D52 Week 11: The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad

At last, we reach the final film of the wretched 1940s! Nothing from the package film era is inherently awful on its own. Underwhelming, but not terrible. But when they're the only Disney thing you watch for a month and a half, it really does become a bit like torture, doesn't it? As the dessert bar at Disney's metaphorical package film buffet, The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad concludes our extended gorgefest with something that would've actually been pretty good on its own, but now that we're stuffed, it's not so appetising, because we're not Ichabod Cranes that can just eat and eat indefinitely, defying the laws of physics in the process. If we eat any more, we might vomit all over the place! And that would be quite the buzzkill, now wouldn't it?

The Wind in the Willows

Poor Basil Rathbone can't avoid his association with Sherlock Holmes, even when he's in an unrelated narrator role! (And why is he even there? Narration pasted onto something that wasn't originally written to contain narration is always awkward!) It must be terrible to be forever associated with a beloved film character, but at least he's able to remark that he, and many other great literary beings, cannot compare to Mr. Toad, who is apparently THE SINGLE GREATEST CHARACTER EVER IN THE ENTIRE HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. His argument isn't exactly helped by this interpretation, however, which seems to paint him not as a kind-hearted yet flighty fellow, but rather, as a genuinely insane individual who's mostly just a huge liability in every way. Perhaps the visual of Mr. Toad in a psychotic trance as he sputters and makes car noises while he twitches around and drives an invisible car was funny and lighthearted in 1949, but somehow it seems a little uncomfortable now! Ratty and Moley, while ostensibly the "boring" characters, come out looking far more charming and entertaining than our titular character. You want a movie? Devote a bunch of time to adorable Moley blindly going along with a succession of strangers' wacky, obviously ill-advised schemes! There's your movie!

But of course Toad doesn't come out looking right! His story is a not-insubstantially-sized piece of children's literature, at 300+ pages, which they try to adapt roughly ten pages of for every minute of this half-feature. (Consider that the source material for the second segment is merely a short story.) Some segments last bizarrely long, like the cartoon courtroom drama business, whereas other things feel completely glossed over. I pretty much have to imagine that the full-length version of this, as originally conceived, would've had fewer obvious pacing issues. Supposedly, it was already half-animated by the time the more-remembered second instalment of the World War series reared its ugly head, after all. It's sad that this project-in-progress had to be truncated, though at least that pre-war Disney brilliance is still readily visible in the visuals, with levels of detail, consistency, and general quality that probably make this the best-looking segment of any of these package films. Not quite on the level as Disney's previous best works, but still really nice!

In her more-timely-than-mine write-up for this week's film, my beloved Taylor mentioned the relative racial harmony on display within this critter community, but I feel the need to point out the major exception to this rule. Y'see, there's the slightly uncomfortable matter of everybody seeing the weasels in a fancy car and assuming, obviously, that the car was stolen. How else could weasels possibly be in possession of a nice car??? I mean, yes, of course it turned out that it actually was stolen, but still. Not cool, dudes.

The Legend of Sleepy Hollow

When you think of Ichabod Crane, literature's most famous creepy male schoolmarm with an obvious eating disorder, what sort of voice springs to mind? If you thought of the smooth crooning of one Mr. Bing Crosby, then you're quite clearly insane. But that's what they did. And he even performed a theme song for this! A happy peppy Sleepy Hollow song! It's nuts! I'm not sure why they went in that direction. Is it because they thought they needed something to undercut the horror? Is it their attempt to make it plausible that women might want to do things sexually to him? Now, don't get me wrong - I'm not someone who hates narrated stories where the narrator does voices for all the characters. But, clearly, Bing Crosby isn't the sort of guy who does voices when he tells stories. He's fucking Bing Crosby! I dunno. Perhaps they had him confused with a sprightly young 12-year-old Bill Cosby? No, that's clearly not right, at all.

I've read a lot of praise for this segment, but I really don't get it. A lot of said praise tries to tell me that the Headless Horseman scenes are genuinely frightening, but...I consider myself to be an easily frightened person, and yet, none of the spooky atmosphere had much of an impact on me at all, with the possible exception of the handclouds, which were cool, I guess? (For a more effective scary forest sequence, look no further than the hallucinogenic fury of week one's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, which I really should provide a retro-write-up for eventually.) It's not surprising that the visuals here aren't quite up to snuff, compared to "The Wind in the Willows" - unlike that segment, it's pretty obvious just from watching that the animation is all post-war cheapness. It's still decent by the quality of the decade, but there are things that blink in and out of existence and feathers that don't cast shadows. Things like that. It's clear that this was spared that extra layer of loving caring polish that it truly needed.

Even outside of the surprisingly tame animation, the tone just doesn't seem right to me. Would better animation have really fixed the climactic chase with the Headless Horseman, when it's scripted so very cartoonishly in the first place? (Why do sword-wielding comedy villains never swing their swords vertically???) And how is Bing Crosby caterwauling supposed to contribute to an atmosphere of eeriness? It doesn't, unless you're one of the Crosby kids, of course. Even worse, they manage to leave out the details from the story that really sell the ending. I haven't actually read the story in a long long time, but even I remember that Ichabod proposed to Katrina at the party, and was rejected. Neglecting that little bit makes the possibility of his decision to just plain leave town forever seem considerably more questionable. I suppose it's more up to individual taste whether or not the elimination of the bit from the story about Brom being "exceptionally knowing" when it comes to matters relating to Ichabod made this story more ambiguous and mysterious and spooky, or if it just comes across as a weird attempt to paint Bingie's telling of "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" more definitively as a supernatural tale, when it's made to be rather obvious in the original short story that nothing supernatural happened after all. (Okay, there are a lot of people who will debate that claim. But, c'mon. Don't be an ignorant Tarrytownie. Brom Bones is totally The Guy.)

Overall

As the 1940s go in Disney history, it's fairly obvious that this film is related to Fun and Fancy Free, in much the same way that Make Mine Music and Melody Time were clearly gross incestuous cousins. Once again, we have two extended stories lasting approximately half an hour each, linked together in a semi-arbitrary matter. Yes, there's the literary theme, but do you honestly know anyone who would hold these two stories up as the pinnacles of British and American literature, respectively? "Kenneth Grahame vs. Washington, only one will survive!" Still, it makes more conceptual sense than "Jiminy Cricket sure likes watching other people tell stories a whooooole lot", so I give TAoIaMT a pass on that one. In fact, this is thoroughly passable all-around. No, it's not a classic, and neither segment is as good as people seem to remember them being; however, at least it's certainly more polished than the previous package films, and I suppose it makes sense, historically, as a bridge between those films and Cinderella.

UNNECESSARY AND UNHOLY DIRECT-TO-DVD DISNEY SEQUEL CONCEPT OF THE WEEK: The New Adventures of Old Ichabod and Mr. Toad is, confusingly, an older adventure featuring a then-newer Ichabod and Mr. Toad. Specifically, it is a prequel to the film that chronicles that one time that Mr. Toad and Ichabod Crane met as awkward teenagers - Mr. Toad was just barely sprouting legs from his gross tadpole form, though Ichabod already had more than enough leg for the both of them! - and actually went on adventures together. Like Washington Irving and Kenneth Grahame totally always intended all along! They're assigned to work on a science fair project together, and their baking soda volcano is go good that not only does it take the gold at the school science fair, but it also takes the grand prize in the "International Science Fair Championships", too, earning them the substantial $10,000 grand prize! But, naturally, tensions arise when they can't decide how to spend it! Narrating this classic tale is the Bing Crosby of the 21st Century - Taylor Hicks, who doesn't question any of this shit, not even a little.