film and western culture altogether; it a seminal moment in American culture and pop art history. It is a big freaking deal. Contrary to popular belief, it was not actually the first ever fully animated feature film.
El Apostol, or, "The Apostle", an Argentine satire, was released in 1917, but no surviving copies of it are believed to exist, and the oldest known surviving animated feature film is
Die Abenteuer des Prinzen Achmed, or "The Adventures of Prince Achmed", a German film animated with silhouette puppets moved frame by frame. SNOW WHITE was the first American animated feature film however, and the first feature-length traditionally-animated film. That's not necessarily what makes it so remarkable in the landscape of film and the cultural zeitgeist however. It's important because it was like nothing that had ever been seen before, in a way that has reverberated throughout popular media, laying groundwork for modern fantasy films, color filmmaking, the musical format and more.
Based on
"Schneewittchen", aka
"Snow White", the German fairy tale collected in
Grimms' Fairy Tales, SNOW WHITE AND THE SEVEN DWARFS centers around what is at once a ridiculously inconsequential and shallow conflict and yet also one of the most universal and timeless conflicts in the human experience: the yielding of the elder generation to the younger. Princess Snow White (voiced in a comically high-pitched falsetto by teenage actress Adriana Caselotti) maintains her cheerful demeanor despite being forced to work as a lowly scullery maid by her vain and wicked stepmother, the Queen (voiced by Lucille La Verne). The Queen fears the day that Snow White's beauty will exceed her own and every day inquires of the Slave in the Magic Mirror (voiced by Moroni Olsen),
"Magic Mirror, on the wall, who is the fairest one of all?", and on the day that the Slave of the Mirror answers with "Snow White", the Queen is incensed to look down at the courtyard where the princess is being courted by a young prince (voiced by Harry Stockwell). The Queen conspires to have Snow White murdered, but the girl escapes into the dark forest and discovers a little cottage, home to seven dwarfs who mine for jewels in the mountains nearby. The leader of the dwarfs is the blustering and pompous Doc (voiced by Roy Atwell), who often clashes with the cantankerous woman-hater, Grumpy (voiced by Pinto Colvig, noted as the voiced of Goofy). There's also Happy (voiced by Otis Harlan), Sleepy (also voiced by Colvig), Bashful (voiced by Scotty Mattraw), Sneezy (voiced by Billy Gilbert), and last but not least, Dopey. The dwarfs, with the exception of Grumpy, welcome Snow White in, but the Queen is still dissatisfied as long as a rival to her beauty lives, so she transforms herself into a hideous old crone as a disguise and prepares a poisoned apple to eliminate the princess.
SNOW WHITE doesn't deviate very far from the Grimms' version, except in the ending, which is changed drastically, borrowing directly from the fairy tale of "Sleeping Beauty". In the Grimms' fairy tale, Snow White is revived when the bite from the poisoned apple is dislodged from her throat. Snow White and the Prince then marry and invite the Queen to the wedding feast, where she is fitted with red-hot shoes made of iron and forced to dance to death. There's a number obvious reasons why this ending was replaced in favor of the "Love's First Kiss", partly because it's not a very neat resolution, but also because it's not only inappropriate for family audiences, but altogether sadistic by 20th-century sensibilities. Walt Disney actually had grander plans for the story, pitching it as a battle between good and evil, with the prince playing a more prominent role in the story, but time and budget constraints, as well as the great difficulty the animators found in trying to create their first handsome, human male lead, resulted in those elements being cut. Storyboards exist depicting the subplot involving the prince who is imprisoned and taunted by the Queen, a scene that was later put to use in Disney 1959 animated feature SLEEPING BEAUTY.
The constraints applied to SNOW WHITE are occasionally evident, such as slips or shortcuts in the animation, but there's a sense of discovery in it as the Disney studio develops a new art form. The Disney animators had begun trying their pencils at animation that transcended traditional "cartooning" with their animated shorts in preparation for their big feature film debut, including
"The Goddess of Spring", in which they attempted a realistically beautiful female character (with mixed results), and
"The Old Mill", in which they experimented with the brand-new multiplane camera that created three-dimensional, multi-layered animation, but they're still racing against the clock to perfect something more than a feature-length cartoon, an animated motion picture. Animation of Snow White and especially the Prince is still a little rough at times, but Art Babbit's animation of the Queen creates a commanding and regal presence. The really juicy material for the animators is in the dwarf characters, actual cartoon characters with clearly defined comic personalities and quirks. The breakout character of SNOW WHITE was Dopey, the mute, beardless dwarf whose mannerisms were largely inspired by comedian Harpo Marx, and as Walt described in the original 1937 preview, "He's nice, but sort of silly." Of course, Dopey is the comic showpiece of the movie, providing lots of opportunities for comic side misadventures, including a memorable struggle with a slippery bar of soap, but the real highlight of the septet is Grumpy. Grumpy is the unexpected heart of the seven dwarfs, initially loathing of Snow White, but gradually coming around to the point that when he has to hide his face and cry when the dwarfs hold vigil for her, he garners the most audience sympathy. Plus his muscular buttock action at that pipe organ is incredible.
