Even in the depths of the horrible stretch of critical, commercial, and artistic failures that plagued Walt Disney Productions between 1970 and 1988, there’s one spot of true brilliance, although the degree to which The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh belongs to that interregnum is debatable. Its roots lie in the comparatively strong period of the 1960s, in fact, for it is nothing but an anthology film put together […]
And so it was, that Walter Elias Disney was dead, but the company to bear his name continued on. The Florida project that had been the chief focus of the last years of his life was being built with a new intensity of purpose: now it was no longer an East Coast mirror of California’s Disneyland, it was to be a massive physical monument to Disney’s belief in the joy […]
It is both convenient and at times very useful to divide Disney’s history into certain periods. The simplest (and thus, the least useful) of these divisions is into the classic period – from the beginning to Walt’s death – and the modern period. That this is plainly undesirable is because it suggests, among other things, that e.g. The Aristocats and Mulan are somehow related to one another. Thus, there has […]
Other Disney films may have had more tortured productions (Alice in Wonderland), had a more dangerously inflated budget (
1955 was a hell of a year for Walt Disney Productions to even think about releasing an animated feature. This was right after their distribution deal with RKO had ended, replaced by the in-house Buena Vista Distribution, though that was probably the smallest issue facing the studio. For in 1952, the company had officially announced plans for Disneyland, a theme park of a scale never before attempted anywhere in the […]
When the Disney Studios released its 14th animated feature, Peter Pan, in 1953, it was two years since their most recent full-length project, Alice in Wonderland. This was the first time that a full calendar year went by without a new Disney feature since 1945. Hold on to this fact, because it’s going to be important later. Walt Disney first attempted to get his hands on the film rights to […]
In the first couple of years following World War II, as I have suggested, the Disney Animation Studios had begun to lose its way: too many cheap make-work projects that didn’t challenge the animators enough and only barely broke even had inevitably led to a slipping of quality, and by 1947 or so, it was becoming more and more doubtful that the studio would be around for very much longer […]
It’s all on display right there in the title: Fun and Fancy Free. I do not know but that I catch a slight whisper of defiant desperation in those words, but then, Make Mine Music is still fresh in my memory, and that is enough to make it clear that things at Disney were not much fun, nor free of fancy, in 1947 when this picture was being animated. In […]
Saludos Amigos was a big enough success that Walt Disney was encouraged to put into production a second Latin American project, again theoretically meant to foster goodwill during the hard days of World War II. This quasi-sequel from 1944, The Three Caballeros (treating upon Brazil once again, along with Mexico in the place of Peru, Chile and Argentina), was a significantly more ambitious production: not just a half-hour longer, it […]
Author’s note, July 2016: I cannot begin to say what bug I had up my ass when I reviewed this film seven years ago, but I completely reject this review. The film is a charming trifle with enormous historical interest and more stylistic value than I came close to giving it; perhaps lingering anger that it wasn’t the second coming of Bambi, as though any animated film ever has been. […]
The first five animated features produced by the Disney Studios between 1937 and 1942 represent a level of sustained artistic achievement virtually unheard of elsewhere in cinema history. Pixar Animation Studios has a good shot at replicating the feat if they keep up their current level for just a couple more years, but outside of that I can think of no director or creative team that made so many stone-cold […]
