Unfortunately for his dreams, his distributors at RKO Radio Pictures were incredibly nervous at the idea of a Disney production that didn’t have any any animation at all (bearing in mind that his two most protracted experiments with live-action to that point, SotS and 1941’s The Reluctant Dragon, had come under no small amount of criticism for the relative lack of animation, it being the implication that Disney’s imagination was only valuable insofar as it was hand-drawn), and early in 1946, So Dear to My Heart was retooled somewhat, to add in a few musical animated numbers. The degree to which the writers’ hearts were in this task can be readily measured by considering that the plot of the film would change in not the smallest detail if the animated sequences and everything presented within them were removed entirely, though at that point it would barely clear 70 minutes and only barely meet the definition of a “feature”. On the other hand, the animators and designers assigned to the project – several important figures such as Les Clark, Milt Kahl, Mary Blair, and others, all under the direction of Hamilton Luske – were clearly more energised than their colleagues; the animated sequences in SDtMH, though brief, are among the most innovative of Disney’s post-war history.
One of those sequences, though it hardly meets the typical definition of “animation”, essentially opens the movie: after the camera tracks in to a dusty old scrapbook in an attic, the famous multiplane camera takes us into and through the pages of that scrapbook, in one of the most ambitious series of shots the studio had then attempted. Through greeting cards and across landscapes that shift and flow as easily as nature, this vies with the legendary “Ave Maria” shots in Fantasia for complexity, and if the movie consisted of nothing but this sequence, that would still make it worth at least a peak. It is easy to note that the package films made little use of the difficult, expensive multiplane technique; I had been inclined to blame the need to produce those films fast and cheap, but now I wonder if there’s another part to the answer: the opening of SDtMH took all the energies of the multiplane operators between 1946 and 1948 (no, I don’t actually think this).
Okay, not that blood & thundery, but it is an exceedingly Christian film, by the standards of 1948, when the film premiered, or today. That extends to its resolute lack of overt conflict: almost the entirety of the film consists of Grandma Kincaid gently giving in to Jerry’s whims and turning a blind eye to the destruction wreaked by the black lamb – Danny, named in honor of the horse – while fretting that in so doing, she’s allowing him to drift away from God, contrasted with Hiram’s attempts to sweet-talk the old lady into dropping her steadfast opposition to the fair, which she views as a frivolous waste of the precious money that comes to the family as a privilege, not a right. Beyond that – which is tenuous to support even a 79-minute family film – So Dear to My Heart is nothing more or less than a love letter to Walt Disney’s well-expressed ideas of Americana, where nothing in the whole of history was ever better than the life a child in the Midwest in the early 20th Century, which by stunning coincidence happened to be exactly the life Disney himself led. Indeed, certain elements of the set design in the movie were based on his own memories, most notably the Kincaid barn, which Walt ended up installing in his own backyard. To the end of his days, it was a retreat where he could go when the pressures of being a studio head and the manager of the largest theme park in the world got to be too daunting.
I won’t lie, I found it all a bit tiresome. Movies that make arguments like, “God, how much better in every conceivable way life used to be, before modern things” don’t hold much water for me, unless they are also glorious masterpieces of cinema, like the politically suspect, but audaciously entertaining Meet Me in St. Louis. So Dear to My Heart, in its otherwise admirable desire to be as generous and approachable as possible, is compelled to be too simple to have any kind of real aesthetic bite – Disney continued his weird trend of hiring generally anonymous men to direct his life action films, this time handing the reins to Harold Schuster, whose greatest claim to fame is undoubtedly that he edited F.W. Murnau’s Sunrise and 4 Devils, and when your second-most famous credit is on a movie best known for having been lost decades ago, you can be safely considered an historical nobody. Luckily, then, that once again, the cinematographer was someone of particular note: Winton C. Hoch returned from The Reluctant Dragon, still one of the most important Technicolor artists of his generation. And if his work in SDtMH is not as bold and different as Gregg Toland’s in Song of the South, at the very least he makes the colors sing, and emphasises the warm fuzziness that was the film’s purpose without spilling into saccharine sentiment.
As for the animated sequences: there are three, besides that multiplane opener, each tied to a song, and each expressing Jerry’s self-comforting fantasy at a particular moment, in the form of a Wise Old Owl (Ken Carson) giving him advice. These moments, as I mentioned, are easily snipped from the plot as a whole, and the songs do not make up for it: they are insipid and twee, exactly what you’d expect from a kids’ musical in 1948. The only good song, in fact, is Ives’s “Lavender Blue”, which was an Oscar nominee despite being a re-working of a 17th Century English folk song (it was the first major hit of the folk singer’s career – his “crossover single”, as I am certain they did not call it in the ’40s).
The animation, however, is stunning; disposable as they are, these sequences are the very best parts of the movie. Even the least of these, a short interlude to bring us to the fair, is not without interest, as the animators found ways of using reflections and silhouettes distorted in balloons to give the recognisable fairgoing adventures seem nearly Surrealist.
A few minutes of amazing animation cannot save a feature, though, and audiences in 1949 – the year of the film’s general release – apparently felt the same; the film slid through theaters making only a ripple in the box office, and fell into obscurity almost immediately, despite long remaining one of Walt’s favorite pictures from his studio. The film’s most lasting legacy is probably its inspiration for some of the architecture in Disneyland; it does not represent a tremendously significant step from Song of the South, the first predominately live-action Disney feature, to 1950’s Treasure Island, the first entirely live-action Disney feature; it’s probably not even as significant as the live-action Disney short Seal Island, the first in the True Life Adventures series, released the same year. It’s simply an attempt to stay alive, and not a completely worthless one; though Disney’s tendency towards flattening history in the name of warm fuzzies was arguably never this soporific, and for that reason I guess it has a certain place of prominence.