Tag Archives: Walt Disney

Capsules

CAPSULE: THE THREE CABALLEROS (1944)

2 Comments

DIRECTED BY: , Clyde Geronimi, Jack Kinney, , Harold Young

FEATURING: Dora Luz, Aurora Miranda, voices of Clarence Nash, Jose Oliveira, Joaquin Garay, Sterling Holloway

PLOT: Three Caballeros is one of the “package features” that Walt Disney made during World War II, a compilation of short subjects (a la Fantasia) with a vaguely Latin American theme.

Still from The Three Caballeros (1944)

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Because only the last 15 minutes or so of this 70-minute feature are truly weird. However, if this were a list of the 366 weirdest animated films ever made, this picture might make it.

COMMENTS: In Three Caballeros, Donald Duck and his friends—the Brazilian parrot Jose, the Mexican rooster Panchito, and the manic Aracuan bird—embark on a musical tour of South America that impressively combines live-action with animation. Along the way, they encounter Aurora Miranda (sister of Carmen) and engage in enough wild slapstick to shame the more anarchic Warner Bros. cartoon characters of the time (Bugs Bunny, Porky Pig, etc.).

Despite having its own ride at EPCOT Center, Caballeros is one of Disney’s most obscure animated films, and with good reason: most of it is kind of dull. What does distinguish the movie, however, is its peculiar, almost Tex Avery-like tendency to turn Donald Duck into a downright lustful bird every time he encounters a Latin beauty (which happens a lot), and a bizarrely psychedelic third act that is a relentless assault of wild visual imagery a la the “Pink Elephants on Parade” segment from Dumbo. The last fifteen minutes of the picture practically turns it into Yellow Submarine, with exploding flowers and dancing, suggestive cacti (reminiscent of the giant swaying bananas in ’s 1943 musical The Gang’s All Here), just two factors in a non-stop crazy quilt of pre-psychedelia that refuses to stop until the avian trio has sung the film’s title song and Panchito has shot his guns in the air about 150 times. It’s exhausting (and, by Disney standards, extremely weird), yet clearly the highlight of the film. This makes The Three Caballeros worth seeing for die-hard fans of Disney and/or animation, but they should prepare to do a lot of fast-forwarding on their DVD remotes.

Otherwise, the rest of the film is harmless and/or forgettable, although Blue Sky Studio’s recent, music-filled Rio (about Brazilian parrots) may owe something to both this film and Disney’s similar 1943 packager Saludos Amigos. As alluded to before, this movie obviously has its fans within the Disney empire’s theme park division, as the Mouse has tried to keep all its characters alive in one way or another: Jose and Panchito can be spotted in the revamped “It’s a Small World” ride.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“I would not hesitate to call it the most surreal work ever produced by the Disney studios… in a film full of surrealist touches, Donald the sex fiend is easily the strangest part, though certainly one of the most memorable. (The fact that the animation looks a bit pasted on top of the live action footage just makes it all the weirder).”–Tim Brayton, Anatgony & Ecstasy (DVD)

Canonically Weird (The List)

205. FANTASIA (1940)

4 Comments

“…action controlled by a musical pattern has great charm in the realm of unreality.”– on Fantasia

Must See

DIRECTED BY: Norman Ferguson, James Algar, Samuel Armstrong, Ford Beebe, Jr. Jim Handley, T. Hee, Wilfred Jackson, Hamilton Luske, Bill Roberts, Paul Satterfield, Ben Sharpsteen

FEATURING: Leopold Stokowksi and the Philadelphia Orchestra, Deems Taylor, Walt Disney (voice of Mickey Mouse)

PLOT: An orchestra files in to a concert hall, followed by classical music critic Deems Taylor, who introduces the film and describes the different purposes of classical music. The first musical selection, Bach’s “Toccata and Fugue in D-minor,” illustrates “absolute” music, and consists of a series of abstract images combined with views of the orchestra in silhouette. The six animated musical sequences that follow compose the bulk of the movie, following the adventures of fairies, Mickey Mouse, dinosaurs, centaurs, hippo ballerinas, and demons set to the music of Tchaikovsky, Dukas, Stravinsky, Beethoven, Ponchielli, Mussorgsky, and Schubert, all introduced by Taylor.

