1963 - The Sword in the Stone

Now it’s time for us to enter what I’m calling the Mourning Period. This was a time marked by the declining health and eventual death of Walt Disney. The movie we’re viewing today was produced and released while Walt was still alive, but shows many of the other signs of the era, including slashed budgets, cheaper animation, and overly cautious production. This is not to say that all the films of this era are bad. Two of them are quite good, and one is at least okay. Two of them, however, are not so great, and this is one of those. Depressed? So am I. So get yourself a leg of mutton and flagon of mead, and let’s talk about The Sword in the Stone.

Stop trying to make "fetch" happen!

Bleeeeeh. This is a scattered and largely lifeless adaptation of the King Arthur legend, based primarily on T.H. White’s book of the same title, part of his Once and Future King tetralogy. Like so many Disney films, this one starts with the future royal in a position of drudgery, as a pageboy in the care of Sir Ector, known as “The Wart“. There are a few differences, like the fact that he’s younger than the princesses, and that he’s a whiny, annoying jerk. The wizard Merlin, however, sees great things in the young lad’s future, and decides to educate him. Sort of.

Merlin, who is an annoying know-it-all, has a tendency to bang on about how important education is, citing math and science, but he’s a terrible teacher. The only proper lesson we see is him telling Wart that the earth is round, and being utterly unable to explain it. The other three “lessons” we are privy to consist of Merlin turning him into various animals. Every one of these animal things goes the same way:

1 - Merlin turns Wart into a [fish/squirrel/bird].

2 - He has some fun at first, but is chased by a [pike/wolf/hawk].

3 - The chase goes on for some time. Merlin does not help. At some point, the animal almost catches Wart, but something bites its tail,  pulling it away.

4 - The animal is defeated, and Merlin asks Wart what he has learned.

5 - Wart has learned that being a [fish/squirrel/bird] is difficult.

Discovered by the people who've been living there for 15,000 years or so. And even if you're Eurocentric, discovered by Vikings around the time this movie is taking place.

The best of these, and certainly the most remembered, is the squirrel one, which largely involves a female squirrel with the hots for Wart. When he turns back into a human, she is devastated, and I think the movie’s going for actual pathos, but it’s so poorly written I can’t tell.

There’s also an extended sequence involving Merlin fighting against Mad Madam Mim, a shape shifting witch who lives out in the woods. Mim is annoying, one of those very simplistic “Good is bad” type villains you find on Saturday morning cartoons. You know, where they’re all “BAD morning, everyone! I hope it rains today, because I hate sunshine for no reason!“ She’s annoying, but everyone in this movie is annoying, so by the time she showed up I was used to it. Her fight with Merlin, where they both turn into various different animals in a constant one-upping of each other, is actually quite amusing. If you remember the bit with Mim as being the film’s climax, or in any way relating to the plot, you are forgiven. In reality, she just turns up, fights, and leaves, and is of no plot relevance at all. They didn’t even include her in later editions of the book.

The actual climax involves the titular Sword in the Stone, which is actually the Sword in the Anvil on Top of the Stone. In a prologue, we learn that after the death of the king, this thing showed up at a church and written on the sword was the message that whoever pulls it out will be king. Everyone agrees, because what, you’re going to argue with a sword? This goes unmentioned for the entire movie. I think it might have been mentioned in passing when they revealed that after twelve kingless years, they were going to decide rulership through a jousting tournament (which is an even worse idea than listening to a sword), but the fact that I don’t remember kind of proves my point. Anyway, Wart gets the sword out later, when trying to find a sword for his brother Sir Kay during the tournament, and becomes king. No one questions the wisdom of this. And why does he get it? Is he the king’s long lost son? Did his dubious education at the hands of Merlin make him worthy? Did everyone else just loosen it up for him, like a pickle jar? I don’t know. Maybe it’s in the book.

And then, my favorite scene!

Production is also pretty rough. Everything’s more loose and ‘sketchy’ than it was in One Hundred and One Dalmatians, which isn’t inherently bad, but this is aiming (sometimes) to tell a more serious story. They also have more fully developed backgrounds, which the animated characters interact badly with. Most bizarrely of all, on the production side, is the three different actors playing Wart, sometimes switching voices in the middle of a scene. Some have speculated that due to the movie not having a script ahead of time (not a criticism, that was standard practice in animation back then, movies would be storyboarded, then the animators would develop the script,) it was recorded piecemeal over the years and the actors got too old. This doesn’t really fit though, since the total production time was only two years, and the voices are all at various stages of pubescence anyway. It’s also been theorized that this was intentional, to show Wart growing up, but the changes come more or less at random. I should also note that two of the Warts are the director’s sons, so… yeah.