The movie is clearly a stepping stone between Disney's animated shorts and something more "legitimate", taking a very simple story and using much of the 83 minute run time on gags involving the dwarfs and animals typical of cartoon shorts, such as when the dwarfs first return to their cottage to find it cleaned by Snow White, or as they sleep around the cottage, while branching out into something more atmospheric. The visuals of SNOW WHITE are lush and artistically ambitious, reminiscent of European storybooks around that time, with ornate designs on the margins, like the woodwork and furnishings around the dwarfs' cottage, or the zodiac that borders the Magic Mirror. Many scenes, especially involving the Queen's castle, as well as Snow White's flight through the forest with its frightening hallucinations, are directly influenced by German Expressionist cinema like the films of F.W. Murnau and Robert Wiene, with the use of shadows and hallucinogenic imagery.
Disney has often been criticized for "dumbing down" fairy tales and folklore to appeal to a wider, American audience and children in particular, rounding out the rough edges and presenting a deceptive fantasy world in pursuit of a happy ending. This is fair to some degree, and the gender politics of SNOW WHITE are undoubtedly troubling, as Snow White is easily the most passive character in her own story, singing
"Someday My Prince Will Come", cooking and cleaning for the dwarfs happily while she literally
waits for her Prince Charming to whisk her away to her "happily ever after". It's not a helpful lesson for young girls, but it's at least somewhat defensible in that the story is a pure fantasy that works on a plane above the simple story, as a metaphor relevant to the common man in Depression era America when the movie was released. For many people, there was little that could be done, and they were forced to trust that their faith and devotion would eventually payoff. When the Prince awakens Snow White from her spell, and she kisses each of the dwarfs goodbye, he takes her away to a luminescent castle that appears to be nestled among the clouds. Although it has been theorized, even as early as when the film was first released in 1938 (after a 1937 premiere), that the Prince's castle in the sky is a metaphor for heaven, I have my doubts. However, it seems to implicate a higher form of reward than something merely temporal, and contrasts with the Queen's clearly earthbound castle. There's more than meets the eye.
In terms of softening out the rough edges, there isn't much argument for keeping the Grimms' unnecessarily sadistic end of the Queen, but SNOW WHITE is only the first of many examples of a Disney classic that goes a lot darker than some people might remember. As aforementioned, elements of the film's style were directly influenced by German Expressionist films, horror in particular, and some moments are very Gothic in tone and imagery. A popular (unconfirmed) rumor holds that when the movie played at Radio City Music Hall in 1938, many of the seats had to have the upholstery replaced after being ruined by children so frightened that they lost bladder control, and whether or not that's accurate, the movie was noted for being potentially too scary for child audiences. When it was initially released in the UK, the British Board of Film Censors classified it at an 'A' (out of "U - Universal", "A - Adult", and "H - Horror"), advising, and in some regions requiring, that children below a certain age be accompanied by an adult. More than frightening, however, the movie is atmospheric, and one of the best scenes is when the Queen descends into her creepy laboratory, after being informed by the Magic Mirror that the carved-out heart she believes to be Snow White is actually that of a pig. Concocting a potion to transform herself into a wretched old hag, the transformation scene is specifically inspired by a similar scene in Rouben Mamoulian's Frederic March-starring 1931 horror adaptation, DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE, and makes use of the recently-invented multiplane camera to create the disorienting, swirling effect when the Queen first drinks the combination of mummy dust, black of night, an old hag's cackle, a scream of fright, a blast of wind and a thunderbolt.
During production, the cost of the film soared multiple times over the initial estimate of $250,000 to what was then an unheard of sum of $1.48 million, for which Walt had to return to his creditors with a rough cut of the unfinished film to ask for more money, in addition to mortgaging his own house. Some members of the press proclaimed it "Disney's Folly", a proclamation that couldn't have been more wrong and which neither Walt or his studio would never forget to mention when recalling the film, even though the prevalence of the sentiment was hardly widespread at the time of the film's release, as so much emphasis would suggest. Disney had wowed the world many times already with the first sound cartoons and Mickey Mouse, color cartoons and the Silly Symphony series, and SNOW WHITE was eagerly anticipated by most. However, the response was jubilation beyond what anyone could have expected, receiving uninhibited praise from audiences and critics alike, even becoming the highest-grossing film ever made with $6.5 million in its initial run (the record would be usurped shortly thereafter in 1940 by GONE WITH THE WIND). Walt poured much of that revenue into his studio, even constructing a lavish, considerably larger new studio while beginning development on numerous new animated features, but soon, with the advent of World War II and a studio strike, Walt would discover that he could scarcely afford his plans. In 1944, in desperate need of revenue, the studio released SNOW WHITE back into theaters, and once again saved Walt's studio. Today, it's the 10th highest-grossing film of all-time when adjusted for inflation, but as Walt's ambitions grew only larger, and with them, costs, and SNOW WHITE would be only one of two financially successful animated features during the Disney Golden Age.