Still from Fantasia (1940)
BACKGROUND:

  • The meeting of conductor Leopold Stokowski and animation god Walt Disney, in 1937 at Chasen’s restaurant, is the stuff of legend. Disney was starstruck with the conductor’s celebrity, mysterious accent, and fierce mane. The seed of an idea for a “concert film” sprang from the meeting. At this time Disney had only produced and released one previous feature: Snow White and The Seven Dwarfs (1937). The idea of an animated feature had seemed risky and radical, with the naysayers predicting bankruptcy. The profits and critical acclaim from Snow White forever silenced those doomsday prophets. Now, Disney was ready to take another risk. 1940 saw the release of Disney’s second and third feature films. Artistically, it paid off as Pinocchio (1940) and Fantasia are, to date, Disney’s two greatest films, released only nine months apart. The former was a critical box office hit. The latter did not make money for nearly twenty years.
  • Fantasia was an expansion of Disney’s “Silly Symphonies” series of musical shorts (which were set to original music commissioned by Disney studios rather than classical masterpieces). The “Sorcerer’s Apprentice” segment, starring Mickey Mouse, was originally made as a Silly Symphony but cost over $100,000 to animate, and Disney realized the only way to recoup that budget was to make it part of a feature.
  • Fantasia was (mostly, despite some notable howls of derision) well-received by critics and audiences on release. It failed to turn a profit because of its enormous budget, difficulties in distribution (new sound systems had to be installed in any theater that wanted to play it, so it was rolled out piecemeal as a roadshow feature), and the fact the the onset of WWII cut off the foreign markets. Disney studios continued to re-release the film every five to ten years up until 1990, however. By the late 1960s, spurred by its discovery and embrace by the psychedelic generation, Fantasia had become both a beloved classic and a cash cow.
  • Bits from the original “Pastoral Symphony” sequence were later erased due to their depictions of black centaurs, who were caricatured and depicted as servants to the white centaurs.
  • Disney had planned more editions of Fantasia (one of which included a collaboration with ), but its initial failure laid such plans to rest until sixty year later, when Walt Disney Productions released Fantasia 2000. Fantasia 2000 had fleeting moments of brilliance, but was mostly a disappointing sequel; too clean, too crisp, lacking the risk-taking intensity and provocativeness of the original.

INDELIBLE IMAGE:  In an entire film of indelible images, alligators swooning over and dancing with hippos may have been the “eureka, it’s weird!” moment for the film’s 1960s acidhead crowd. We concur.

THREE WEIRD THINGS: Dancing mushrooms; Stravinsky dinosaurs; alligator/hippo romance

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Pinocchio may have had boys turning into jackasses, and Dumbo (1941) had it’s mind boggling “pink elephants on parade,” but Walt Disney’s Fantasia is chock-full of progressive strangeness and an ardent embrace of art for the sake of art. It’s Walt’s weirdest.


1956 re-release trailer for Fantasia (including part of the scene later deleted from prints due to charges of racism)

COMMENTS: Over a thirty year period I have seen Fantasia (1940) Continue reading 205. FANTASIA (1940) →

Canonically Weird (The List), Shorts

204. DESTINO (2003)

3 Comments

“A magical display of the problem of life in the labyrinth of time.”– describing Destino

“A simple story about a young girl in search of true love .”– describing Destino

Must SeeWeirdest!

DIRECTED BY: Dominique Monfery

FEATURING: Vocals of Dora Luz

PLOT: Essentially plotless, but the loose narrative involves a nude woman wandering the desert who comes upon a pyramidal statue with a male figure embedded in it. A bird bursts from the statue and it comes to life. The woman and man try to approach each other but walls and other surreal obstacles constantly grow between them, until the woman is transformed into a ballerina with a dandelion head, and then into a bell housed in a tower.