There are a few things I liked. Sir Ector and Sir Kay are very good characters. They’re mean to Wart, but in a sort of gruff and blustering way, and it’s shown throughout the film that they do actually care about him. There’s a good bit, for example, in the opening scene, where Kay is making Wart go and retrieve his lost arrows, but when one goes into the woods, Kay tries to keep him out for safety’s sake. When Wart is made king, Ector and Kay are the first to bow to him, honestly and sincerely. I applaud Disney for shaking up the abusive stepfamily stereotype, since keeping it going must have been easier. Plus Ector is voiced by Sebastian Cabot, who’s sort of a 1960s version of john Rhys Davies, and is always good. Speaking of voice actors I always like, there‘s also a random knight voiced by Thurl Ravens croft (yaaaaaay) , who may be my favorite character in any of these films. When Ector examines the sword and proclaims that it’s the Sword in the Stone, this random guy we’ve never seen before suddenly lurches into frame and bellows, in that Thurly way, “THE SWORD IN THE STONE?!!?!” And then I laugh for hours. But here, don’t take my word for it.

Dammit, Steve! We said we're blinking on three! And where's your jousting mustache!?

So yeah, not that great a movie. And it was the last one released while Walt was alive. It’s not the last one he worked on at all, there’s still three more being developed that he had input on, but it’s the last one he got to see. Bit of a shame, there. It’s not flat-out terrible, just sort of a bit worse than Peter Pan without anything shockingly offensive to make it at least memorable.

ADDITIONAL THOUGHTS

* In this month’s issue of Ultimate Spider-Man, Miles is in class, and the teacher is asking what lessons Merlyn was trying to teach Wart in the book by transforming him into animals. I don’t know about the book, but in the movie, it’s “Being a fish is hard”, “sex”, and “how to fly (?)”

* Merlin, counting time travel among his other skills, is one of those characters who makes modern references no one else gets. So if the genie from Aladdin annoys you, now you know who to blame.

Well that's dignified.

* That clip I linked earlier contains one of the Wart voices. Here’s the other two. See what I mean?

* Speaking which, one of the Warts briefly sings a bit of a song that had been sung by another one earlier, and gets the tune wrong. Real professional there, Disney.

* Madam Mim is apparently ridiculously popular in the Netherlands, to the point where she‘s overshadowed the rest of the movie entirely. Dutch Disney comics will have a story featuring her at least once a month. Sometimes she’s even a good guy.

* Oh, I didn’t mention Archimedes. He’s Merlin’s sidekick, a sassy talking owl. Sassy talking animal sidekicks are a bit of a tough sell with me, but I have to admit, I like the guy. Even if he doesn’t really do anything.

I don't speak Dutch, but I speak juuuust enough German to render this almost, but not quite entirely incomprehensible.

* They were really trying to make “Higitus Figitus” into the new “Bibbiti-Bobbiti-Boo”. It does not work.

* In the beginning of the movie, Kay is making ready to shoot a deer, and it picks up its head and runs away. This is the first of many, many reuses of some animation from Bambi, specifically Bambi’s mom just before getting shot. We’ll see this at least five times in the future, and sometimes not even about to be shot!

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1961 - One Hundred and One Dalmatians

Well, after the lengthy production and less-than-hoped-for returns of Sleeping Beauty, the company was starting to feel that feature animation was more trouble than it was worth. Fortunately, the form was saved by a weird little dude named Ubbe Eert Iwerks. Ub was a longtime animator at Disney. He had already done his bit for the company financially, through little tiny things like developing the live-action/animation hybrid technique and inventing Mickey Mouse.

"Oh, don't mind me, just saving your company again."

 But never satisfied with being an unrecognized legend, he went for it again, developing a new form of animation called xerography. See, the way they used to animate was the lead animators would make pencil drawings, and their staff would ink each frame onto an animation cel. Using a camera based on a Xerox machine, Ub figured out a way to transfer the pencil drawings directly to the cel, eliminating the costly, time-consuming, and labor-intensive inking process, and going straight to the colorists. Of course, it also eliminated the jobs of like 400 animators, but hey, omelets and eggs. So, armed with a fancy new tool, the rights to a good book, and fond memories of Lady and the Tramp, the team went to work. Feeling the inexorable march of progress as machines take our jobs? So am I. Wait, no I’m not. Well, regardless, get some Kibbles and Bits, unless you’re Bits-intolerant, in which case, the SoyBitz are okay, and you can hardly tell the difference. Let’s talk about One Hundred and One Dalmatians.

