My original intention was to just take the opportunity to watch some Disney movies and then rank them, maybe with a few notes against each to explain my decision. My notes turned out a little longer than expected, so for now I’m only ranking the first five, which were the five produced before and during World War 2. Not including the package films composed of multiple shorts.
As a TLDR courtesy, my list of best to worst. Note that I thought all of them were good, though!
- Fantasia
- Snow White
- Dumbo
- Bambi
- Pinocchio
Snow White and the Seven Dwarves
Snow White’s existence is a more interesting story than the movie itself (which is also interesting!). The first animated motion picture, dating all the way back to the 1930s, from a time when animated shorts were commonly black and white and played in theatres as filler between news reels and movies. Walt Disney poured every cent he had into its production, even borrowing money against his studio and home just to see it finished. Before it debuted, Industry veterans dubbed it “Disney’s Folly”, the idea of a cartoon being stretched to a movie length was such an insane notion, a massive financial commitment for something people wouldn’t want to sit through. Must have been embarrassing for those naysayers when it totally shattered all expectations at the box office.
The Dwarves playing it cool before jumping Grumpy to force him into a bath.
A culmination of all the technology and techniques the studio had pioneered over the years, it’s easy to see how this would have had audiences enraptured at the time. And the best part is just how well it holds up even today. The dwarves of course steal the show, the expressive animation instilling so much personality into all seven in such a limited amount of screen time. Their songs are also a great time, I especially loved the one about washing, it was catchy and even got a chuckle out of me. Again, amazing how well it holds up, I laughed at their antics several times, Grumpy is definitely my favourite and has the best story arc going from a complete grouch who doesn’t trust any women, to actually shedding tears during the finale when Snow White is poisoned. I actually said out loud during that sombre scene “oh no, not Grumpy!” Snow White herself is serviceable as a protagonist. A lot of her animation is rotoscoped, meaning they took film footage of a real actress and basically traced over her movements. This makes for incredibly realistic movement but it kinda sticks out against the dwarves much more exaggerated motions and more expressive faces. And I’m sorry but I’m just not a big fan of rotoscoping in general it feels like corner cutting to me. The other main character would be the evil Queen who is Snow White’s stepmother, where the rotoscoping makes more sense, you want something to feel off about her.
Definitely deserving of an S rank, as a first attempt it’s an outstanding achievement whose influence on the artistic medium of animation can’t be overstated.
Pinocchio
Moving on from the box office hit that was Snow White, it made sense that Disney would try and recapture that success a second time with yet another animated motion picture based off a fairy tale.
A lot of the less appealing aspects of Snow White were improved upon here. Gone are the opening and closing text crawls narrating the prologue and epilogue, instead replaced by the first character we see on-screen, Jiminy Cricket, singing When You Wish Upon a Star, which would go on to become the song people associate with Disney to this day. The character designs also see an improvement, the traced human characters nowhere to be seen, every character human or otherwise is now animated with exaggerated squash and stretch motion and expressive faces. At least, that’s what I thought until I was reminded about the Fairy who brings Pinocchio to life, once again sporting that distracting rotoscope animation. It feels like they use this as shorthand for conventional beauty because they hadn’t yet figured out how to animate attractive characters. And in this time period, conventional attractiveness was narrative shorthand for goodness, kindness and purity. I guess in a way that’s still true today. It’s not too bad because the fairy is of course, a supernatural being so having movements that don’t feel natural to the rest of the characters makes sense.
This movie was a lot more dark and unpleasant than I remembered it…
Despite the improvements I mentioned, by the halfway mark I was wondering why I hadn’t been enjoying things so far. Don’t get me wrong, the animation is gorgeous, probably the most impressively animated movie out of all five I’m covering here, the songs catchy and the story far less predictable than its predecessor, but I hadn’t felt anything. I hadn’t laughed, I hadn’t cried and this feeling persisted all the way through. Despite this being objectively a more competent production than Snow White, I just wasn’t vibing with it in the same way. I think it’s because the two main characters we’re following are just not interesting or endearing. Pinocchio himself is basically a blank slate with no knowledge of the world, no backstory, no personality outside of being a naive kid, he was just zapped into existence by a wishing star… And Jiminy for most of the movie is either shirking responsibility or being ignored by Pinocchio. He basically exists for exposition, slapstick fodder and to move the plot along when convenient. And move, the plot certainly does, going from one set piece to the next, one diabolical villain after another, none of which give us the schadenfreude of seeing them get their comeuppance, they’re just never seen again and presumably continuing to do bad things. One of these antagonists was basically kidnapping boys and selling them into slavery, and it’s never addressed again! I think all this is a symptom of trying to compress all the story beats from the original into such a short runtime, maybe? Either way, something about this one just failed to hook me. I can’t rank it too low because the animation is still some of the most impressive ever put to film… Hard one to figure out, honestly I was expecting to enjoy this one a lot more considering some people put this as the best Disney film of all time. I’ll give it a B, but only because the animation is so incredible it drags it up from a C.