Still from Destino (1946/2003)
BACKGROUND:

  • After making the (flop) Fantasia, was still looking for opportunities to incorporate high culture into his animated projects. In the 1940s visited Hollywood frequently; fascinated by stars and by filmmaking, and constantly promoting himself, the Spanish eccentric struck up friendships with many Tinseltown luminaries, including Disney. The two men hit it off and conceived the idea of a collaboration on a short film (which would be part of an anthology feature film similar to Fantasia). Dalí worked closely with Disney animator John Hench,  who translated many of the Spaniard’s sketches and ideas into ready-to-film animation cels. The project was begun in 1945 and continued for eight months, but only 17 seconds of footage was actually created before it was scrapped.
  • Secondary sources report that the male statue is Chronos (presumably the god of time) while the female character is named “Dahlia” (a feminization of the artist’s name).
  • The official explanation for Disney’s decision to shelve the project was that the wartime vogue for “package pictures” had passed, and Disney’s distributors were requesting full-length features. The documentary Dalí & Disney: A Date with Destino suggests that Walt may have found the film too “bananas,” citing a report that he blew up one afternoon after seeing that Dalí had stopped painting pictures of ballerinas and had begun drawing baseball players instead.
  • Roy E. Disney, Walt Disney’s nephew and a Disney senior executive, was looking for material to provide extras for the DVD release of Fantasia 2000 when he discovered the unused material for Destino in a moldy corporate storeroom. He decided to reconstruct the film from the existing storyboards and leftover concept art, largely so that the Disney Company would gain property rights in the underlying artwork. Fortunately, John Hench was still alive at the time to provide guidance for the reconstruction.
  • This was animator Dominique Monfery’s first work as a director.
  • The short briefly played theaters as an unlikely introduction to the comedy Calendar Girls.
  • Destino was nominated for an Academy Award for best short animated film in 2004, but—incredibly, given its provenance and historical value—it did not win. (‘s excellent Harvie Krumpet got the nod instead).

INDELIBLE IMAGE: The most impressive of many gloriously hallucinatory moments is the seventeen second sequence that John Hench animated to try to convince a faltering Walt Disney to go ahead with the project. Two grotesque faces, with bulging eyeballs and tattered skin pulled taut and held in place by crutches, are perched upon two turtles who slowly bear them together. In the negative space formed when their noses touch, a perfect, pearly ballerina appears.

THREE WEIRD THINGS: Dandelion-headed dancer; baguette-wearing bicyclists; ballerina-head baseball

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Destino is Salvador Dalí’s only moving canvas. A slight breeze from Walt Disney Studios nudges it ever so slightly off its already tilted axis. This dream of a Disney princess trapped in Dalí’s delirious desert is something we will not see the likes of again in our lifetimes.


Promotional clip about Destino from the Dalí Museum (in Spanish and English)

COMMENTS: Salvador Dalí was a genius. This fact may seem Continue reading 204. DESTINO (2003) →

Alfred Eaker's Fringe Cinema, List Candidates

WALT DISNEY’S FANTASIA (1940)

5 Comments

Over a thirty year period I have seen Fantasia (1940) in theaters on a few occasions. During each showing I witnessed several members of the audience walk out. That is usually a good sign. There is little doubt that this experimental film (yes, Disney once was innovative) has unmitigated moments of lurid kitsch, with equal parts cinematic magic. It’s a flawed masterpiece, which begs the questions: does an infallible masterpiece actually exist? Fantasia represents it’s creator, Walt Disney, as utterly possessed by obsessive, artistic, and innovative ambition. It may be one of the most stand apart films ever crafted, which is why, seventy plus years later, it still has the power to provoke dumbed-down audiences who still look at artmusic with suspicion. Simultaneously, it also annoys insufferable academic elitists who cannot find it in themselves to embrace the film’s tawdrier moments.

Another supposed “strike” the film has against it is its choice of conductor: Leopold Stokowski. Stoki was the P.T. Barnum of transplanted Euro conductors residing in America. Mention him to any “serious” classical music lover and he’ll make a face like he’s heard fingernails scraping down a chalkboard. Stokowski was known for his Bach transcriptions, one of which—“Toccata and Fugue in D minor”—opens the film. Essentially,he romanticized Bach, making him sound more like Tchaikovsky. One wit described such tampering as “High Cholesterol Bach.” It’s a dishonest reaction, molded by unimaginative attachments to “historical correctness” and hyper-realism. Avoid such persons like the plague (they probably started life by pulling the wings off butterflies). For those of us who have no qualms admitting that we like plenty of syrup on our musical flapjacks, embracing this wizard’s transcriptions presents no problems. Seeing only Stokowski’s brazen self-promotion amounts to blindness. This former organist had one of the most prodigious gifts in drawing color out of every orchestra he worked with, which made him the quintessential choice for Fantasia. Compare his achievement in this film, awash in personality, to the comparatively monochromatic conducting of James Levine in Fantasia 2000.