PINOCCHIO
Released 23 February 1940
Directed by Hamilton Luske (supervising director), Norman Ferguson (sequence director), T. Hee (sequence director), Wilfred Jackson (sequence director), Jack Kinney (sequence director), Bill Roberts (sequence director) & Ben Sharpsteen (supervising director)
Featuring the Voices of: Dickie Jones, Cliff Edwards, Christian Rub, Walter Catlett, Charles Judels, Evelyn Venable, Frankie Darro
88 minutes
Based on "Le avventure di Pinocchio" (1883; English: "The Adventures of Pinocchio") by Carlo Collodi
PINOCCHIO is considered the most perfect of Walt Disney Animation's feature films by many critics and scholars, and the apex of animated feature filmmaking, and on a technical level, at least until the advent of digital animation systems like the Computer Animation Production System that the studio adopted in 1989, it is definitely true. It is a paragon of technical achievement, and one of the greatest visions of a fairy tale on film. There have been many live-action screen adaptations of Carlo Collodi's
The Adventures of Pinocchio, and they're all creepy as hell, and not in a good way; but the material is so ideally suited to animation. Pinocchio can be a wooden puppet while looking as much like other human characters except that he features hinges at his elbows and knees, angular limbs and sounds like wood when its convenient to do so, but in animation, there's no responsibility to extraneous details that are either indulged to creepy effect in live action, or made whimsical to creepy effect in live action. But PINOCCHIO, alongside FANTASIA, is the most lavishly produced hand-drawn production to come out of the studio, keeping a somewhat grounded but appropriately childlike quality that transcends a cartoon into a living, breathing, and entirely hand-crafted storybook.
Loosely adapting Collodi's episodic and, frankly, nasty tale, the movie follows the adventures of the naive wooden puppet Pinocchio (voiced by child actor Dickie Jones), who is granted life by the Blue Fairy (voiced by Evelyn Venable, also known as the original model for the Columbia Pictures logo) in response to a wish made by his maker, the wood artisan Geppetto (voiced by Christian Rub). The Blue Fairy promises to make Pinocchio a real boy if he proves himself worthy by being "brave, truthful, and unselfish", and with the guidance of his "conscience", a cricket by the name of Jiminy Cricket (his name a humorous play on the less objectionable exclamatory replacement for "Jesus Christ"; voiced by singer/radio personality/vaudeville performer Cliff Edwards, aka "Ukulele Ike"), Pinocchio sets out to do just that. But the lad is easily led astray by the likes of the sly fox "Honest John" (voiced by Walter Catlett) and his mute partner-in-crime, Gideon the Cat, or Lampwick (voiced by Frankie Darro), a rotten little boy, and slowly but surely, and after a series of traumatizing close calls, Pinocchio comes to realize what the Blue Fairy meant.
PINOCCHIO is actually a lot like a buddy film, and the story is as much about Jiminy's journey as it is Pinocchio. When we first meet Jiminy, he's a little bit of a good-natured ne'er-do-well, dressed in rags and kind of a rascal. He gets the job of being Pinocchio's conscience in the first place by eavesdropping and losing his patience at Pinocchio's naive questions, and then going gaga over the Blue Fairy. Like Pinocchio though, he's doing his best to do like the Blue Fairy said, and he often throws in the towel in exasperation before eventually coming back around. Jiminy was the breakout character of the film went to be a recurring icon of the Disney brand, appearing in another feature film, FUN AND FANCY FREE, as well as a series of TV specials and educational films and segments.
Many viewers tend to forget just how dark and frightening this film gets, and although I grew up watching it as a small child, ironically it wasn't until I was older that I realized how scary and intense the movie is. Although the story doesn't feel episodic, it does follow a pattern through a series of varied scenarios in which Pinocchio resolves to make good, winds up doing the wrong thing anyway, and as worse gets to worst, he oh-so-narrowly escapes and resolves to make good again. He's locked up in a birdcage by the puppeteer Stromboli, who taunts him that once he's served his purpose of performing for gold coins from audiences across Europe, he'll use him for firewood, a threat he makes as he hurls an axe into a worn-out old puppet. The climactic sequence in which Pinocchio and Geppetto escape the belly of the whale Monstro is seething with tension as the giant whale propels itself at them on their tiny raft and almost crushes them. The standout moment of horror in PINOCCHIO however, is undoubtedly at Pleasure Island, where naughty boys are encouraged to indulge in their worst vices, but when night is fallen and the fun is over, they discover too late that their fun was not free. Drinking ale and smoking cigars with Lampwick (try getting that in a mainstream movie today) while shooting billiards, Pinocchio sees his new friend, a cocksure brat, devolve into screaming hysterics as he turns into a donkey, pawing at Pinocchio as his hands clench into fists that become hooves, and Lampwick's shadow on the wall slowly and painfully is forced onto all fours. The screams of "Mama!" turn into frantic braying, and as Jiminy witnesses, Lampwick, along with the other boys, will be shipped off to short and hellish lives as beasts of burden in the salt mines. So yeah, I guess you could call it a kids movie. You goons.