Fantasia
Nowadays, a lot of people write animation off not as an artistic medium but as a genre for kids. Sure, there’s a lot of animated movies and TV aimed at an adult audience today but somehow the stigma endures… Probably because the majority of the most adult-focused animation today is ironically mostly juvenile humour. Walt Disney understood that animation was more than just a means of bringing the Sunday funnies to life, it was an art form that combined illustration, music and technology and instead aimed to bring an air of prestige to the medium with Fantasia, arguably the only Disney animated movie aimed squarely at adult audiences. It’s a compilation of animated shorts set to classical music performed by the Philadelphia Orchestra. Not only did they go all out on making a visual spectacle using every technology and technique available to them at the time, but they put the same effort and expertise into the audio, being the first movie to release with a stereo soundtrack, with left, right and centre channels over seven speakers and a fourth channel to control their volume individually. This significantly ramped up the cost though, not just from all the research and development but also the fact that movie theatres were only equipped with mono speakers and outfitting them all with this tech just for one movie was definitely not cheap. But it’s still crazy to me that they came up with this and deployed it for its premiere decades before even 2-channel stereo became the norm.
If you were fortunate enough to see it as intended, though, it must have been an absolute feast for the senses! It starts off with an introduction from Deems Taylor, explaining to the audience what they’re about to see. He’ll keep coming back between animated segments, essentially acting as a palette cleanser. The first segment we’re treated to is a piece by Bach, it eases the audience into the concept by simply having the orchestra members light up in various colours as they play before transitioning into actual animation, showing abstract shapes and colours moving and flowing in perfect sync with the music. It’s like if you were to attend a performance and let yourself doze off, these are the sorts of dreamlike images you’d see! Going on from there, the programme format is set and the segments become less interpretive and start focusing on telling a narrative, obviously still completely without dialogue or sound effects and with just enough wiggle room to allow for a certain degree of viewer interpretation.
Seeing this monster must have been absolutely horrifying, when the scariest things before this would have been janky stop-motion or men in rubber suits.
My favourite segment is definitely the one about life on Earth, because I am a huge palaeontology nerd, starting from when our planet was a mass of molten rock churning away, pushing forward through time to show the first single-celled life forms and their evolution all the way to the dinosaurs and their eventual demise. Keep in mind, this scene is based on a 1940’s understanding of the distant past so cut them a little slack with the scientific inaccuracies. Also, imagine putting yourself in the position of someone watching back when this was new and seeing the T-Rex, this could well have been the most intimidating monster ever put to film and I can just imagine how awe inspiring it must have been to see! I also really love the segment that shows the passing of a day, it’s split up into four parts for morning, afternoon, dusk and night. Each part features a performance from a troupe of dancing animals, each giving way to the next for their part, culminating in a chaotic ending where they’re all on stage together. Oddly, I felt the weakest segment was Sorcerer’s Apprentice, the one with Mickey Mouse in it that everyone remembers this movie for and is used in all the marketing material. It’s still a good segment, the animation quality, especially with the water, is totally insane, but it feels out of place with the rest of the programme and that’s because it kinda is, since it was originally supposed to be a standalone short before the scope of the project ballooned.
Fantasia easily earns an S rank, it’s a bold, risky experiment pushing new technology and innovation in the name of art and unlike many early experiments in motion pictures, these not only stuck the landing but held up extremely well into the modern day.
Dumbo
Dumbo released in theatres in late 1941, most of the world is engaged in the conflict that would become known as World War 2, with America entering itself just a couple of months later. International markets had closed off for Disney and it was severely hurting their bottom line, felt especially with Pinocchio which they couldn’t make their budget back on from domestic ticket sales alone.