The meeting of Stokowski and Walt Disney, in 1937 at Chasen’s restaurant, is the stuff of legend. Disney was starstruck with the conductor’s celebrity, mysterious accent, and fierce mane. The seed of an idea for a “concert film” sprang from the meeting. At this time Disney had only produced and released one previous feature: Snow White and The Seven Dwarfs (1937). The idea of an animated feature had seemed risky and radical, with the naysayers predicting bankruptcy. The profits and critical acclaim from Snow White forever silenced those constipated doomsday prophets. Now, Disney was ready to take another risk. 1940 saw the release of Disney’s second and third feature films. Artistically, it paid off as Pinocchio (1940) and Fantasia are, to date, Disney’s two greatest films (yes, I said that), released only nine months apart. The former was a critical, box office hit. The latter did not make money for nearly twenty years. Disney had proven one can go indeed broke overestimating the American public.

Still from Fantasia (1940)The Fantasia deal signed, Stokowski was excited and predictably offered numerous ideas about the use of color. A later biographer wrote that the conductor’s fascination with color was sincere, describing his various experiments with mixing alcoholic drinks for color effects. Stoki did a similar thing with “sound color” by incessantly changing the orchestra seating layout. Even visually, “Toccata and Fugue” is pure Stokowski. The opening piece is introduced via the superb narration of American composer Deems Taylor (to the public he was primarily known as a commentator for the NY Philharmonic Radio Broadcasts). This “absolute music” is total abstraction. Entirely hand painted, at times the watercolors almost appear to still be wet. Vibrant with texture, this is far removed from contemporary slick and soulless computer animation. Stokowski used no baton, so his beautifully powerful long hands are highlighted, jabbing through the splashing backdrop. The french horns are hauntingly lit in diaphanous color before the violin bows transform into silvery beams of light reaching for infinity. Sound and vision collide, producing crashing tides, ending in a literal fireworks display.

For those, like myself, who have overdosed on Tchaikovsky’s “Nutcracker Suite,” Fantasia serves up a refreshing alternate vision, the most Continue reading WALT DISNEY’S FANTASIA (1940) →

List Candidates

LIST CANDIDATE: ALICE IN WONDERLAND (1951)

Leave a comment

366 Weird Movies may earn commissions from purchases made through product links.

Recommended

DIRECTOR: Clyde Geronimi, Wilfred Jackson, Hamilton Luske

FEATURING: Voices of Kathryn Beaumont, Ed Wynn, Sterling Holloway, Verna Felton, J. Pat O’Malley, Bill Thompson

PLOT: A young girl named Alice follows a talking white hare down his rabbit hole and into a world of talking animals, smoking insects, walking playing cards, and other nonsense creatures.

Still from Alice in Wonderland (1951)

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: Because of the source material.  Disney animator Eric Goldberg explains Alice‘s appeal: “I think the book ‘Alice in Wonderland’ is popular because it’s completely absurd… The book, in its kind of weirdness, persists because people like weird.”  The question becomes, does Disneyfication destroy the story’s weirdness?

COMMENTS: Though it doesn’t reach the level of the classic-era Disney animated masterpieces Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) or Pinocchio (1940), Alice in Wonderland is certainly in the next tier—notwithstanding the fact that it didn’t fare well on its initial release. The animation, obviously, is glowing and superlative, and the anything-can-happen-here surrealism of the story gave the Disney artists the license to let their imaginations run wild without being fettered even by cartoon realism. As might be expected, the result is worlds away from the staid, quaintly absurd black and white line drawings of Sir John Tenniel (the standard vision of Alice and Wonderland up until that time). The rabbit hole, with its grandfather clocks and rocking chairs floating at different rates, doesn’t follow the rules of gravity; the flexibility of the playing card royal guards allows the animators to arrange them into pickets or to spontaneously form roller coasters to take Alice for a ride. Scarcity of spectacle is not an issue in Wonderland.

As an adaptation, this Alice is surprisingly smooth.  Episodes from the book have been shuffled around and mixed with characters and events from “Through the Looking Glass,” an example that future Alices would follow (since no one wants to leave out Tweedledee and Tweedledum). Even digressions like the “The Walrus and the Carpenter” interlude, which plays like a self-standing Looney Continue reading LIST CANDIDATE: ALICE IN WONDERLAND (1951) →