This was a really enjoyable one. The plot is simple enough, two Dalmatians fall in love, as do their owners. They (the dogs, that is) have fifteen puppies which are stolen by a thoroughly bizarre woman who wants to make them into coats, along with 84 others. The parents go on a cross-country trek to get them back. The spectre of Lady and the Tramp hangs heavy over this one, particularly at the beginning, which is another dogs’ love story. But the whole film needs to take a dog’s perspective of the world without seeming too samey, and largely succeeds. Rather than looking at the humans  as family, Pongo and Perdita refer to them as “The Pets”. Human faces are clearly seen throughout, we know their names (Roger and Anita), and rather than being entirely dog-centric, other animals feature, notably a duck, a horse, and a really awesome cat.

The plot is well-executed, though the middle gets a bit draggy. In order to find the puppies, Pongo calls on the Twilight Bark, a sort of dog militia/neighborhood watch, and we spend a long time going across the country seeing each dog on the chain barking along the message to the next group. It’s interesting, but we really don’t need to spend a few minutes with each one. It gave me a bit of character fatigue. By the time the puppies are found, the movie basically has a new set of main characters. Thankfully, they’re awesome. Our mid-film heroes are all the pets of a retired general who has named his sheepdog Colonel, his horse Captain (Thurl Ravenscroft, yaaaaaaay!), and his cat Sergeant Tibbs. Seeing the nervous, overworked sergeant sneak around to try and save the kids was one of the highlights of the movie, and managed to convey a real sense of danger.

[INSERT RELEVANT CHEEZBURGER JOKE]

That’s the real strength of this movie. There’s actually a good deal of suspense in it. The three villains are really well-realized. The henchmen, Horace and Jasper Baddun, are comical and goofy without resorting to the “not so bad after all” disease that tends to strike villain sidekicks. When they try to put off killing the puppies, it‘s not that they‘re squeamish, they‘re just lazy. Their boss, Cruella DeVil (and you thought Maleficent was an on-the-nose name), is another fantastic Disney villain. Her design is wonderful, as she’s scrawny as all get-out, but wears a voluminous fur coat and staggering heels that make her seem immensely imposing. As for her personality, she’s basically Leona Helmsley if she didn’t care what people thought of her.

You know what's great about my jokes is that they're so accessible and timeless.

Now, for the animation. Xerography has a very different look than the traditional ink-and-paint approach. Since the final product is based directly off the pencil sketches, the animation has a loose and scratchy feel to it, especially at this early stage in the technology’s development. This time around, though, it works. They keep the backgrounds loose and sketchy as well, which puts focus on the characters and makes everything look consistent. Many of the furnishings and such are uncolored, and sets are largely monochromatic. There’s some parts where it’s a bit choppy, sometimes there’s a bit of that “I know what book Shaggy’s about to pick up” type highlighting, but in general, it works. This time. My biggest complaint was that they dropped the widescreen and went back to the Academy Ratio.

Also of note was that this is the first movie in the series that isn’t making any real effort to be a musical. There’s one song in the entirety of the film, and it’s sung by Roger, who is a songwriter. It’s a really good one, too. When Cruella, who was a friend of Anita’s from school, shows up at their house, Roger talks about how creepy she is and winds up improvising a song about her. When she enters, he retreats upstairs, where he proceeds to continue playing his very catchy melody on various instruments, giving the excellent scene downstairs a soundtrack that is lively, appropriate, and totally digetic. I do have to question the song becoming a big hit at the end of the movie, though. Isn’t it slanderous?

Also, anything that exudes green smoke is probably not great for you.

ADDITIONAL THOUGHTS

* Voice-wise, the supporting cast is fun, but the Dalmatians are a bit bland. But Pongo is voiced by Rod Taylor, which means everything he says is like getting a hug from your imaginary British dad.

* Cruella bought the other 84 puppies legitimately, so why did she have to steal the other 15? There's no references to her needing 99 exactly, and even if she needed that number, are there not 15 other puppies in England she could buy? Of course, the fact that I didn't notice this until 2 weeks after watching it pretty much shows it doesn't really matter.

