D52 Week 8: Make Mine Music!

Oh, look, it's another musical package film! Huzzah?

It's odd to ponder the differences in circumstances between Fantasia and Make Mine Music. After all, both are essentially an attempt to say "Hey, isn't music neat?" via the medium of animation. Yet, whereas Fantasia was a misguided and overblown high-budget labour of love from a thriving animation tycoon, Make Mine Music is very much the opposite: a desperately (relatively) low-budget salvaging of leftover story ideas by a studio just scraping to get by. Fantasia was a collection of short films by well thought out design; Make Mine Music is a collection of short films because anything longer was literally infeasible. In the end, neither was a success when released, of course. While Fantasia ended up becoming a beloved classic over time, Make Mine Music is one of the least remembered films in Disney's entire animated features canon. Now, don't get me wrong, Fantasia is, by far, the superior film; but its weird little cousin who doesn't leave its own house very often actually has a little goodness to offer, too, buried beneath all the forgettableness of course.

A Tone Poem

Blue Bayou

Thanks to the tragic shooting death of "The Martins and the Coys", it is here that your copy of Make Mine Music inevitably begins. And what an odd place to begin it is, too! The animation is utterly gorgeous, because it's not original. It's actually from a cut Fantasia segment, originally set to Debussy's "Clair de Lune". (If a substitution had to be made to be more contemporary, I suppose "Blue Bayou", the song, exudes the same kind of mood.) True to that era, there's some stunning work with water, specifically the ripples as the egrets walk, but I can fully understand why this originally got the axe - it would've been, by far, the least exciting piece of animation in Fantasia. (Okay, with the obvious exception of the monk processional.)

A Jazz Interlude

All the Cats Join In: A Caricature

Does the quick sketch of that cat right at the beginning exist only to justify the cat pun in the title card, or...what? The drop in animation quality from "Blue Bayou" is actually a little jarring. The energy of this piece helps make up for that somewhat, but it's a mixed bag. Just about any gag involving the pencil got a smile out of me; the more straightforward shots involving hip 1940s teenagers doing hip 1940s teenager things like going to a hip 1940s malt shop, not so much. As for the former, drawing a traffic signal to stop the runaway half-drawn car strikes me as a pretty ingenious gag, though maybe that's just because I'm tired/overmedicated. As for the latter, was it more acceptable back then to completely disrobe in the presence of a younger sibling? Or is that still acceptable today? Please tell me it's not.

A Ballad in Blue

Without You

Dude, what is it with this movie and the colour blue?? It's hard to really think of much to say about this one. It's short, and it's about as entertaining as arty paintings of natural scenery set to some guy feeling sorry for himself in song really can be, I guess? But, notice the mask on the first title card. If nothing else, you can get yourself through this by imagining that it's all from Zorro's point of view. Poor zorrowful Zorro!

A Musical Recitation

Casey at the Bat

I cannot for the life of me figure out why they changed the year in which this was set to 1902. What's wrong with 1888, seriously? For the most part, this is a serviceable adaptation of the poem, as near as I can tell, but I'm not a sporty guy in the least, so it didn't suck me in, personally. I will say that Casey's continuing failures after the fact were as nice a way to end this as anything; stylistically, the preceding cut to cute li'l birdies in a distant forest probably didn't work as well as they had hoped, though.

Ballade Ballet

Two Silhouettes

This one probably sounded cooler on paper than it actually was in execution. Silhouetted ballet dancers in front of animated backgrounds! But it just doesn't work all that well, and I think it's how spatially muddled everything is. There's really not a whole lot at all to these abstractish static backgrounds, you see, and as a result, they're throwing away a good chunk of the wonder of watching a ballet performance, without taking a particular concern in compensating for that with the wonder of animation. "Dance of the Hours", this most certainly isn't.