Dumbo, as a result, definitely feels like a far more modest production than those that came before. As well as being one of the shortest Disney movies ever, the animation quality (while still stellar) is a clear step back in ambition. That said, I liked this a lot more than Pinocchio, primarily because the main duo have much better chemistry and are both more endearing, but there are so many elements these two movies share that Dumbo does so much better. Dumbo himself, like Pinocchio, was just born into the world, but both acts and is treated like an infant by his loving mother which makes more sense than Gepetto sending Pinocchio off to school by himself like 6 hours after birth. Both films feature a lot assholes that act as antagonists, Dumbo handles these better by actually giving them their comeuppance.
Timothy the mouse is essentially filling the role of Jiminy Cricket, a diminutive, streetwise figure that keeps the plot on track. Full disclosure, I am biased to favour mice, but I don’t think it’s a hot take to say that Timothy is just the better character. He befriends Dumbo out of empathy rather than because a hot fairy told him to, seeing the baby elephant separated from his mother by the circus and shunned by the other elephants for his freakishly large ears.
There’s a scene set to a beautiful song called “Baby Mine” where Timothy leads Dumbo to the circus wagon his mother had been shackled up in. Their reunion really caught me off guard with how emotionally powerful it was, both our duo were brought to tears and subsequently so was I. This is what Pinocchio failed to do and to be fair, I don’t consider it mandatory for a movie to make me cry but it IS a sure sign that the storytelling is making me feel something.
Timothy has both compassion and a sense of justice. Superior in every way over the cricket.
Addressing the elephant in the room, so to speak. Yes, the crows are awkwardly racist, but they are also the second best set of characters in the movie outside of the primary pair, being the only ones beside Timothy that show any sort of empathy toward Dumbo (admittedly after teasing him and subsequently learning about his sad start to life). I like to think they know what it’s like to be treated as outcasts and can relate to his plight more but that probably wasn’t intentional from the writers. But also, these characters are just cool, they all have distinct designs and their banter between one another feels authentic and they have maybe the best song in the movie that was used in all the promotional material. So, sorry if it makes me problematic or whatever but I really like them.
What I didn’t like so much was the ending. This might be down to the budget constraints and short runtime, but essentially the whole movie built up this image of circus cruelty and ends with Dumbo using his newly-found ability to fly with his huge ears to essentially exact his vengeance upon those who wronged him, breaking out of the demeaning clown act he’d been assigned to and attacking the other clowns who’d been putting him through hell, the ringmaster who caged his mother and the other elephants who ridiculed and abandoned him… In tame, cartoon violence of course! Then the scene basically cuts to a montage of newspapers showing how famous and valuable Dumbo became, ending on a reprieve of the crows song as Dumbo is apparently still with this circus, granted his mother is with him now unshackled but… It kinda ruins the whole thing, honestly, knowing that this despicable institution that abused him so much is making bank off him even now.
Special mention for the “Pink Elephants” scene, where Dumbo and Timothy accidentally get drunk and start hallucinating. It feels like an excuse for the animators to have fun with a lot of abstract imagery and I am down for that!
I’ll be ranking this one an A, because it has so much charm and does a lot with its source material and the constraints it clearly had to work in, but even with historical context in mind, its problematic themes and botched ending are really sharp downers, more so than any movie so far.
Bambi
Bambi is the last movie from this particular era, after this the economic downturn from World War 2 and the fact that a lot of Disney’s staff were drafted and/or made to produce propaganda material meant it just wasn’t feasible to put out these big, expensive feature films any more. Instead, they would start stitching together shorter animations and sell them as package deals. Being real here, I have zero interest in watching any of them, with perhaps the exception of whichever one had Mickey & The Beanstalk. If I remember right, production began on Bambi before Dumbo, with the latter basically being a budget-conscious attempt at recouping losses from the previous films, and this delayed Bambi somewhat, as well as having some scenes cut out. This is unfortunate because my main issue with Bambi is that I was left wanting more.
Once again, the protagonist and namesake we will be following this time is a creature that has just been born. What makes this one different is that he doesn’t stay this way for long. Rather than a story that takes place in a set time, where our established character has a specific want and must overcome an obstacle to satisfy it, Bambi is more like a series of scenes depicting defining moments in his life, with the only connective tissue being the passage of time.
