DISNEY ANIMATION: IN A FIX, IN A BIND, CALL ON US ANYTIME

The last animated film released by Walt Disney Productions in the 1970s is a transitional work, the handing of the torch from one generation to another. Even though several of the older generation who was still around at this point managed to stick around for one last film, 1977's The Rescuers still has a valedictory feel; it's also the first work produced by several young animators trained by Eric Larson's talent farm, at least a few of whom went on to become some of the most important names at the Disney studios. By and large, the old-school animators regarded this as the first really satisfying production made by the company since Walt died, and it's frankly not too hard to agree that, the Silver Age holdover The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh notwithstanding, The Rescuers is probably the one completely successful feature produced between 1967 and the beginning of the Disney Renaissance in 1989. By happy accident, it seems that audiences of the time agree with me: the film enjoyed the highest first-run gross of any film during that time period. It's not a timeless masterpiece, nor one of the all-time outstanding Disney animated features. But it more than gets the job done, something you can't necessarily say for a lot of the films made around it.

The film opens with something new for Disney: a pre-credits sequence, in which a little girl with a teddy bear creeps out onto the deck of ruined paddle steamer in the middle of a dismal swamp. Two ominous crocodilian shapes with narrow green eyes watch her throw a bottle containing a note into the water. It's a really fine way to start up a movie: we have no idea what's going on yet, but we know it's not at all comforting, and assuming we have any affection for children whatsoever, we're instantly concerned that whoever this girl is, she's in trouble. Quite a good, moody introduction to a film that proves to be more of a thriller than anything else yet produced by the studio.

When the credits start up, we are introduced to a really wonderful selection of still shots that trace the bottle's course out to see and up the coast to New York City. These are oil paintings by Melvin Shaw, made with stark, impressionistic lines, and details meant to evoke the rough texture of canvas or burlap only barely covered by paint. All told, they are as beautiful as anything else produced in the xeorgraphy age to that point, which would be enough reason for tarrying and mentioning it.

But I'd like to stay with the credits a little bit longer, because there are some people we have to say goodbye to, and some new people to greet in their stead. The first folks we come to are the film's four directing animators, three of them old veterans and one of them newly promoted from the ranks of character animators.

Ollie Johnston, Milt Kahl, and Frank Thomas are certainly three people we've come to know very well over the course of 23 features. They were the last of the Nine Old Men to work directly in the animation studio, which gives me a good chance to speak once for all about the significance of these three and their six colleagues, and what they did for the development of American animation over the course of some fifty years.

I should speak one caveat at the start: though I have certainly been guilty of doing this throughout, it's not right to give the Nine Old Men total credit for all the good animation to come out of these features. They were by and large only directing animators, especially beginning in the'50s; that is, they'd draw the key frames for an action, leaving a team of assistants (the character animators) to fill in the details of movment. With very few exceptions - and we'll be meeting one of them shortly - no character was entirely the work of a single animator.

Nor is it entirely fair to say that the Nine Old Men are without question the finest people to come out of Disney during their generation; they are not grouped together by some consensus of history, but because Walt Disney specifically chose to group them. It is probably accurate to say that they are the nine best animators that Walt liked; at the same time they were first officially named as a group, men like Vladimir "Bill" Tytla and Art Babbitt were doing work just as good, but in both cases, those animators had run afoul of the boss man personally, especially during the 1941 aniamtors's strike. So even though they were good enough to earn the historic privilege accorded to the Nine Old Men, they were deprived of the same opportunities by a producer with an axe to grind.

All this being said, the achievement of the nine animators is not merely illusory or marketing. The really did quite a bit to define a specific strand of animation: defining and explaining theories of movement (it has to be slightly exaggerated), physical mutability (an object that "squashes and stretches" will be more appealing than one that is rigid), character interaction (Johnston's famous discovery about how emotion is generated when characters touch), facial expression, the use of the line, and the use of the space "in between" frames. There are many great animated films made according to an entirely different set of pre-conceptions, but for the Disney style, inarguably the most significant mode of animation in America until at least the end of the 1990s, these nine men were the experts and the lawmakers, without whose discipline, we can safely assume that the memorable characters that have been part of the Disney stable since the 1930s would not be have as charming, lovable, scary, or believable.

