Also check my post on the Pre-war Disney movies!

Most of the movies from the 50’s I hadn’t seen before, the only exception being Lady and the Tramp. I definitely missed out because these are some gorgeous looking pictures with a nice mix of genres and themes. Disney seems to have taken the lessons learned during their experimental days a decade prior and learned how to make a quality animated motion picture and get it out the door quickly and efficiently and make its money back in ticket sales.

As before, a TLDR courtesy, my list of best to worst. Note that I didn’t hate any of them!

1. Lady and the Tramp
2. Peter Pan
3. Alice in Wonderland
4. Sleeping Beauty
5. Cinderella

 

Cinderella

This was my first time watching this one so I have no nostalgia for it outside of the trailer clips I’ve seen before. Apparently this one received critical acclaim upon release, I can only assume this was due to the fact that Disney hadn’t put out anything but shorts for almost a decade due to the war and financial troubles. It makes sense their big return to animated movies would try and emulate the success of Snow White but if anything, to me, it feels like a step backwards from that. The music is worse, the characters are worse, the animation is worse, the story and pacing is worse. It felt like only a third of the runtime went into telling a story and the rest was a Tom & Jerry cartoon.

When I saw the mice come on for the first time, my face lit up, they looked adorable!… Then they started speaking, in these very forced and annoying dialects… And it’s established that Cinderella can actually understand what they’re saying, more on that later…

 

“Leave the sewing to the women!”

 

The first half of the movie seemed to be mostly antics around the animals, the cat chasing the mice and generally being an asshole, as you might expect from a cat named Lucifer. Things did pick up after the animators realised they’d wasted half their budget on this and they quickly see about getting the plot going, involving a Prince returning home and his Father the King who really wants his son to get hitched and give him Grandkids. His plan is to invite every single chick in the country to a royal ball and hope at least one of them catches the Prince’s eye.

This is the part where the best characters of the movie come in. It’s not our protagonist, it’s not the antagonist, it’s not even the mice we’ve spent most of the time watching (not going to lie, I did like their song though!). No, the first best character is the Fairy Godmother who is delightful, I just absolutely feel a warmth about her both from her design and performance, quite an accomplishment considering despite being in all the marketing material she’s only in the movie for a few minutes in this one scene! She of course, helps Cinderella get to the ball after her wicked Stepmother and sisters went without her, by making for her a magic horse drawn carriage and giving her a radiant white dress and glass slippers. What kinda dampens the impact of this scene though is, the fact that the audience is already detached from any sort of grounding in reality, because this is a world where animals talk, so having magic doesn’t seem that far fetched.

The other best characters are the delightfully old-gay-couple-coded King and Grand Duke. Standing out from the rest of the human cast by being undeniably cartoon characters, the King is this loud, spoiled old man who is clearly used to getting whatever he wants, while the Grand Duke is the snivelling yes-man who clearly is aware of the King’s petulance but has no choice but to go along with anyway. The two just have this chemistry, a dynamic that’s just so entertaining to watch. Possibly because most of the main cast are rather bland…

I’ll give this one a C, it was pretty mid but still a good watch. I liked the mice doing a musical number when they were trying to make a dress, I liked the Fairy Godmother and the creative magic spells she did, I liked the gays. But overall it felt really unambitious and that might have just been because they were playing it safe.

 

Alice in Wonderland

I was a little worried after Cinderella that it was going to be decades of mid movies I have no nostalgia for, I’ve never seen this one either and my knowledge of it mostly comes from Kingdom Hearts. I need not have concerned myself though, because this movie is a lot of fun. Once again not as ambitious at pushing the medium forward as the pre-war movies, but it certainly made a fantastic choice with its source material. While most of Cinderella could have just been done in live action, almost all of Alice’s scenes were tailor made to be animated! It’s a conga line of trippy setpieces and musical numbers with no plot beyond Alice following a white rabbit into a strange world and then wanting to find her way home.

To list everything I liked about it would basically be me retelling the story because I liked the entire thing. Alice herself is a really delightful protagonist, her soft, proper mannerisms and well-spoken dialogue contrast perfectly with the crazy nonsensical world of Wonderland. The supporting cast is vast and varied and they don’t get much screen time individually, but it works in this case because these aren’t characters that should be fleshed out, they are ironically far more compelling in how enigmatic and surreal they are than they ever would be with backstory and motivation. That said, they are not entirely without personality and individual traits. The Cheshire Cat stands out for being a trickster and speaking in riddles. The Queen of Hearts is a deliciously nasty antagonist that will severely punish anyone for the slightest provocation, her constant switching between trying to act dignified and lady like to blowing her top with her bad temper, culminating in quite possibly the most ludicrous court trial ever, I tell you I was hooked the whole way through because there was never a moment where I felt like I knew what was going to happen next and that was definitely the intent!