So if it’s a series of loosely connected showcases of mundane, often sappy mush, this makes it a pretty weak story compared to the other films, right?… Sort of. There are some advantages to this sort of storytelling, like keeping the plot cohesive and organically moving. You never get into a situation where the plot veers off on a weird tangent or where you need a tiny little sidekick character to move things along. Take pivotal scenes from the source material, animate them in a vacuum, maybe give them a musical number, then just have them play in sequence. And you can summarise some of these scenes in just a few words, too. Bambi experiences snow for the first time and slips on ice. Bambi visits the meadow for the first time and gets shot at by hunters. But because this is the only plot points you need to get across, it frees up a lot of time for the animation and music, and unlike Dumbo I definitely didn’t feel like this movie was cutting corners, aside from the short runtime of course. The backgrounds are stunning and while I’m not sure of the specifics, it definitely felt like this was the best showcase of what you can do with the multiplane camera, the forest paintings are given such depth and there’s a super long panning shot at the start of the film that just had me in awe. Another scene later on had the shot on a lake, showing deer walking along the edge in the reflection with Bambi and his mother bringing up the rear, distorted by the water movement and ending with autumn leaves landing on the surface and I legitimately had to watch it several times because I cannot wrap my head around how they managed to pull this effect off! I can only assume it was some manner of imperfect glass layer but yeah, despite hurting for cash they still went really hard on the animation in this movie!
Went off on a bit of a tangent myself, there. The point being, this slice-of-life format of storytelling, couple with minimal dialogue and a musical score that matches the animation, makes this like the missing link between conventional Disney movies and Fantasia, where you’re there for the visuals and music more so than the story, which is purposefully kept simple and open to interpretation so as not to distract from the experience.
Bambi exhibits literal and figurative character growth more so than any protagonist so far.
Out of the five, this is probably the one I had the hardest time writing about because I enjoyed it a lot, but there’s nothing I can point to as an example of its greatness that the other movies hadn’t done better, Bambi himself is another blank slate character and the side characters are either not very engaging or aren’t on screen very much, but even with this fact AND knowing full well that Bambi’s mother was going to die, I still cried when it happened, I still felt pity for the wee one. The storytelling, deceptively simple as it is, had built up their bond through expressive animation and minimal voice acting, subtle enough that I hadn’t noticed, culminating in a perfectly directed sequence showing them running from a hunter, seeing Bambi escape into the foliage as the music stops dead and a gunshot is heard. Running all the way home, the music appears to start to brighten up as he expects his mother to be right behind him, but as he realises she isn’t, it once again drops into the melancholy melody of winter as he begins to wander the snow calling out for her. The music once again goes silent as he is confronted by his father, who bluntly tells him that she can’t be with him any more. And they hold on this silence and it’s just so perfect… Until it cuts to the next scene in spring with a bright, lovey dovey love song that might actually break your neck from the tonal whiplash.
Another couple of things I want to mention, Flower the skunk is adorable and I love how he’s presented female-coded with those long fluttering eyelashes, the way he talks, the way he acts, especially his reaction to young Bambi accidentally naming him flower as he’s learning his first words, and when Thumper goes to correct Bambi that flower isn’t the right word, he stops Thumper right there and insists it’s OK to call him Flower. It’s only later in the movie when Flower has his adult voice actor that you can even tell. It’s still common in animation today to use stereotypes as a way quickly introducing a character, knowing your audience will understand. For example, put a fat guy with a cartoonish big nose in a business suit and everyone knows they’re the greedy money hungry antagonist. So yeah it was surprisingly refreshing to see a subversion of a stereotype in an animated film this old. Whether that was their intent or not, I have no idea. Oh, and the other thing I wanted to mention was how terrifying the scene with the hunting dogs was, another prime example of how expertly matched the music and animation is in this film, it transitions so seamlessly into Faline looking for Bambi through the sound of gunshots, to having her fleeing from these frightening animals! The entire sequence is chaotic and tense, perhaps this is why I like the movie as a whole so much, each each sequence is tight and well directed, something that’s easier to do when you break a movie down into individual chunks.
This is another one that straddles between two ranks, between B and A. The unique storytelling style is both a blessing and a curse, the attempts at humour fall short, probably because of the more realistic animal art style with no humans, and although the music is consistently excellent throughout it doesn’t have any standout banger songs like the others do… But it’s so beautiful, my gosh. OK, I’m settling on a B, but it’s a high B! It’s objectively a better film than Dumbo, but Dumbo is just a way more fun time and has a better mouse character.
I don’t know if I’ll go as in-depth with any others, possibly this is just an exception for these special five and I’ll give any future rankings just a few of the highlight notes instead. This was fun, though. The one I thought I’d like the best I ended up liking the least and all of them were entirely different experiences than I remembered. Hopefully I can binge the rest of them before my Disney Plus subscription runs out!
Leave a Reply