Aesthetically, PINOCCHIO is unmatched by any other WDA film until BEAUTY AND THE BEAST, but PINOCCHIO is entirely hand-crafted; hand-drawn on paper, hand-traced in ink onto celluloid sheets, hand-painted and positioned over hand-painted backgrounds and shot frame-by-frame on the camera. This film contains what is almost certainly the most elaborate shot ever created in the pre-digital era of animation, as morning starts in the little Tuscan village, beginning at the bell tower as birds fly past, following over the red rooftops and roads as parents send their children off to school, eventually cutting to Pinocchio and Geppetto outside Geppetto's Workshop. It's the crowning achievement of the multiplane camera technology, used by WDA to create a three-dimensional effect with two-dimensional, hand-drawn animation. Invented by William Garity in 1937, the multiplane camera had shelves on which the animation artwork and scenery would be placed, creating a complete, layered image, and the camera could then be moved through the shelf space to appear as if it were moving past the layers. It was a complex, laborious and expensive process, but the effect can lend a stunning sense of real world space to the fantastical storybook world of the animation, and PINOCCHIO represents the pinnacle of that technology.
The Academy Award-winning signature song of the film,
"When You Wish Upon a Star", has gone on to become the theme for the Walt Disney Company itself, appearing over the studio logo at the start of most of their releases, but the entire soundtrack undoubtedly ranks with the studio's best, including the sweet, charming tune
"Little Wooden Head", and the carefree ditty
"Hi-Diddle-Dee-Dee". Just this year, one of the biggest blockbusters of the summer, AVENGERS: AGE OF ULTRON, brought back Pinocchio's showcase number,
"I've Got No Strings" as the villainous Ultron's theme. In PINOCCHIO, the music, written by Leigh Harline (song & score composition), Ned Washington (song lyrics) and Paul J. Smith (score composition), combines with the visual aesthetic and free-flowing story structure to create one of the most richly atmospheric and transporting experiences in animated films.
When PINOCCHIO was released in 1940, it was a box office flop, costing nearly $1 million more than SNOW WHITE to produce while grossing less than 30% that film by the most optimistic estimates. With the beginning of World War II in September 1939, the European market that had responded so enthusiastically to SNOW WHITE was now cut off, and Walt Disney Productions had to write it off at a $1 million loss. However, like FANTASIA, BAMBI and a slew of other animated Disney box office failures, re-issues that followed throughout the decades, and home format releases (the first of them in 1985) vindicated PINOCCHIO, making it one of the studio's biggest hits in the long term. In 1977, even Steven Spielberg made prominent references to it the science fiction classic, CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND, including a brief snippet of the melody from
"When You Wish Upon a Star" at the film's climactic moment (Spielberg was unable to obtain the rights to play the song over the closing credits. As 2015 marks its 75th anniversary, it remains as potent as ever, and one of the enduring landmarks of not only The Walt Disney Company or the medium of animation, but also of movies in general and American iconography.
FANTASIA
Released 13 November 1940
Directed by Norm Ferguson (segment director), James Algar (segment director), Samuel Armstrong (segment director), Ford Beebe Jr. (segment director), Jim Handley (segment director), T. Hee (segment director), Wilfred Jackson (segment director), Hamilton Luske (segment director), Bill Roberts (segment director), Paul Satterfield (segment director), Ben Sharpsteen (segment director) & David Hand (segment director)
Featuring the Voices of: Walt Disney, Julietta Novis
Featuring Appearances by: Leopold Stokowski, Deems Taylor
125 minutes
Anthology film based on "Tocatta and Fugue in D Minor" by Johann Sebastian Bach, "The Nutcracker Suite" by Pytor Ilyich Tchaikovsky, "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" by Paul Dukas, "The Rite of Spring" by Igor Stravinsky, "Symphony No. 6 in F major" by Ludwig van Beethoven, "Dance of the Hours" by Amilcare Ponchielli, "Night on Bald Mountain" by Modest Mussorgsky, and "Ave Maria" by Franz Schubert
FANTASIA was the most ambitious film that Walt Disney ever produced, a lavish, experimental production that Walt believed would change the landscape of animation, filmmaking and music, and in a sense did, but not in the way he hoped or needed. It was a movie well ahead of its time, introducing new technologies and new ways of understanding music and film and the relationship between the creative mediums. It was the brainchild of Disney and Leopold Stowkowski, the long-time conductor of the Philadelphia Orchestra, as identifiable with classical music at the time as Walt was with animation, noted for his fierce style of conducting and his characteristically wild white hair. Disney's popular "Silly Symphonies" series of animated shorts had blended animation and classical music, but FANTASIA was meant to take the idea further, carrying animation into prestige within the artistic community, beyond the its status as a mere "pop art". Stowkowski hoped FANTASIA would help propel classic music back into the public consciousness.