* When Anita is first introduced, she’s wearing a hat and glasses and reading a book in the park. And she’s a redhead. Anyone who knows me can guess my reaction. When she first gives a withering look to the goofball who interrupted her reading, it became hard to watch the movie, what with all the cartoon hearts suddenly floating around my head.

* I mentioned Ub Iwerks as an unrecognized legend, but it’s nice to know that’s no longer true. While the general public still doesn’t know the guy, he, along with Disney’s feature animation team, the Nine Old Men, was in the second wave of inductees into the official list of Disney Legends.

* The first wave, incidentally, consisted of Fred MacMurray. No, that’s it.

*Speaking of the intro, I feel bad for making fun of that robot comedian, so here’s a good one.

* Thanks to Discworld, it took me forever to get used to Perdita’s name, since every time I heard it, I parsed it in my head as “That Agnes what calls herself Perditax.”

* The picture above doesn't get a funny caption, because it's there to demonstrate the sketchy remnant pencil lines that are a feature of this animation, as well as this movie's loosely colored backgrounds. If it did have a funny caption, it would probably be really hilarious.

* And here's some cute puppies, because for a movie whose whole thing is having a lot of them, I really should have had some pictures.

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1959 - Sleeping Beauty

Well, as I said last time, Walt’s ambition was at a peak. He wanted to go back to traditional fairy tales, and he wanted to go BIG. This movie spent four years in development, involved more detailed character design and background painting than ever before, utilized a new stylized form of design, was filmed in the INSANELY wide Technirama format. It was nominally an adaptation of Perrault’s “La Belle et la Bois Dormant” (The Beauty Asleep in the Woods) but also with a healthy dose of the Grimms’ “Briar Rose”. The pre-release publicity was huge, on TV and in print. Biggest of all, the newly-built Disney Land made the Sleeping Beauty castle its centerpiece, complete with mosaics depicting scenes from the film that was still TWO YEARS off. So was it a success? Well… That’s a big question. Inquiry to your emotive state? Assertion of agreement. Suggestion of food and let’s talk about Sleeping Beauty.

I loved it. The angular, stylized characters and lushly painted backgrounds look amazing, the film is really a technical wonder. From the loose design idea of making the whole thing look like a medieval tapestry, the company made one of their most visually striking films ever, even to this day. The music was composed by freaking Tchaikovsky, for Pete’s sake! I mean, okay, they adapted it from his ballet, but still, that’s ambitious. Even the songs are Tchaikovsky numbers with lyrics.

The film certainly carries the Disney tradition of sealing up plot holes and making fairy tales a lot more solid, but in a bit of a roundabout way. Where they usually have to expand the plot, here they have to contract it, as the Perrault version is a rampaging mess of ancient curses, and 13 fairies, and dwarfs, and seven-league boots, and the Prince’s half-ogre mother who tries to eat her grandchildren. Disney used the Grimm version of the tale as a story frame and cut it down to the basic essence of the story, then reexpanded from there.

Again, with the woodland critters? Oh, princesses.

Characters are also excellent again, clearly taking influence from past fairy tale movies. Like Snow White and Cinderella, Princess Aurora starts out poor and honest, only rather than being forced into servitude by cruel step-relations, she actually believes herself to be the peasant Briar Rose. This makes her come off a lot more well-adjusted, though she and her love interest still utterly lack charisma or personality. Again, though, Disney uses their old tricks to make them slightly interesting. Like in Snow White, they actually meet and have a conversation before he wakes her from her magic sleep, and like in Cinderella, they have no idea who each other are. In fact, it’s even better, as she thinks he’s a commoner, and he thinks she is as well. But he KNOWS he’s a prince, and KNOWS he’s expected to marry a woman he’s (supposedly) never met, and is willing to give that away for Briar Rose. It’s far more compelling and makes the couple the most likeable human pair I’ve seen, even if they function less as people and more as an excuse for the plot to happen. Their fathers are also fun, in that bumbling Disney dad sort of way.

Hey, creeper. Hands to yourself until you at least say hello.

