Thus did one of cinema’s all-time most audience-friendly entertainers and most criminally incompetent businessmen piss away a fortune on two vanity projects – vanity projects that have been more than redeemed by history’s judgment, of course, but that couldn’t possibly matter to Walt and his far more practical brother Roy, with one film, the richly-detailed and expensive Bambi, much too advanced in production to abandon, and another, the deliberately cheap Dumbo, still too far away from its release to fulfill its necessary function of bringing some desperately-needed cash into the Disney Studios’ coffers. With World War II effectively eliminating the foreign markets that might have brought some – any! money to the company, Walt was forced to look for a stop-gap measure, something that would be fast and easy and not tie up his resources too terribly long, and cost little enough that it couldn’t help but turn a profit.
It was, in short, the same problem that would plague Disney in the years during and immediately following America’s involvement in the war, and the response was the same: take the projects we have lying around, too slight for feature-length treatment, and yet too special to get dumped as regular old pre-feature shorts, and cobble them together into a movie long enough to get released. History would call these the “package films”, and to be scrupulously accurate, that’s not exactly what the company released in the summer of 1941, under the title The Reluctant Dragon. Sure, the film was in large part a vehicle for a short film that had been largely completed when the feature went into production; but the whole thing is structured along a very clear narrative thread, something not at all true of e.g. Make Mine Music. That narrative thread makes The Reluctant Dragon one of the most fascinating, irregular curios in all the cobwebby corners of Disney history.
Somewhere along the line, Walt had come into the idea that regular American moviegoers, having no real clue how an animated picture came into being, would love to have a peak inside the dream factory. Walt also had the idea that regular American moviegoers would flock to see non-representational art set to Bach, so he probably oughtn’t have been trusted on this point, yet the idea stuck that the time was ripe for a quick & dirty documentary inside the brand new Burbank animation studios which had just opened at the very tail end of 1939. Though the word “documentary” suggests a project substantially more factual than is the case. It’s filmed in all of the actual rooms where the Disney films were made; it shows, in essence, all of the procedures that go into making a cel-animated film. But it’s transparently staged nonetheless.
The Reluctant Dragon opens in the home of- scratch that. In fact, it opens with opening credits, and these are in their way just about the most special part of the whole thing. As the cards for the animators involved in the creation of the four cartoon sequences seen in the movie, their handwritten names appear next to caricatures of themselves. In all the chronicles of Walt Disney Feature Animation, I know of no other single moment in which the animators who were so important in the successful prosecution of Walt’s vision were brought to the fore, given emphasis and personality to such a degree – it certainly doesn’t happen anywhere else in this film, given that virtually everyone who speaks onscreen is a professional actor.
The Benchleys arrive at the Disney Studios, where Robert is ushered in with remarkably little effort, while Fake Mrs. Benchley leaves to do some errands. The remainder of the film consists of Benchley’s attempts to dodge the irritatingly officious guide Humphrey (Buddy Pepper) by darting into different rooms of the studio campus: and in doing so, accidentally giving both himself and the audience a whirlwind tour of how traditional animation is made. There’s a classroom where animators study an elephant to determine how to caricature such an animal without making it look outright false; a scoring stage where Clarence “Ducky” Nash and Florence Gill provide voices for their signature characters, Donald Duck and Clara Cluck while an orchestra plays the music they’re singing along to; the Foley stage, in which Benchley gets to watch the various tools that Foley artists use to mimic real-life sounds, explained by a young woman from the art department named Doris (Frances Gifford).
Leaving that room, Benchley sneaks through yet another door, and the black-and-white film switches to lurid Technicolor; for this is the camera room, where Benchley learns of Disney’s marvelous innovation, the multiplane camera.
So you have these folks here, just on hand to help some idiot animators film a cheapie documentary, and what do they see, that no other live-action filmmakers had ever seen before? Storyboards. A way of laying out the narrative of film in terms of its shots, prior to ever building a set or assembling a crew. History does not record what Werker did with his new knowledge; whether he went straight to Zanuck and said what he found, or whether it was just one of the those things, trickling out slowly. But nowadays, just about every major motion picture is heavily storyboarded before it gets shot. If The Reluctant Dragon had no other legacy, let it have that.
In the years since the feature fell off the earth, this two-reel short is the only thing anyone has seen much of. It’s certainly not without merit: a goofy fractured fairy tale about a dragon and a knight who’d rather write poetry than fight, and the irritable young boy who wants to force them into conflict. Truth be told, the motivations throughout the piece are a bit hard to keep square; first the boy wants this, then that; and it has not remotely the same ending that Fake Mrs. Benchley read in the opening scene.
But it’s still a charming piece all in all, with some delightful nonsense rhyming , and a truly excellent performance by Barnett Parker as the dragon; he has the stuffy primness of a cartoon Briton, but ends up being the character we find most sympathetic and likable. The animation is no stronger than in “How to Ride a Horse”: just look at the stripped-down backgrounds, and you can clearly see how fast Disney needed to get this little filmlet cranked out.
This project absolutely failed to meet its goals in 1941: released right in the middle of the crippling animators’ strike that, in its way, forever changed the fortunes of the company, it was hard for anyone to take seriously Walt’s theme-park vision of how his workers lived and played; there was moreover a strong feeling among critics and viewers that this was a dirty trick, Disney’s attempt to sell people an animated feature that was only half-animated. Even at a tiny budget, The Reluctant Dragon lost money.
Seven decades later, it’s much easier to appreciate the film as a queer little time capsule, a fantasised version of how animated movies were actually made in 1941, beyond a doubt, but still the glimpses we get of the Disney Studios has a measure of truth behind it nonetheless. That is the multiplane camera; that is Clarence Nash and Florence Gill doing their voices; that is the very Foley equipment used to make all those sound effects. A truly great animation documentary? Absolutely not – but it still is a decent and fun animation documentary, and those were thin on the ground before the age of EPKs and DVD special features. There is history here, even if it has been sanitised – it is the only history we’re going to get (besides, even Walt Disney’s inveterate showmanship ends up having some value: as a snapshot of how Hollywood liked to think of itself, it’s irreplaceable). The Reluctant Dragon is rare but not impossible to find; and it is absolutely essential viewing for anyone with even a passing interest in the art of animation, warts and all. It is a snapshot of a world that simply doesn’t exist, and it is to be treasured.