Johnston and Thomas weren't quite finished with the studio yet, but the time has come to bid our farewells to Milt Kahl, arguably the most technically proficient artist the studio ever employed (I'd say that Tytla gives him stiff competition; but he directed such a comparatively tiny number of characters!). His contribution to The Rescuers is its villain, the last in a long run of excellent Kahl bad guys. In this case, I refer to Medusa, voiced by Geraldine Page, a flighty, dumpy woman with a shock of red hair and an angular face, and a tendency towards over-the-top, campy movements. Allegedly, she was inspired by Kahl's hated ex-wife, and it must be said that if she is quite memorable, this is largely at the expense of being one of the most wickedly female of all Disney's lady villains (in the earliest story drafts, her role was filled by Cruella De Vil of One Hundred and One Dalmatians, an idea scrapped when it was concluded, ironically, that a sequel was a bad idea; both women share the distinction of being the most regressive depictions of insane, materialistic, narcissistic females, both of them totally incapable of driving a car properly, in the studio's canon). Kahl had such specific ideas for how she ought to be animated, that he did virtually all of the work himself, finding that his assistants weren't up to his demands; and it is quite pleasing that his farewell to Disney feature animation should not only be a solo job, but one of the most excitingly kinetic of all Disney villains. Though Medusa is ultimately too broadly comic the stand in the very top tier, she is a masterful piece of animation, with her putty-like tendency to stretch and bounce in a slightly grotesque caricature of the human form; any animator would be proud to call her his swan song.

As for Thomas and Johnston, they both did fine work in the film, allowing that Medusa is the unchallenged stand-out in the cast. Really, there are no weak characters in The Rescuers, with its two mouse protagonists both fully fleshed out and animated to best suggest their very different peronalities: the male mouse, Bernard (voiced by Bob Newhart), is twitchy and nervous and has never actually gone on a rescue mission before, and his animation is accordingly jerky and full of short, awkward movements. His partner, Bianca (voiced by Eva Gabor), is sensible, unafraid and very clever, and she moves with a fluidity and ease that reinforces that impression. Johnston himself makes something of a cameo appearance in the form of the old cat Rufus (voiced by John McIntire, one of two Psycho alumni in the cast), given a bushy Johnston-esque mustache by the young animators in tribute to their admiration for his many years of inspiring work.

The new kid on the block was Don Bluth, finally hitting the top levels after some twenty years in the company's employ. We can, in retrospect, read some Bluth style into certain characters: many of the background mice in the Rescue Aid Society that sends Bernard and Bianca on their mission; also in Penny (Michelle Stacy), the young orphan girl who sent the bottle out into the world, a profoundly innocent little thing (she talks to her teddy bear, and treats him as her best friend) thrust into an ugly situation in a brutal plea for our sympathy that comes this close to working, about which I'll say more in a bit.

Bluth proved to be a great addition to the Disney family; he clearly understood the mentality behind the studio's greatest achievements, but had enough personality of his own that he wasn't just a cog. He was a truly gifted artist, and if history had been somewhat different, I think he might have done wonderful things with the resources Disney made available to him. But the future wasn't going to be that kind, as we shall find out in due course.

Moving further into the credits, as we hit the list of character animators, we see the first appearance of several tremendously important names that will become, in the films to come, as important to know as Ward Kimball or Marc Davis were in the past. There is John Pomeroy, who we first met in The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh; he was hired during production of the third segment. Brand new people include the future director Ron Clements, and Glen Keane, one of the truly vital figures of the subsequent thirty years of Disney, an animator who proved his indispensability with the very next project, but for right now simply toiled, doing what I have no doubt was his customarily excellent work.