The film is presented in a concert format, with each musical animated segment introduced in artistically lit live-action scenes by a master of ceremonies, Deems Taylor, a noted music critic who assisted Disney and Stowkowski in selecting which compositions were to be featured. There are seven animated sequences inspired by classical music, as well as a "Meet the Soundtrack" scene that introduces different sections and timbres of the orchestra. Bach's
"Toccata and Fugue in D Minor" features abstract animation that responds to the music specifically with lines, waves, shapes and colors. Selections of Tchaikovsky's
"Nutcracker Suite" accompany a montage of the changing seasons, with slightly racist Asian characters in the form of mushrooms during the "Chinese Dance", including an impish little mushroom modeled after Dopey from SNOW WHITE, dandelions reminiscent of Cossacks dance the "Russian Dance" and fairies paint the leaves with frost at the advent of winter. The film's most famous segment, Paul Dukas'
"The Sorcerer's Apprentice", stars Mickey Mouse (voiced by Walt Disney) as the apprentice of a sorcerer who gets in over his head when he recklessly uses advanced magic to do a simple chore while his master is away. The lengthiest and most impressive segment is Stravinsky's
"The Rite of Spring", an avant-garde and then-somewhat controversial piece that presents the scientifically-informed (by the standards of the day) origins of the planet Earth, from its initial forming from raw materials and early millennia as a globe of blistering volcanic activity, to the evolution of life from the primordial soup and into the dinosaurs, ending with the extinction of the "thunder lizards" (the continuation of the segment in which mammals would evolve into modern man was planned but scrapped as too "controversial"). Beethoven's
"The Pastoral Symphony" (lambasted by classical music aficionados of the time, because Beethoven is like
The Beatles of classical music, and the music buffs hate to see him reinterpreted) is a slightly more cartoonish segment, depicting the courtship of young centaurs and centaurettes and the festivities of various Greco-Roman deities. Amilcare Ponchielli's
"Dance of the Hours" is presented as a comic ballet featuring animal performers representing four periods of the day, with ostriches in the morning, hippos in the afternoon, elephants in the evening, and alligators in the night. The final segment is in two parts, with Modest Mussorgsky's sinister
"Night on Bald Mountain" as the hulking devil Chernabog oversees a Black Mass, a satanic orgy as various demons and flames of hellfire dance, followed by Schubert's
"Ave Maria" in the triumph of good, repelling Chernabog and his minions back to into the darkness as the dawn breaks and a chorus of saints carries torches through a forest as the trees take on the form of a natural cathedral.
FANTASIA never existed as Walt had envisioned it would, as a living, evolving piece of cinema that would maintain some old standards while introducing new segments and musical selections over decades of re-issues (this notion of a living, continuing creative project would later be fulfilled by Walt with Disneyland, while his nephew Roy would attempt something in the manner of Walt's vision for FANTASIA with FANTASIA 2000), so in a sense, it's incomplete. It laid the groundwork for future popular entertainment like music videos and pushed the envelope in ways that hadn't been done before, and in some cases, since. It was the first commercially released film to use stereophonic sound, now taken for granted in cinemas today, developed with the name "Fantasound", intended to simulate the immersive sound quality of an actual concert (Disney requested that theaters install the expensive sound system when exhibiting the film, which made it prohibitively expensive in most cases). The audio recording and exhibiting technology used in making and distributing the film was as ahead of its time as the experimental content, but would eventually hit the mainstream in later years.
"The Pastoral Symphony" is probably the weakest link in the set,
and now appears in an edited form, with a couple of distasteful racist
stereotypes, including a little black centaurette who polishes a white
centaurette's hooves. It's a cartoonish and sillier segment, but the
film as a whole is a wonder.
"The Sorcerer's Apprentice" is the film's most famous segment, and probably Mickey Mouse's most famous appearance, and without negating that,
"The Rite of Spring" and
"Night on Bald Mountain" are the greatest achievements of FANTASIA. As recently as 1913, Igor Stravinsky's
"The Rite of Spring", a ballet based on pagan myths, had caused an uproar when performed in Paris and was a controversial choice advised by Taylor for the film. It's ambition is enormous, beginning at the origins of the world, synchronizing the bursting bubbles of molten rock with the rhythm of the orchestra, and attempting to create a vision accurate to the scientific reality. More than half a century before Industrial Light & Magic created photo-realistic dinosaurs onscreen in JURASSIC PARK, FANTASIA aimed to create the most realistic depiction of everyone's favorite prehistoric beasts possible, with a sobriety and savagery that transcended the reputation of the studio. Rendered according to the understanding of dinosaur anatomy at the time, the sequence climaxes in a confrontation between a stegosaurus and a carnivore. These are friendly, anthropomorphized, talking dinosaurs. The carnivore clamps down on the stegosaurus' neck until it dies and proceeds to eat it.
