In this case, we have Wendy Darling, as portrayed by Kathryn Beaumont in her second consecutive role as a Disney animated British kid bored with the real world until she learns her lesson in a fantastical world of make-believe. Like Alice, Wendy somehow manages to be largely irrelevant to what is supposedly supposed to be her story! Aside from briefly teaching the Lost Boys about how awesome mothers are - it was the only possible career path for ladies of the era, after all - what does she really do, honestly? Making Tinkerbell jealous? Meh. Like Alice, she is mostly here to be awed, in proper hyper-subdued Beaumontian fashion, by the fantasy unfolding around her. If all of this has happened before, and all will happen again, then surely it has happened to someone more interesting, you'd think!
But, yeah, about Tinkerbell and her jealousy. Why is this li'l psycho bitch so beloved?? She's the star of that series of direct-to-DVD fairy movies for dull children, which I haven't seen, but I'm fairly certain that they overlook the fact that she's an insane homicidal maniac who can't control her anger. Supposedly, all of this is justified by the way she stares at herself in the mirror, thoroughly disgusted by her hips (that many women in this day and age would actually love to have, mind), which is......well, it's another example of 1950s Disney sexism, from an era where everyone was sexist anyway. It strikes me as weird how Wendy attempts to stand up for Tinkerbell when Peter Pan tries to banish her forever. "Oh, no, not forever!" SHE JUST TRIED TO MURDER YOU!!! And the mermaids are just as awful. "We were just trying to drown her!" According to this film, women are either docile homemakers, or Satan. When you overexamine it, as Jesse is wont to do, it's really kind of uncomfortable!
More than just kind of uncomfortable: the Indians, who serve as this week's Retro-Disney Racist Secret Shame. Except, this one really isn't so secret; in this case, the animators admit in interviews that they kinda regret the big heap stereotypum. The Native Neverlandians barely look human (well, I suppose with the exception of Princess Tiger Lily), and indeed the other characters feel free to refer to them as subhuman. (The usually polite and refined John Darling even suggests them as something that might be fun to hunt, like an animal!) They even get their own Particularly Racist Musical Number, in the form of "What Made the Red Man Red?", which is exactly as appropriate as you'd expect a song providing jokey answers for why non-white races have non-white skin colours! When you combine this with the fact that it involves eight-year-old John puffing on a pipe, the sort of pipe that people sit in a circle and pass around, you have to be kind of astonished that they didn't just snip the damned thing for the DVD releases. I seriously don't understand the set of guidelines they used for tobacco-related edits to these old films, I really really don't! But we do learn that they're just the rest of the world, in that they're also not above hackneyed mother-in-law jokes. It's just so terrible when the person you're in love with also came out of some chick's birth canal just like you did, isn't it???
But, hey, Peter Pan still shows a flash of hope that Disney might be getting their shit together, because Captain Hook is a really, really fun villain! The first fun villain, in fact; the Queen Grimhildes and Ladies Tremaine before him existed for the sole purpose of being harbringers of misery. The Cap'n, meanwhile, is the first in a long line of comic relief villains, a well that Disney would go back to over and over because it just works SO WELL here. The interesting thing about his quarrels with the (unnamed?) clockodile is that they're animated in what was, for the time, a distinctly un-Disney style, being very wacky and slapsticky and generally over the top. That's one hell of an elasticky reptile, and Hook's flailing attempts to escape seem to evoke a Warner Brothers sort of feel. You almost expect him to eventually go flying off a high cliff, plummeting to the bottom of a canyon and landing in a puff of white dust! One has to wonder if anyone in the 50s viewed with the same sort of scepticism that, say, a few modern Disney fans viewed the wackiness of The Emperor's New Groove. (I actually remember enjoying that particular movie, too; but we'll get to that when we get to that.)
