After the end of the second World War, there was an inconsistent and unsatisfactory period for the Disney lot which can be witnessed in the patchy Washington Irving adaptation Ichabod and Mr Toad, but come 1950 - Cinderella would reinvigorate,marking the beginning of a new chapter for the studios. Cinderella was the first animated feature produced since the David Hand directed Bambi of 1942 and tried with all mite to recreate the brilliance of the earlier films albeit it would never quite capture the graphic quality of line. However, Cinderella is indubitably a graceful film, though its heroine may be bereft of the sympathetic nature of Snow White and much of Cinderella's success is due to the engaging mouse characters, Jac and Gus and their ongoing battle with Lucifer the cat.
In 1951, came Alice in Wonderland and despite the critics' unanimous disapproval, is still the silver screen's most enlightening interpretation of Lewis Carroll's infamous work. Though the zany characters are perpetually upstaging one another, and the pace is a dash too frenetic; the comic invention never flags and there is exquisite animation, particularly in the March of Cards sequence and then there's that Daliesque nightmare of its finale.
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| You wouldn't want to be in a dark alley with this lot either. |
Increasingly in this period, we find Disney making concessions to meet what he believed were the narrow expectations and limitations of his audiences. In Alice in Wonderland, he fails to grasp the implicit seriousness of Lewis Carroll's humor and forgoes most of the disturbing elements of the story. And similarly in Peter Pan (1953) Disney conveys an understanding of the story's sinister and emotional depths or the tragedy that is implicit in Peter's perennial youth. Disney's Peter is never short on pepper or bravado, thought does lack the self-sacrificing heroics of the original, whilst the whimpering buffoonery of the film's Captain Hook has little of the genuine malevolence in J.M Barrie's black-hearted Old Etonian.