SNOW WHITE and PINOCCHIO have their own pretty terrifying moments, but in
"Night on Bald Mountain", Disney cranks the horror up to 11 with Chernabog, the towering achievement of legendary animator Vladimir "Bill" Tytla, a hulking devil (a variation on the Slavic pagan deity "Crnobog", meaning "black god") perched atop Bald Mountain as he oversees the satanic rituals taking place in the palm of his hand. Sexy dancing ladies writhe as he turns them into swine, and screeching harpies swoop about (curiously, while the Production Code Office prohibited the animators from drawing nipples on the centaurettes in
"The Pastoral Symphony", they got away with having them on the harpies), while flames flick through the unholy orgy and warping wraiths emerge from the nearby cemetery. And when the morning dawns, the agony is on the great demon's face, before he bows to its will and wraps himself in his wings, forming the peak of the mountain.
Walt would never again reach the creative heights of FANTASIA in animation again, as it became an even greater financial loss than PINOCCHIO (until, again, future re-issues came to make its money back many times over), resulting in a financial strain that forced him to make cuts to BAMBI, and WWII put the studio's production of feature animation on a hiatus that the studio wouldn't truly recover from until the Disney Renaissance in 1989.
DUMBO
Released 31 October 1941
Directed by Ben Sharpsteen (supervising director), Sam Armstrong (sequence director), Norman Ferguson (sequence director), Wilfred Jackson (sequence director), Jack Kinney (sequence director) & Bill Roberts (sequence director)
64 minutes
Featuring the Voices of: Edward Brophy, Verna Felton, Cliff Edwards, Herman Bing, Sterling Holloway, Margaret Wright, Noreen Gammill, Dorothy Scott, Sarah Selby
Based on "Dumbo" (1939?), a "Roll-A-Book" by Helen Aberson & Harold Pearl
DUMBO came as an emergency measure in the midst of the most tumultuous point in the early years of WDA feature animation. After losing money on the lavishly-produced PINOCCHIO and FANTASIA, while the upcoming and continuously delayed BAMBI suck up financial resources the studio didn't have, Walt saw his would-be animation utopia torn asunder by a Screen Cartoonists Guild strike that grew more and more bitter over a protracted 5 weeks, decimating studio morale and losing some of Walt's lead animators. DUMBO was designed as a studio-saving measure, an inexpensive, commercially-assured feature, standing in sharp contrast to the extravagant and experimental filmmaking of FANTASIA.
Taken from what is probably WDA's most unique story source, a toy prototype called a "Roll-A-Book" (essentially a moving panorama story for children), DUMBO's eponymous character is born to Mrs. Jumbo (voiced by Verna Felton), a circus elephant who names him Jumbo, Jr., but upon seeing the little calf's over-sized ears, the catty social circle of other elephants dub him "Dumbo" and the moniker sticks. After Mrs. Jumbo is locked up as a "mad elephant" for losing her temper at an obnoxious boy who torments her calf, Dumbo is left on his own. Dumbo is ousted from the community of elephants and forced to be part of the clown act, but Timothy (voiced by Edward Brophy), a mouse with a thick (occasionally annoying) New York accent, takes him under his sympathetic wing. After they both wake up in a tree after a night of accidental intoxication, Timothy becomes convinced that Dumbo's massive ears can be used to fly, but the real challenge is proving it in the circus tent.
DUMBO strikes an interesting balance between the evolving impressionistic style of FANTASIA and the studio's more ambitious shorts, and a simplistic, straightforward cartoon. Its low cost is starkly apparent in comparison to the other four features of this period, full of simple colors and designs and relatively liberal use of the
"squash and stretch" principle. In place of the richly layered worlds of SNOW WHITE AND THE SEVEN DWARFS and PINOCCHIO, DUMBO embraces simplicity and surrealism with the same heart as those earlier features. The color palette alternates between the bright, saturated tones of daytime scenes and the circus, and the dark greys and blues of the
"Song of the Roustabouts", and the watercolor backgrounds were the last used in an animated feature film by WDA until LILO & STITCH 61 years later. Rather than pushing to advance the art form in a technical sense, DUMBO is a veritable animator's playground with loose movements, rounded shapes and a lot of heart and character to go with it all. Great character animator Vladimir "Bill" Tytla, who ultimately left the studio in 1943 due to feeling unwelcome for participating in the strike, best known for heavy and sometimes threatening characters like Stromboli from PINOCCHIO, Chernabog from FANTASIA and Grumpy from SNOW WHITE, animates the silent title character with a sincerity and honestly childlike demeanor, especially notable in the bath scene as Dumbo plays in the water.