Now we come to the producer credit: Wolfgang Reitherman is still serving in that capacity, the line connecting the past and the future, Walt's aesthetic heir apparent; but now we find an executive producer that we haven't seen before. Ron Miller was Walt's son in law, marrying Diane Disney in 1954 (they are still married, incidentally), and had spent most of the '70s overseeing the live-action arm of the film department. It was only now that the top brass moved him over to stand in charge of the animation studio as well; and the full flower of that decision was not to be felt in The Rescuers, but he'll come to be a very important man in the annals of Disney history, so remember here, where we first met him.

Lastly, we come to the film's three directors: Reitherman once more, splitting duties with two collaborators, John Lounsbery and Art Stevens. Lounsbery was of course one of the Nine Old Men, just like Woolie Reitherman; promoted out of the directing animator racket in the Winnie the Pooh years to help his colleague, for these men were getting quite old, and the responsibility for a whole feature was too much to ask. Unfortunately, Lounsbery would not enjoy his new job for long. In Februrary, 1976, he passed away, the first of the Nine Old Men to die, and the second to leave the Disney fold: Les Clark, who had long since moved into directing short films, retired just shortly before Lounsbery's death.

Stevens, a Disney animator since the 1950s, was called in as a pinch-hitter; he learned enough of the directing craft to take over for Reitherman in the next feature, despite being no spring chicken himself. Together, these two sets of two men did a fantastic job of guiding a movie that was unlike any other Disney film before it: contemporary and exciting, one of the least "fantastic", in any sense, of any feature thus far.

It's hard to say what it is, exactly, that give the film a different feeling from any of the 22 films preceding it: certainly a good place to start would be the musical score, which is pounding and distinctly electronic, and not at all the kind of flowing light-classical that the studio customarily used. The songs are another strong break: except for the anthem of the Rescue Aid Society, everything is performed by an off-screen singer, Shelby Flint: only Bambi had that same quirk to its soundtrack. The songs in The Rescuers are quite reminiscent of the singer-songwriter tradition of the 1970s (they were composed by Sammy Fain, with lyrics by Carol Conners and Ayn Robbins), and tend to date the film a bit; but they also give it a particular feeling, a sensibility that the film is not timeless but of the moment, active and living - even if its moment is more than three decades gone, at least it doesn't feel static or hermetic, like some of the very finest Disney pictures.

The Rescuers is also marked by a particular leap forward in the animation style: it was an experiment in doing new things with the xerography, using different lighter toner in the copies so that the lines didn't have to be so dramatic and black; in the case of Miss Bianca and some occasional background characters, they even used purple toner. I call it an "experiment", because it doesn't always work very soft figures occupy the same frame as much sketchier figures, and sometimes neither of them fits the background terribly well. And yet sometimes, it all comes together brilliantly, particularly in the case of the two protagonists, who are drawn like the best of the graphic, angular designs featured in the studio's films since 1961, but who also have the soothing softness of the earlier films. (Medusa, it is worth pointing out, looks a great deal like earlier "sketchy era" characters; Kahl is generally believed to be one of that aesthetic's primary boosters, as he liked the ability to translate the urgency of his drawings right onto the film without losing any of their freshness. And dammit if in this case at least, he isn't right).

The backgrounds of the film come in two quite distinct forms, and this contrast is another thing rarely or never seen in Disney. The scenes set in New York, at the beginning, have an angular, scratchy feeling akin to the backgrounds in One Hundred and One Dalmatians; there is a multiplane shot in which several rows of buildings shift about without any depth at all. The swamp is much lusher and more painterly, like what we might think of as the Disney standard. Both of them work well with the character animation, and more to the point, both are damn well set against the other: the transition from the city to the deep country is all the more dramatic because of it, and our sense of the swamp as something otherworldly is much increased as a result.