A Fairy Tale with Music

Peter and the Wolf

Finally, another segment that actually succeeds beautifully at what it sets out to do! For one, Sterling Holloway always makes for an interesting narrator. He helped buoy The Three Caballeros' "The Cold-Blooded Penguin", which would've been nothing without him; here, he gets to add to what was a pretty nice piece in the first place, which is even better. It's uncomplicated, as is fitting for a kids story, but everything about it is done pretty nicely. Even the cheaply animated critters look decent! (And I confess that I enjoy classical music, such as this, over the popular music of the 1940s.) This is also the only short I'd seen before watching Make Mine Music for the first time this week; it's probably the most famous bit from this not-terribly-famous movie, and that's totally deserved, I think. Could've used more beard shadow-puppetry, though. Then again, what couldn't?

...and Now the Goodman Quartet

After You've Gone

Like the other Benny Goldman piece here, "All the Cats Join In", this boasts some simple but effectively energetic visuals. This is probably the lesser of those two segments, mostly because anthropomorphic musical instruments for a musical short are clearly a far more straightforward choice. Nevertheless, it's still a neat short, though, and one of the film's highlights. It's fluff, but it's charming fluff, and there's a degree of low-budget impressiveness in the crashing of the piano keys.

A Love Story

Johnnie Fedora and Alice Bluebonnet

$23.94? Fuck, I can't imagine spending that much on a hat now, in 2012! But then again, I'm cheap. Perhaps I'm also heartless, because this really didn't do anything for me. The song's far from the most interesting thing the Andrews Sisters ever did, and it's always a risky gambit to expect your audience to be able to identify with inanimate objects, unless you're Pixar. (And even then, they stumbled a bit when it came to automobiles.) Can you imagine a hilarious and heartwarming (and headwarming?) Pixar film about hats? It certainly wouldn't play out like this, with a protagonist who essentially does nothing, aside from a mildly amusing struggle against the dude who bought him. The degree to which Johnnie Fedora the Fedora is a non-entity makes it incredibly hard to identify with him; making a hat-based universe work would've required far more hat-based personality, like the angry cop hat, which made me smile, at least. If nothing else, this short makes me long for an era when the Jersey Shore was merely gloomy, and nothing more...

Opera Pathetique

The Whale Who Wanted to Sing at the Met

I'm sure there are many reasons this was chosen to conclude Make Mine Music. Its bittersweet finality, for instance, and its length. Most importantly of all, it constitutes the very wise choice of saving their best short for last. It's so overly fantastical and slow-moving, and that could turn people off, but they would be missing out a surprisingly powerful bit in a generally limp film. There's a strange sense of melancholy in Willie's demise; it's not as personally affecting as most Disney deaths, of course, but then there's the realisation that, for once, things aren't going to be tied up in a neat little bow such that all is well for everyone. I'm not much of an opera guy, but Nelson Eddy turned in a pretty damn good performance. (It's even enough to make you forget that this short is essentially about a seagull named Whitey leading a dark-skinned creature, whom we first meet singing "Shortnin' Bread", to his untimely demise.)

Coming off of Saludos Amigos and The Three Caballeros, I suppose it is nice to see a film that doesn't back itself into a creative corner by hyper-focusing its efforts on only one topic. After two weeks of being uninspiredly educated about the non-United-State Americas, the mere fact that Make Mine Music explores a broader range of subject matter is a breath of relatively fresh air. Again, this is no Fantasia, but you're sure to find a couple of shorts that you don't mind terribly much. It's not the worst of the package films, at least.

DISCLAIMER: I no longer feel like any of my friends are callously cruel like Mr. Narrator here is. I'm still keeping this, as a time capsule, because it's a valid point against the movie, and also, because I still think disembodied voice sex is funny, because I'm weird.

DIRECT-TO-DISNEY-DVD UNNECESSARY SEQUEL CONCEPT: Make Mine Musickier is built entirely out of other old rejected Fantasia concepts, all of which are half-animated at best, or just a series of preliminary pencil sketches at worst. The original classical music selections have been replaced by selections from the album A Year Without Rain. In the one and only brand-new segment created especially for the film, Tetti-Tatti returns, murdering other innocent animalian individuals and going essentially unchecked. Hijinks ensue.