 

These two annoy me. But can you spot the mouse??

 

If I could nitpick, I think maybe Alice is a little too calm and collected most of the time, which makes the occasions she does have an emotional moment feel a little jarring. Also not sure it it’s just me but some of the voices were a little hard to understand what they were saying, Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum for example. I also share somewhat in Alice’s frustration that most of the side characters she meets are kinda rude and obnoxious, often talking over her, acting self-important or just generally being dicks.

This one gets an B, but it’s a high B because it has a sleepy mouse in a teapot. I can’t really rank it much higher than that because it’s almost devoid of any actual storytelling. There aren’t really any stakes or relatable aspects, but at the same time I was enjoying it from beginning to end, there just weren’t many moments that really stood out as exceptional (or awful).

 

Peter Pan

Another I haven’t seen before, but oddly enough have seen the Robin Williams adaptation (Hook) many times, it’s one of my favourite comfort movies, so I thought it’d be fun to see how the animated adaptation holds up against it… Yeah, it’s pretty good! I think I’m noticing a pattern here where I enjoy these movies a lot more if the source material lends itself well to the sorts of exaggerated, abstract imagery you can only achieve through animation, so an adventure in a magical world would be an easy win.

But Neverland is actually quite subdued in terms of wonder and whimsy, there are no weird and wacky creatures, magical forces or talking mice, it’s just an island covered mostly in jungle… But it has mermaids, you don’t age while there and there is at least one fairy so, it technically counts as a magical world, right?

Although there were no mice in this one, we got something just as good and roughly the same size, Tinkerbell! I had no idea how much of a sassy little bitch she was and I love it! Also borderline psychotic, the heat she gives off when boiling mad literally able to ignite things and casually trying to get Wendy killed out of jealousy, yeesh girl!!

 

How she got to be one of the most important Disney mascots, I’ll never know!

 

Captain Hook and Smee will be your queer couple for the evening. It’s absolutely precious the desperation in Hook’s voice when encountering the crocodile that ate his hand, calling out for Smee to protect him! And Smee is just this soft little teddy bear and I’m sure they cuddle at night when no-one is looking.

The animation is really good especially when it comes to action sequences and slapstick, I laughed out loud several times, including that part where Smee accidentally slams an oar onto Hook’s head instead of the crocodile.

It’s not all a winner though. Wendy… I’m sorry, I just found her to be a drag, John and Michael too. They’re filling the rolls of the normies, audience surrogates for the fantasy elements to work off of, but as mentioned there just really aren’t that many fantasy elements here and I don’t think the movie even needs these characters. But they are important in the original play so, they have to come too I guess. Most of the movie just had Wendy trying to keep up with Peter who was just off doing his own thing, sometimes forgetting she was even there. Peter is a bit of a dick too, actually. That’s intentional though, they portray him and the other lost boys as having no manners because they don’t have parents.

So I don’t know much about native Americans, not being American myself, but as far as I’m aware they were basically treated as sub-human through much of the existence of the USA and had their lands and culture forcibly stripped from them. So to see them represented like this in a white-man-made movie just made me say “yikes” out loud. This was even worse than the crows in Dumbo, by a long shot.

So this one gets an A, the core story with Peter and Hook and their back and forth spats is where the movie really shines and if it were just that I’d give it an S for sure, but Wendy being the third wheel and the cringe-inducing racism keep it from the top spot for me.

 

Lady and the Tramp

What the hell is wrong with people? What traumatic experience have they gone through that would make them call this movie dull or mid? This was so much better than I remembered, it’s got everything you could want, cute moments, some quite intense action scenes, funny moments and a titular pair that develop some endearing chemistry, at least by the standards of what these movies have given us so far.

We get to see Lady in her new home as a puppy, a mansion really! Very upper class neighbourhood, which will serve well as a contrast to what’s coming. I like Lady as a character, it would have been easy to make her an obnoxious snobby stereotype, what with being spoiled and pampered by rich owners, but thankfully that’s not who she is at all, she has the air of a proper Lady, but she’s a sweet heart that’s just naive and unaware of the world beyond her picket fences. There was a scene at breakfast where her owners pour coffee into a saucer for her along with giving her a donut and I loved this because my Grandpa would do the same for his dog. This movie is just full of sweet little moments like this.