All in all, this is a fairly exciting step forward, and a comforting proof that good things could yet come out of the studio; though it is perhaps more of a promise of great things to come than a great thing itself. The story is a bit ragged, but no more so than a lot of Disney films; I don't quite understand how the world fits together, particularly why the albatross pilot Orville (Jim Jordan) makes apparently routine trips between the city and the swamp, when the swamp is obviously an isolated hellhole. It only feels particularly forced in the last ten minutes, when the waiting game of the previous half-hour erupts into the climax. But I am not completely certain that I buy all of the characters - particularly, I just don't care very much for Penny, who is so sickeningly cute and charming and precocious that I really wouldn't mind, by the end, if she happened to be eaten by those alligators. It's the one hugely obnoxious flat note in what is otherwise a tight assemblage of action movie elements, carefully re-calibrated for a young audience; but little kids in peril, be they cartoons or living beings, have a marked tendency to be too absurdly sweet for their own good, or more importantly, the audience's good. At least the villains are truly outstanding: not just Medusa, but her idiot henchman Snoops (voiced by Joe Flynn and modeled after animation historian John Culhane, who was often at the studio during the film's production), and the 'gators: they are collectively the first villains who seem like they might actually do harm to the characters since Shere Khan in The Jungle Book, and the first to marry that danger to effective comedy since the great Cruella.

If I do not love the film unreservedly, I still recognise it as a grand success for a struggling company, and in 1977, it would have seemed possible to believe, for the first time in a decade, that the Disney Studios had found an identity, sitting comfortably in the hands of a new team of animators who had the drive and the skill to keep a 40-year tradition of animated features alive. Alas that it was not to be so! This brief light of possibility and promise was quickly to be extinguished by the most terrible break in the ranks of the animation staff since the strike, set off by the launch of a project whose terrible, dispiriting, and impossibly long period of production outdid the worst of the behind-the-scenes miseries of Alice in Wonderland and Sleeping Beauty combined.

DISNEY ANIMATION: WILLY NILLY SILLY OLE BEAR

It's nice to see that even in the depths of Walt Disney Production's horrible stretch from 1970-1989, there's one spot of true brilliance, although to call The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh a '70s film is more than a bit disingenuous. Its roots lie in the comparatively strong period of the 1960s, in fact, for it is nothing but an anthology film put together from three shorts released in 1966, 1968, and 1974, respectively, with about five minutes of new material created to link the three miniatures together in a something like a narrative. The last of the package films, it is frequently called, for it shares their essential characteristics: in a time when the company was doing anything it possibly could to save pennies, this compilation allowed them to release material already produced in a somewhat more elegant manner than the frequent re-releases of established classics that had long since proven to be one of Disney's surest revenue streams. There is some indication that Walt Disney had intended all along that an eventual Pooh feature should be assembled as this one was, so perhaps it's not as desperate a cash-grab as it seems; but unfortunately, the truth of the matter is as unknowable as any history whose primary sources lie exclusively in the depths of the notoriously self-correcting Disney archive.

No matter. Whatever it's motivation, The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh in its 1977 state is one of the most charming of all Disney features, with the added bonus for the animation scholar of providing a convenient microcosm to study the changes in the studio's aesthetic over a rather significant eight-year period. Not that even such a mirthless formalist as I thinks first and above all about how the film functions as a work of art; no, like anyone else, when I see Winnie the Pooh I am swiftly and inexorably carried back to childhood, in accordance with the drippy clichés that Disney uses to market damn near all of its classic pictures.

Ever since I looked at Dumbo, I've been intermittently carping about the infantilisation of Disney animation: though there's nothing in any of the features (except maybe for bits and pieces of Fantasia) that is inappropriate or inaccessible for children, who in the main absolutely do form the chief audience for these films, I think it's hardly a point for debate that e.g. Pinocchio functions as an artistic statement made by thoughtful adults who wanted to create something genuinely beautiful, while e.g. The Sword in the Stone is a bouncy cartoon that is primarily intended to appeal to youngsters. Can an adult enjoy The Sword in the Stone? Yes, and I did so not even but half a week ago.

