The Disney studio survived the war years by producing propaganda and training films exclusively for the government, and executed among other varied subjects, the mobile maps illustrating the war's progress with over-sized probing arrows for the Why We Fight series. Disney's standard of professionalism often led him to subsidize the official budgets. The most significant of these movies was Victory Through Air Power (1943), which had animated sequences of great potency, particularly in the sequence of the American bald eagle battling with a grotesque Japanese octopus to free the world from its tenacious tentacles.
The material gathered on Disney's South American tour was recycled into two features: Saludos Amigos (1943) and The Three Caballeros (1945). The first of these films, ran for just under 44 minutes and scarcely merited feature status, although it contained some impressive sequences, chiefly the concluding, 'Aquarella do Brasil' ('Watercolor of Brazil') in which an animated paint brush creates a lush jungle backdrop against which a Brazilian parrot, Jose Carioca teaches Donald Duck how to dance the samba. This episode heralded even wilder flights of surreal fancy in The Three Caballeros which combined both real and animated characters. It was this very technique which was later to be used in several other features, including Song of the South (1946), based on Joel Chandler Harris's Uncle Remus stories about Br'er Rabbit, Mary Poppins (1964) and Pete's Dragon (1978).
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| Perturbed Peter and furry friend from Make Mine Music (1946) |
The compilation format used in the South American movies was employed to construct a number of so-called features which contained anything from two to ten short subjects. These films sometimes linked with live action are a random rag-bag in which even the finer of the sequences are hardly considered masterworks. Among the highlights are 'Peter and the Wolf' and 'The Whale Who Wanted to Sing at the Met' from Make Mine Music (1946), 'Mickey and the Beanstalk' from Fun and Fancy Free (1947) and 'Johnny Appleseed' and 'Little Toot' from Melody Time in 1948.
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| The Toad Less Traveled |
This inconsistent, unsatisfying period concluded with the patchy Washington Irving adaptation The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr Toad (1949), Cinderella (1950) marked the beginning of a new era. This was the first animated feature since Bambi and tried hard to recreate the brilliance of the studio's earlier films without quite capturing their graphic quality of line. Cinderella is a graceful film irrespective of the fact that its heroine is in lack of the warm qualities of Snow White, and much of Cinderella's success is due to the mouse characters, Jac and Gus, and their ongoing battle with Lucifer the cat.
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| The Cat From Hell |
In 1951, Alice in Wonderland was released and to the chagrin of many a critic but despite the negative press that plagued this film, it still stands as one of the silver screen's most accurate and satisfying interpretations of the Lewis Carroll classic. And while it is true, the neurotic characters are incessantly attempting to upstage one another, and the pace being a mite too frenetic, the comic invention never flags and the animation impeccable, namely in the 'March of Cards' sequence and the Brechtian nightmare of the finale.
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| Pantheism 101 |
Increasingly, in this period we find Disney making concessions to meet what he intuited - that there would indeed be narrow expectations and limitations of his audiences. In Alice in Wonderland, Disney with all his college tries, still managed to fail to grasp the implicit seriousness of Lewis Carroll's humor and would whitewash and forsake much of the disturbing elements in the story. Similarly in Peter Pan (1953) Disney shows no understanding of the story's sinister and emotional depths or the tragedy that is implicit in Peter's perennial youth. Disney's Peter has charm and bravado yet is bereft of the self-sacrificing heroism of the original, while the whimpering buffoonery of the film's Captain Hook has nothing of the genuine malevolence of J.M. Barrie's black-hearted Old Etonian.
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| Hooked on a feeling |
Sleeping Beauty cost an astronomical $6 million and was a financial disaster and would mark the end of yet another era at the Disney studios, being the last feature to have its characters inked onto the cels by hand - a costly and laborious process that would be replaced by the year 1961 in 101 Dalmations, by the freer, but decidedly less stylish method of using Xeroxed drawings.