Monday, April 30, 2012

D52 Week 17: 101 Dalmatians!

Well, it's that time again. Disney started digging itself yet another grave with yet another overgrown commercial disaster - in this case, Sleeping Beauty - and so, amid talks of closing down the animation studio once and for all, a decidedly low-budget film is thrown together, the company's future essentially riding on its detail-lacking shoulders. It's really quite amazing just how often the studio was close to collapsing during those first few decades! (Of course, by the 1960s, I'm sure they could've gotten by for awhile just producing live-action That Darn Cats and Westward Ho, the Wagonses....not forever, but for awhile.) 101 Dalmatians came about due to circumstances similar to the ones that caused Dumbo, so it's kind of impressive to see how much more comfortable this film is in its inexpensive skin than its predecessor. Its cheapness, in a way, is an art style! But it makes grand gestures beyond that, too, drawing a clear stylistic line in the sand between 1950s Disney, with its obsession with trying to be 1930s Disney still, and 1960s Disney, which was more willing to try different things, because everyone was starting to get high at that point in time anyway.

Monday, April 23, 2012

D52 Week 16: Sleeping Beauty!

Yes, in its later years, Disney would produce some thoroughly charming animated fairy tales that are hard not to love unless you're a soulless husk of a human being. And yet, these earliest attempts at princessy romance for movie theaters present the same sort of conundrum that watching, say, the first series of the British Whose Line does - I like what came of this later on, but seriously, how did anyone give it the chance to get to that point when it started out SO BAD? Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Cinderella each had the excuse of their respective places in history as an excuse for just being mediocre; coming directly in the middle of a string of successful full-length features, Sleeping Beauty has no such excuse to save it. This one will have to stand on its own merits. And, um, seeing as how its merits are pretty much "like Snow White, but less whimsical", that.............might be a problem.

Monday, April 16, 2012

D52 Week 15: Lady and the Tramp!

Did you know that this could've very well been Disney's first full-length feature not based on a pre-existing work? A film called Lady was first pitched to Walt Disney in 1937, based on the gentle misadventures of studio story guy Joe Grant's Cocker Spaniel of the same name, but Disney ended up cutting off the project after preliminary storyboarding, because he thought it was dull, because of course something like that would be kind of dull. And then Disney read a short story in Cosmopolitan - yeah, apparently he read Cosmo, though to be fair that was before it was essentially softcore porn for the laaaadies - called "Happy Dan, the Whistling Dog", and bought the rights to it, just so he could add a Happy Dan-esque character to Lady. And thus, the "and the Tramp" was born! It's a weird combination of things that both sound simply dreadful, and yet somehow the film itself is Disney's most consistently solid film since....well, probably since before the war. (Incidentally, the actual first Disney full-length feature not based on a pre-existing work was also pet-based: The Aristocats, unless I'm mistaken.)

Friday, April 13, 2012

D52 Week 14: Peter Pan!

I don't know what it is about Peter Pan, but both Sexy Girlfriend-Type Person and I have been having a devil of a dickens of a time thinking of things to say about it! It's another one of those 1950s Disney films that isn't really overwhelmingly good or overwhelmingly bad, it's serviceable and it's just kind of.....there, existing to be re-released every decade or so, then quickly forgotten again. It's another one of those films that Walt Disney had wanted to make earlier in his career, but then it got pushed back, first by script changes, then by Hitler, finally emerging as a warmed-over chimaera of dozens of different possible adaptations of the story. At this point in time, the man was so obsessed with preventing his female characters from doing anything that might "cross the line", which of course was a problem when a lot of the films from this period have female main characters!

Sunday, April 8, 2012

D52 Week 13: Alice in Wonderland!

Apparently, Walt Disney was just crazy about Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. His first significant success as a film producer came with the short "Alice Comedies", before even Mickey Mouse and his more interesting friends. He very well could've even based his very first feature-length film on the stories, if not for the fact that Paramount released a live-action adaptation in 1933, which flopped, horribly. So, he revived the idea in the mid-1940s, featuring live-action Ginger Rogers interacting with cartoon characters, because the Alice stories are nothing if not the The Three Caballeros of Lewis Carroll's bibliography; after seeing this storyboarded out, though, Disney rejected the proposal upon realising that the Alice stories were, um, nothing, I guess. It took until 1951 to realise what he had finally deemed to be an acceptable adaptation! And I sure bet that was worth the wait, right??

Monday, April 2, 2012

D52 Week 12: Cinderella!

(Yes, this is rather late, but I kinda sorta have a reason?)

Can you imagine being a fan of theatrical animation in the 1940s? Not only was there all that non-animated war nonsense going on, but also, you had to go EIGHT WHOLE YEARS without a proper Disney animated feature to enjoy! And this was waaaaaay before you could just buy the old ones and re-watch them endlessly on some sort of home media format, too! Perhaps that's why Cinderella is remembered so very fondly, despite being middling as Disney's features go. (At least it's not a collection of shorts about international avians or something again!) Perhaps that's also why it so shamelessly attempts to emulate Disney's biggest (and almost only) financially successful animated feature up to that point, Snow White and the Seven Drawves.