D52: The Halfway Point Roundup Thingamajig!

Oh, hey, look at the time. Apparently we're already halfway through this silly little project! Twenty-six down, twenty-six to go. (Weird to think that nearly half of Disney's films were released just in the last two decades, isn't it?) What have I taken away from this so far? Well, um......pioneering as they might've been, there's no denying that Disney's early stuff is HIGHLY uneven. I can't think of a single film so far that I liked 100%, with no major caveats. When Disney himself was in charge, a recurring hang-up I had was the general lack of emotion characters tended to display, especially females in abusive situations. And then Wolfgang Reitherman came along, and gave everything visual character, but also made for stories that were, undeniably, pretty shallow. And then.....well, let's just say that it's clear that they didn't know where to go from there.

But now the Disney Renaissance is around the corner, and that'll be an entirely different story! And hopefully a better one. But, before we march forward into a fairly thick gauntlet of princesses, allow me to take a look back and share a few things I liked, and a few others I didn't, in the best format of all: ARBITRARY LISTIES.

Jesse's Top 5 Favourite Disney Films Thus Far

1. The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh - God, this was really a hard decision. Like I said, I don't think I've liked a single one of these twenty-six films without some sort of major caveat. So, I decided this gets the honour, on the basis that the shorts are some of Disney's best work, when taken individually. The characters are actually full-blown characters, in a way that Walt Disney didn't seem to allow all that often, for some reason. When the sorts are all grouped up, in one place, yes, it can be a bit trying, but....well, especially with DVDs and all, you can just go ahead and view one and then come back later. So, I guess there's that.
2. The Fox and the Hound - Also a hard decision! It feels really weird giving this one second place solely on the basis of its bittersweet finale, which feels like a punch to the gut because it comes out of nowhere. (Not in the real-lifey "sometimes bad things happen for no reason" sense, but in the sense that it's just an awkward, meandering story up to that point.) Is it just that I'm overly affected by friend-based social commentary? Maybe, because it's not like the film even hit it out of the park in that regard. But, if memory serves, it's the only film so far that has genuinely made me tear up, and so I think that's worth something of some sort, maybe?
3. The Jungle Book - By this point in the studio's history, they'd pretty much given up on making emotionally affecting stories, a clear side effect of Wolfgang Reithermania. And that's pretty obvious here. The one part of the film that's supposed to be the most emotionally desolate is occupied by a weird Beatles parody, and Mowgli finds true love in, like, the last 30 seconds of the film. Emotionally, it's not much of a story. But the characterization and animation is pretty neat, right? (Kaa's animation even looked so good that Reitherman even recycled it wholesale a few years later for Robin Hood!)
4. The Great Mouse Detective - Again, because Vincent Price. That is all. (If you need a secondary reason, um......super-impressive CGI clock gear climax?)
5. Bambi - When I reviewed this, I believe I said it was a movie that doesn't ever need to be rewatched. I still stand firm in my belief that it's something people have to experience once. It's awkward, and it's episodic in the negative sense, but....holy shit do the animators achieve exactly what they set out to do here, with their carefully researched wildlife, and the almost intangible aspect the animation takes on when terror sets in. And then the infamous death scene, which isn't as scarring as some will tell you, but it's still remarkable for being, perhaps, the least sensationalist death in Disney history. The more I think about it, the more effective I believe their decision not to dwell on it was. It only serves to underscore the idea that this is nature, and this sort of thing happens all the time, because nature is the most depressing place imaginable, when you get right down to it.

Jesse's Un-Top 5 Least Favourite Disney Films Thus Far

1. The Black Cauldron - This, conversely, was a pretty easy decision to reach. When a film has THIS MUCH EFFORT put into it, and it's still unbearable, you know there's a problem! Could the "missing" twelve minutes have possibly saved it? Well, um.....no. Nothing could've saved this. Nothing.
2. Sleeping Beauty - Unlike the previous entry, this at least has one moderately interesting setpiece, with Maleficent's Dragon Forme, which increases her base stats but gives her a crippling weakness to sword-based attacks, apparently. But, generally, this is in the same boat - a Technirama snoozefest (hahaha, get it???????) with an overblown budget.
3. Cinderella - I'm noticing a trend here! At the time, this movie was a relief after all the package films, but looking back on it objectively, it's just kind of pathetic, isn't it? Remember, abuse victims: just sit back and take it and if you wish hard enough, it'll all change eventually! ("Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo" was good fun, though.)
4. Make Mine Music - To be perfectly honest, I'm giving the package films a lot of leeway here because they were deliberately cheap and shoddy productions that weren't really meant to be art in the first place, because of Hitlers. Even with this handicap, though, Triple-M was a thoroughly miserably boring affair. The only segment I can even remember right offhand was "The Whale Who Wanted to Sing at the Met", and perhaps that's only because Tetti-Tatti is you-know-who.
5. Robin Hood - I'm always hearing about how furries love this character because, oh my god, Disney is being stingy about re-releasing it because the furry main characters are just sooooo sexually attractive to furries. Even though Disney isn't being disproportionately stingy about re-releasing it at all, are they? Furries just like to whine, I guess. Anyway, I'm someone who likes anthropomorphic foxes, and that wasn't even close to being enough to compensate for how fucking boring this was, sadly.

BONUS LIST: Top 5 Animal Species, by Number of Major Appearances

1. Humans, naturally (23)
2. Mice and/or rats (11)
3. Domesticated cats (8)
4. Domesticated dogs (7)
5. TIE - owls, bears, and crocodiles/alligators (5 each)