The impressive thing about Captain Hook, though, is that he comes across as a genuinely threatening villain - he coldly dispatches a pesky accordionist in his very first scene, dammit - even as he suffers an unending stream of indignity. He's a bright, crafty fellow, held back by his hopeless arrogance; a Wile E. Coyote whom we actually believe could catch his Road Runner, if you will. (The way his intelligence contrasts with his constant embarrassment is precisely why Hook is awesome, and Smee is someone I'd just like to slug right his his gross alcoholic face.) A lot of the credit here goes to Hans Conried, who manages to effortlessly tow the line between these two extremes, in what I would nominate as probably the very best Disney voice performance up through that point in time. It's THAT GOOD. Hookie definitely benefits from being a villain we actually get to know, from the story behind his freakish surrogate hand to his bizarre relationship with clocks. What the hell did we ever know about Queen Grimhilde, aside from the sad sad fact that her best friend is a freakin' mirror???
In fact, the only bad thing about the Cap'm (well, okay, aside from saying "redskins") is that he's....simply too good a villain for this movie. Peter Pan, our titular character, is completely overshadowed (no pun intended) by his nemesis. Wendy's enthusiasm for him is sorely misplaced, because he's really not so terribly interesting at all! In fact, he suffers from something I suppose I'll call Mary Poppins Syndrome - he's a character that we remember being perfectly pleasant and wonderful as kids, but when you finally go back and rewatch the movie, you discover that, no, he's actually deceptively unpleasant guy; you just didn't realise it at the time somehow. If this asshat is the embodiment of never growing up, then you really can't blame Wendy for ultimately deciding that, on second thought, that sounds awful and she'd better go ahead and grow up after all, thankyouverymuch.
Huh. Once I sat down and got into writing this, apparently I had a lot to ramble redundantly about after all! Yes, overall, this is another entry in a streak of middling material that seems to define Disney in the 1950s, but I find it considerably easier to recommend than Alice in Wonderland or Cinderella in Soul-Sucking Abuseland. Those films were mediocre all around; the insubstantiality at play here is the average between two polar opposite halves, the yawn-inducing adventures of Peter Pan and the Lost Boys (and Not-Quite-Lost Girl Wendy) and the surprisingly delightful antics of Captain Hook. In this case, the latter factor is definitely worth it, though you're more than welcome to go take a bathroom break when he isn't on the screen. In summary and in conclusion: How the heck is Peter's clock set to EXACTLY the same time as Hook's clocks; and, for that matter, how are they both so adept at knowing how many seconds remain until any given time when NONE OF THESE CLOCKS EVEN HAVE SECOND HANDS IN THE FIRST PLACE???
TERRIBLE AND UNNECESSARY UNDERGROWN DISNEY DIRECT-TO-DVD SEQUEL CONCEPT OF THE WEEK: In Preturn to Neverland, we learn why George seems to remember Peter Pan's cloud ship. You see, when he was a kid, George Darling was magically whisked off to Neverland, too! While he was there, though, he felt much more of a kindred spirit in Captain Hook, who at his point had no hook but was still named Hook, than in Peter Pan, who at this point had no pan flute but was still named Pan. George eagerly assisted Hookiepoo in all of his piratanical schemes, and gradually earning a promotion to First Mate. Smee was, of course, deeply jealous of this fact, going out of his way to attempt to murder George, even going as far as to reprehensibly give away the location of Captain Hook's hideout to Peter Pan and the Lost Furry Boys! In the end, when George learns of Smee's malsmeesance, he finally realises the truth about how evil Captain Hook and his crew are, and does the right thing, by helping Peter Pan cruelly chop his hand off. In the end, George heads back home to London to grow up, but not before saying, "Someday, I promise to have a daughter named Wendy, and when she comes here I promise she'll be on the right side from the start", which is probably a bit too on-the-nose, now that you mention it. (Soundtrack includes a couple more They Might Be Giants songs that you wouldn't ever in a million years guess were They Might Be Giants songs because they're so crazy-generic that any asshole could've written them!)
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