"Baby Mine" is the real heart string-pulling scene, but the bizarre and slightly frightening surrealistic
"Pink Elephants on Parade" is arguably the most memorable sequence of the film. Based on the early 20th-century euphemism to be so drunk that one is "seeing pink elephants", the scene follows Dumbo and Timothy becoming unwittingly intoxicated from a bucket of water mixed with champagne,the "Pink Elephants" sequence is one of WDA's most famous examples of surrealist animation as brightly colored elephantine characters morphing between varied shapes and forms, accompanied by the upbeat but eerie musical number by Oliver Wallace and Ned Washington, performed by The Sportsmen.
With a particularly spare source material and a contemporary setting, DUMBO is a small movie, and without negating its entertainment and emotional value, it's fair to identify as closer to a feature-length "cartoon" than the rest of the Golden Age, or most of the studio's animated features, not including the "package films" that would dominate their output after BAMBI and through the rest of the decade. According to the American Film Institute, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and the British Film Institute, a feature length film must be no less than 40 minutes long, while the Screen Actors Guild cites a minimum of 80 minutes, but at 64 minutes, Disney's distributor, RKO, was reluctant to release DUMBO as a main feature. At the time, one admission at the cinema counted for more than the specific movie that patrons were going to see; people could see a newsreel, a couple of short films (often animated short films made by Disney), a B-movie, a shorter, less expensive film without major stars (the term has since come to refer to a cheaply-made amateurish movie), and the A-movie, aka the feature attraction. Disney's animated features were always A-movies, but considering its slight running time, RKO wanted to release it as a B-movie, which Disney refused to allow, and he got his way. DUMBO and SNOW WHITE were the only WDA features during the Golden Age to turn a profit during their initial release, and
TIME magazine was planning to announce Dumbo as "Mammal of the Year" on the 29 December 1941 cover, but cancelled it when Japanese forces attacked Pearl Harbor on 7 December. As the United States officially entered WWII, the U.S. Army and the Navy Bureau of Aeronautics contracted most of the studio's facilities and resources into making propaganda and training films, and the studio's only significant revenue during this time came from a 1944 re-issue of SNOW WHITE. The studio still had one more Golden Age feature in the pipeline, but DUMBO, a minor production but a major and enduring hit, had come into being at the end of an era.
BAMBI
Released 21 August 1942
Directed by David D. Hand (supervising director), James Algar (sequence director), Sam Armstrong (sequence director), Graham Heid (sequence director), Bill Roberts (sequence director), Paul Satterfield (sequence director) & Norman Wright (sequence director)
Featuring the Voices of: Hardie Albright, John Sutherland, Donnie Dunagan, Peter Behn, Tim Davis, Sam Edwards, Stan Alexander, Sterling Holloway, Will Wright, Cammie King, Ann Gillis, Fred Shields, Paula Winslowe, Bobby Stewart
70 minutes
Based on Bambi, Eine Lebensgeschichte aus dem Walde (1923; English: Bambi, a Life in the Woods) by Felix Salten
At the time that Walt Disney became interested in producing an animated adaptation of the Austrian novella
Bambi, a Life in the Woods by Felix Salten, it was a popular contemporary book and subjected to the infamous Nazi book burnings in its native country of Austria, considered an anti-fascist "political allegory on the treatment of Jews in Europe". Such an allegory is less apparent to the modern reader than the environmental, anti-hunting themes, but Salten's novella is a darkly disturbing and adult story about a deer coming of age in the forest, and it remains very affecting nine decades after it was written.
Disney's version is somewhat lighter, and significantly less gory (disturbing at times maybe, but not gory at all, actually), but is nonetheless one of the deeper and darker WDA features, especially in their early years. There isn't a strong plot line that carries through the film; as the title of the source material suggests, it is a "life in the woods", beginning at the birth of Bambi, a young fawn and the "young prince of the forest". With the guidance of his mother (voiced by Paula Winslowe), and his friends Thumper (voiced at various ages by Peter Behn, Tim Davis and Sam Edwards), a rabbit, and Flower (voiced at various ages by Stan Alexander, Tim Davis and Sterling Holloway), a skunk, Bambi (voiced at various ages by Bobby Stewart, Donnie Dunagan, Hardie Albright and John Sutherland) grows up in the deciduous forest, enduring the long winter and learning to be cautious of the forest's great enemy, "Man". In the film's most famous scene, Bambi's mother is shot and killed by a hunter, at which time Bambi's father, the Great Prince, teaches him how to survive on his own as Bambi matures into a young stag. The following spring, Bambi, Thumper and Flower find their mates, Bambi with Faline (voiced at various ages by Cammie King and Ann Gillis), a doe he played with as fawns. Then Man returns to the forest in a hunting party, and Bambi fends off Man's hounds to protect Faline before Man's fire spreads quickly, turning the forest into a fiery inferno. Not all the animals survive, but among those who make it to the safety of the riverbank are Bambi, Faline and the Great Prince. When spring comes again, the forest has renewed itself once again as Flower and Thumper, both of them fathers now, and the other animals of the forest gather to witness Faline's newborn twins, while Bambi, ascended as the Great Prince of the Forest, looks on.