The fairies, however are FANTASTIC. Walt’s initial impression was that there should be seven identical fairies, but his animators thought better and created three very distinct ones; bossy Flora, ditzy Fauna, and sensible, put-upon Merryweather. The three are wonderfully realized and developed characters, and it’s often said that they are the actual protagonists of the story. The prince wouldn’t have been able to do squat if they hadn’t rescued him from the dungeon, given him weapons, and magicked away every obstacle he came across. I will say that when we see the three of them trying to do housework, they’re so inept at it, it’s a wonder the kid made it to see her first birthday, let alone her 16th.

The evil fairy, Maleficent, is magnificent. She has maybe the worst motivation for a villain ever (for not being invited to a baby’s birthday, she resolves to kill the kid,) but they make up for it by making her awesome. Her look is fantastic, with green skin and giant horns and a raven always lurking about. And when she captures the prince, she doesn’t threaten to kill him, but plans to keep him alive until he’s a withered old man, and then set him free to go and wake the princess, a lifetime too late to be with her. That is some EVIL right there, and the images she projects of the decrepit future prince are really heartrending. After a string of buffoons and monsters, it’s great to see a villain who’s truly malevolent.

Magnificent... Malevolent... Oh, NOW I get it!

So how did it do? Well, it was the second most successful movie of the year, and was such a flop it almost closed Disney’s animation department. That probably seems incongruous. See, here’s the thing: All that creative innovation, the lush backgrounds, the detailed character animation, the Technirama, that stuff all costs a LOT of money. This movie cost more than twice as much as any they’d done before, and with four years of no animated releases and a successful venture into television and live action films, a movie that makes back just a hint over budget isn’t looking like such a great use of almost half a decade. Fortunately, something came along that made the whole process seem a bit more sensible. But we’ll get to that.

ADDITIONAL THOUGHTS

* On its theatrical release, this was packaged with a live-action short called Grand Canyon, which won the Academy Award. I feel like I should review it, but it’s like a half hour, and I’m super lazy. They included it on the DVD, though. Which is nice.

* While the movie gets feminist brownie points for an awesome villain and the fairies, big points lost for the Queen, who is never looked at, spoken to, or given a name. She's just "the queen." That's a pretty garbage move, as she SHOULD be as important as anyone.

* Speaking of unused characters: Need further proof that the romantic leads are largely irrelevant to the main story except as props? Consider: Aurora is on screen for only 18 minutes, and Phil’s last line comes at about the midpoint of the film.

Not kidding. Here's a screencap of my media player as Phil says his last line in the movie.

* Once again, the Disney Princess marketers make an odd choice, putting Aurora in a pink dress, based on a brief scene where Flora and Merryweather change the color back and forth, but it starts blue and it finishes blue, and she’s got a blue dress for pretty much the whole movie.

* I read several things that said this was the last fairy tale movie Disney made until the Little Mermaid, but what about The Sword in the Stone and the Black Cauldron? I know, they’re technically based on novels, but come on, if it looks like a fairy tale and quacks like a fairy tale…

* As much as I love the changes made to the Aurora/Philip relationship, this does make it so that the Princess and her kingdom were asleep not for the poetic 100 years of the story, but for maybe like a day at most. Possibly just a few hours.

* Legendary Warner Bros animator Chuck Jones actually animated some of the climax when the Warner Animation department closed down for a bit. I don’t know what made them open back up, but I like to think it was their biggest star going to work for the competition. (He eventually did some stuff for Hanna Barbera as well as some great independent stuff.)

* If you don’t know who Chuck Jones is, shame on you. Go to YouTube immediately and watch “One Froggy Evening”, “Duck Amuck”, and the greatest cartoon ever made, “The Dover Boys at Pimento University, or the Rivals of Roquefort Hall”

What is a Baby?

* I wonder what Merryweather’s gift was going to be at the baby shower. She wound up easing Maleficent’s curse, but she must have been planning something else. Flora gave physical attractiveness, and Fauna gave a nice singing voice. Since I like Merryweather more, I’m going to assume she was going to give political savvy or something useful like that.

* The Prince’s hair color changes from blonde as a kid to brown as an adult. This isn’t a problem, I was blonde as a kid, too, but I think they did it so we wouldn’t know it was him when he turns up later. But really, we’d have to be idiots not to spot it.

*Speaking of Phil, he’s wearing different clothes when he wakes her and when he goes downstairs with her to see all the woken people. Did he stop off to get dressed up? “Look, Aurora, I know you’ve had a trying experience, you want to meet your parents for the first time, but look at me. I’m all sweaty and I’ve got dragon blood on me, this just won’t do.”

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