Her world gets turned upside down though when her owners have a baby, they start neglecting her more and more as their new kid takes up all of their attention. I don’t think the movie intentionally wanted to make them seem like bad people but like, if you stop taking your dog for walks and ignoring it for any reason that’s just being neglectful so… Boo on them. Once the kid is born and things settle down though it’s sorta implied that things go back to normal? The movie doesn’t do a very good job at explaining this part, we get a scene of Lady seeing the baby for the first time in a really sweet scene where she finally gets ear scritches after months of scenes showing her being ignored. It then cuts immediately to a scene of the owners packing to go away for a few days and like, I feel a big gap is missing here!

Anyway, they leave Lady and the baby with an Aunt who’s a complete bitch and takes Lady to the pet store to get her muzzled. She freaks out though and runs away, getting lost in the streets dodging traffic, running down a back alley and getting chased by a trio of really intimidating looking mutts. Like, so far we’ve seen several dog characters and they’ve all looked cute or silly but these are downright frightening! Tramp appears and fights them off, and it was watching this scene that made me think how much their technique for animating animals had improved since the Bambi days, the dogs are neither true-to-life or cartoony, it’s a really visually pleasing middle ground.

 

“Bones?! What’s-a-matta wit you Joe I break-a you face!”

 

Todays queer pairing will be two Italian stereotype restaurant chefs who know Tramp as a stray dog they give bones to sometimes and they’re basically recycled designs of Stromboli and Captain Hook which makes it even more amusing. When they’re arguing like an old married couple and Tony says “I break-a you face!” I burst out laughing! They also get possibly the best scene in the entire movie, finding Tramp with Lady and being adorable as they are they give them a dinner of spaghetti and meatballs while singing to them and despite it being these goofy two, the song is actually really sweet and the highlight of the movie actually. The song plays as the two dogs have this romantic dinner, that iconic scene where they both share the same noodle strand until their lips meet, it’s so sweet my gosh!

But yeah, once again this movie doesn’t really push any boundaries with the medium and is actually a rather grounded, low stakes story, but it’s so pretty, the backgrounds look gorgeous and as mentioned the animation on the dogs looks so good. There’s a scene near the end with a chase scene around a horse and cart on waterlogged streets in the rain, some shots here have such depth you’d swear it had to have been done with computer animation, but computers didn’t exist yet!! I was thinking like, when the cart loses control and flips over how did they do that??? While it is sad we’re not seeing awesome stuff like the multiplane camera any more, shots like this coming in right near the end still surprised me in their technical and artistic mastery! By this point, their presentation just feels so polished and like they’ve finally figured out how to make animated movies down to a formula.

Also in the last act there’s a rat that’s meant to be an antagonist. It just appears in the yard and Lady growls at it and frightens it into climbing the house and hiding in a window, the baby’s room. The rat doesn’t actually make any attempt to hurt the baby or anything it just hides under the crib… And they drew it so evil and scary looking too, poor ratto, the only character in the whole movie to die and he did nothing wrong…

This might sound blasphemous or like I’m being a contrarian but, did the people who say this one is boring actually sit down and watch it? I feel like we didn’t see the same movie, maybe they accidentally watched the live action remake, who knows… I really want to give this one the coveted S rank but I think the parts with Lady being ignored and left with that bitch Aunt drag it down a bit, I feel like there could have been less nasty ways to get Lady out onto the streets. It would also have saved us from the racists Asian cats scene… I love this movie though, I really can’t find too many things to fault it on!

 

Sleeping Beauty

The last of the 50’s Disney movies and disappointingly once again taking from a fairytale about a princess in a fantasy kingdom. I say disappointed because I’d started to really enjoy the more surreal and adventurous concepts that had come since Cinderella, but this movie was actually pretty good and definitely the best princess one so far, although it did have some pretty major flaws.

But let’s start with the good stuff, and probably the best thing about it, how it looks. Because my gosh this movie has some beautiful art, not even talking about the animation or chatacter designs right now, I’m just referring to the painted backgrounds, the style is so abstract, imagine things like castles and trees but with simplified shapes, but still having an enormous level of detail, like someone took the backgrounds of a cartoon from the 90’s and turned DLSS on… And it uses the same ultra wide aspect ratio as Lady and the Tramp did, it was legitimately a feast for the eyes the entire time! It may have actually been TOO good. There’s a phrase “chewing the scenery”, but what happens when the scenery starts chewing everyone else?? The characters in this movie, both designs and animation are both very competent but nothing we haven’t seen before, nothing really sets it apart from the other movies this decade, so putting them against these gorgeously stylized painted backgrounds just made them appear flat and dull in comparison.

At least that was how I felt during the first half, the movie was meandering a lot and I genuinely felt more bored than at any other time in any other movie so far. The second half was a lot better, it picked up the pace and crammed in some genuinely thrilling action scenes, some comedic scenes with the two kings who are the fathers of the titular character and her betrothed, and some nice locations for more of those backgrounds to shine. Maleficent’s lair especially is given such an imposing aura.