BAMBI is a beautiful, moving film, but is not one of WDA's more re-watchable features, moving at a relatively slow pace through the meandering story. Regardless, it's undeniably one of the most majestic and remarkable animated features made, especially in the latter half when the cute animal hijinks give way to a powerful story of survival and the circle of life with some of Disney's most awe-inspiring scenes. The wildfire sequence is one of Disney's most dramatic, with Bambi and the Great Prince evading blazing logs and raining embers before leaping from a pouring waterfall in a visually spectacular moment topped off by a stunning long shot of the raging fire that has engulfed the tallest trees.
The first half, while lavishly produced and certainly with its moments, is less interesting than the second, largely revolving around young Bambi, Thumper and Flower as they experience the changing of the seasons and relying heavily on cute gags and vignettes of nature. The vignettes are fascinating, stopping to see the natural world, hand-crafted on animation cels of course, in its small moments like a field mouse rubbing its face with a dew drop or the famous
"Little April Showers" sequence showing the animals covering themselves from a rainstorm. Scenes of young Bambi, Thumper and Flower are cutesy and modestly amusing, but what makes them stand out is how the behavior is so true to actual children, such as Bambi's first encounter with Faline, which is a little awkward, but in a manner very true to the spirit of actual childhood play.
BAMBI is the last film on which Disney's house composer Frank Churchill, whose iconic work included
"Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?" for the animated short, "The Three Little Pigs", and the song scores for SNOW WHITE AND THE SEVEN DWARFS and DUMBO. For BAMBI, he composed the gorgeous theme,
"Love is a Song", one of the most underrated songs in Disney's vast and beloved library, which plays over the opening credits and acts as a recurring theme until it's reprised by the Disney choir as Bambi and the Great Prince look on at the birth of Bambi's offspring and the end title card comes up. Tragically, he committed suicide at the age of 40 only a few months before the film's release when he put a shotgun in his mouth and died at his piano.
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| Frank Churchill |
BAMBI's influence has reverberated throughout many films that have followed, especially animation, such as Don Bluth's Steven Spielberg and George Lucas-produced 1988 hit, THE LAND BEFORE TIME, even paying homage to the Disney classic as specifically as recreating the gag in which the baby birds fight over berries with baby pterodactyls. Bluth's film opens with dinosaurs gathering to see the hatching of a baby apatosaurus named Littlefoot, and in a pivotal scene, Littlefoot's mother is killed by a "sharp-tooth" (Tyrannosaurus), a scene that is significantly more graphic than the mother's death in BAMBI. However, the story does not carry Littlefoot and his friends into the realm of adulthood. More than 50 years after BAMBI, Disney made a similarly-themed film that became one of the most successful movies of all time, 1994's THE LION KING. Also opening with a gathering in the animal kingdom to witness the arrival of a new prince, and featuring the devastating death of a parent, THE LION KING is a story about the circle of life, and the only other WDA feature without any onscreen human characters. But unlike in THE LION KING, mankind does play a role in the action in BAMBI, a vicious and terrifying role that placed "Man", who never appears onscreen, at #20 on the American Film Institute's list of the 50 greatest film villains. The movie undeniably fuels an anti-hunting sentiment, although it's certainly not as explicit as it was in Salten's book. The film was denounced by hunting groups from the moment of its release in 1942, and while the message is clear, it's doubtful that Disney was trying to so much to start a social movement as he was trying to tell a good story. I find hunting distasteful, but for reasons against eating meat, which I enjoy in moderation. I disdain the thought of killing animals for sport, and in a world where meat is so readily available, there is no other reason for hunting in terms of personal reasons. In terms of the general welfare, there are issues
involving species population control, but that's not why hunters hunt; it's one of the ways they justify hunting. In the context of BAMBI though, who's defending the Man who kills a mother doe and carelessly leaves a campfire to set the forest ablaze? C'mon guys.
The production is undeniably splendid with the gorgeous scenery of legendary Disney artist Ty
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| All images via Disney |
Wong, and the practiced, detailed animation that had so clearly evolved since the animals of SNOW WHITE AND THE SEVEN DWARFS, BAMBI is the conclusion of the Disney Golden Age, also known as "The Big Five". It followed PINOCCHIO and FANTASIA as yet another highly expensive and ambitiously experimental production that failed to recoup its costs as the world fell into WWII, cutting off the European market as the Walt Disney Studios were contracted by the U.S. Army and Navy Bureau of Aeronautics to focus their efforts of mostly unprofitable military training and propaganda films. Worst of all, the animators' strike in 1941, protesting Disney's flawed merit-based wage system, descended in a bitter conflict that lost him some of his most talented artists and destroyed morale at the studio. Although the studio eventually returned to producing feature animation, some projects on the studio's slate since the immediate aftermath of SNOW WHITE, but Walt's heart was rarely in it the same way again. BAMBI was the last animated feature in which Walt played such an active role.
This series will continue in The Disney Package Films (1943-1949)