Speaking of, Maleficent herself is definitely the main attraction in this movie, everything from her design to her powers to her mannerisms just feels like evil personified, oh and her laugh too, can’t forget that! It’s like they took the evil Queen from their first movie and cranked it up to 11! And that finale where she flat out transforms into a giant dragon, holy cow I fucking love dragons!! Totally makes up for the lack of motivation and backstory, she cursed this girl because she got snubbed at a party and then spent the next 16 years fretting over not being able to find her after she went into hiding. I can sort of see now why Disney decided to go back and give her a movie of her own because I did find myself wanting to know more about what her deal was, seeing as the rest of the cast were nowhere near as interesting.

But yeah like I said the first act is slow and boring and also stupid. Their plan to keep the baby Aurora safe from Maleficent is to have her live out in the woods with these three fairies who also have no backstory as to who they are or where their powers come from. They stop using magic so as not to draw attention to themselves. But here’s the stupid part, the curse states she will die if she pricks her finger on a spinning wheel before the end of her sixteenth birthday, so instead of waiting that out and returning her to her worried parents the following day, they smuggle her back to the castle on that same day… Why??? Add to that they start using their wands again on that last day because they’re too incompetent to bake a birthday cake and too lazy to do chores and OF COURSE one of Maleficents scouts just so happens to spot this… These three really are complete morons, the whole plan was moronic and the King and Queen are also morons for going along with it.

 

This might be the nicest looking Disney movie yet!

 

We get a really chilling scene after Aurora is back in the castle and of course the three morons decide it’d be a good idea to leave her alone for a moment. Maleficent appears before her in the fireplace, an eerie green light filling the room as she beckons a seemingly hypnotised Aurora into a secret passage behind the fireplace, sealing the route behind her to prevent the fairies from following. And of course, she gets her to prick her finger on a spinning wheel that she magicked out of thin air. And then perhaps the stupidest part of all in the movie… The kingdom is partying and the royals are excited because they know this is the day their daughter returns (again, could have waited until tomorrow!!) and they don’t know she’s dead/asleep yet. Rather than the fairies coming forward and fessing up to their buffoonery… I shit you not… Their solution is to put THE ENTIRE KINGDOM to sleep with magic!! Like, at this point they don’t have a plan or anything they just decide this is the best idea. Sucks to be you if you fell asleep in the bathtub I guess! Go drown! City defences? Who cares! Let the rabble come loot and pillage all they please while the good people waste away in never-ending slumber!

Oh, and through contrivances, Maleficent has captured the Prince that Aurora met one time and spent 10 minutes with and fell in love with during the first half of the movie and the fairies by massive coincidence find out about it and go off to try and break him out. It does lead to some really nice imagery at her evil lair and also a really awesome fight scene with her dragon form, though. The Prince ultimately slays her, kisses Aurora which breaks the curse and everyone else wakes up none the wiser and everyone lives happily ever after, I guess.

This is a hard one because on paper this has a lot going for it, but it also has a plot that really broke me. You have to be lenient with these sorts of movies, I get that, sometimes you need to suspend your disbelief and just roll with it, but for some reason I just couldn’t with this movie. I felt similar feelings when Gepetto let Pinocchio go to school alone on his first day of living, it’s an act of idiocy that actually steers the plot rather than one played for laughs or something inconsequential. But Sleeping Beauty is basically like that almost the entire way through, all the friction comes from the stupid decisions and nonsensical plans.

So while I enjoyed the movie because when it cooks, it REALLY cooks, it just has so much dragging it down it’s getting a C. I’ve never seen the source material it’s based on so I’m not sure how rigidly they had to stick with it, but the movie would have been so much better without the fairies and that’s hard for me to say because I love fairies!!

And that’s it! All the 50’s Disney movies watched and thoroughly digested!

All in all, it feels less like an exciting experiment of technology and art than it did in the 30’s and 40’s and more about pushing a product off an assembly line. Still, really high-quality products, mind you! The animated movie making process feels refined and perfected now. No more gambling ridiculous amounts of money on pushing the medium further, instead put out something competently made on a budget, cutting corners if necessary so long as it doesn’t impact the finished movie.

The next few decades, I’ll be honest, I am not looking forward to revisiting. While I do have some fond memories of some of the movies to come, I do know that the 60’s marks the start of a sharp decline for Disney. Their quality of their output takes a nosedive, Walt himself is totally checked out of his animation studio by this point and consumed with his Epcot project, which would be the case until he died a few years into the next decade, so… Hey, maybe I’ll find a movie in there I haven’t seen before and end up really liking! Bright side!