In the midst of all my complaining about The Aristocats and Robin Hood, I fear that I've fallen into a most dubious trap, of contrasting "cartoons" with "animation": the former a simple matter of dull entertainment for kids, the latter an artistically vibrant matter for children and adults and every combination thereof. Clearly, this dichotomy isn't fair: the Looney Tunes are nothing if they are not "cartoons", and I'll fight to the death anyone who refuses to admit that the best of those shorts are among the greatest of all American cinema. Here is another case in point: The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh is unmistakeably and objectively a kids' movie. It assumes an audience that hasn't turned ten yet, and if the viewer above that age can't do anything to switch off the grown-up parts of the brain, that viewer is just going to have to suffer. And despite this, I absolutely love Winnie the Pooh, and will - any moment now - defend it as the greatest Disney movie for many years in either direction.

The difference between this and something like Robin Hood is therefore not the intended audience, nor the medium, but the attitude with which the film is created. The three preceding films, at least, have a distinct feeling of calculation about them; they are cynical things, made not out of the filmmakers' love but out of a desire to make the kind of movie that some platonic concept of a child will respond to. Winnie the Pooh is not one whit more "mature" than any of them, but it is infinitely more honest. It treats childhood and children's entertainment with the greatest seriousness, without ever committing the great sin of talking down to to the audience. I still love the film as much in my late 20s as I did when I was a pre-teen, and I think this is the reason why: any film that treats its audience with respect, no matter who that audience is, is a much more lovely and good and lasting thing than any movie that treats its audience like consumers.

For some time now, Disney's treatment of Winnie-the-Pooh, a character set in text by A.A. Milne in the mid-1920s, based upon toys owned by his son Christopher, has met with no small amount of rancor on the part of Pooh purists (not included among them was Christopher Milne himself, who made no secret of his hatred for the Pooh books), and I am not about to defend the faintly disgusting lengths to which the company has gone in the past 30 years to secure worldwide ownership of the mere concept of Winnie-the-Pooh. But setting aside issues of corporate decency, I cannot feel that, even with a heaping spoonful of Americanisation, no filmed adaptation of the Pooh stories could have been truer to the source material than this, arguably the most faithful of all Disney adaptions. Part of that faithfulness included the unabashed child's-eye view of the world that Milne adopted in his prose and poetry. Whatever cosmetic changes Disney made - or in some cases, substantive narrative alterations - that purity of tone which defines the ethos of Winnie-the-Pooh remained intact.

The first of Disney's Pooh stories, "Winnie the Pooh and the Honey Tree", is the clearest example of what I'm referring to. It tells what has become, I think, the elemental Pooh story - that which is most readily remembered by the most people when the name "Winnie the Pooh" comes up - Pooh's attempt to steal honey from a colony of bees, by covering himself with mud and floating up on the string of a helium balloon, having theoretically disguised himself as a rain cloud. Christopher Robin - the character based upon Milne's son, who came to regret it so desperately - immediately recognises that this is altogether silly, but there is a fine line between "this is silly because the bees will not buy it" and "this is silly because a bear can't float on a helium balloon", and the distinction is a key one.

Even before this crops up in the movie, we've been gently eased into a surpassingly juvenile way of looking at the world, from the first of many silly-cutesy neologisms, "I'm rumbly in my tumbly" and Pooh's regard of his reflection as a distinct personality, not apparently caring that his reflection never actually responds to any direct inquiries. There is a mad genius to this Pooh, present in the Milne and fully brought out in Disney's treatment: he is dim enough that even the smallest child will be able to feel smarter than he is, but at the same time so entirely harmless and good-natured, even in his ravings for honey, that no-one could help but like him. I can think of no character in filmed media to compare him to, except for Big Bird from Sesame Street.

This isn't just a writing thing, that makes him so lovable: Pooh is also beautifully designed and animated, loosely based on E.H. Shepard's original illustrations (particularly in his eyes, represented by small black dots), but with an added expressiveness and personality unique to the gifted mind of directing animator Frank Thomas. For a bear with virtually no definition to his features, Pooh is quite a miraculously flexible character: the way his face scrunches up when he is thinking, the way that his whole head seems to take part in his smile. This is the very stuff of character animation. And it is all founded on the greatest performance in the career of Disney veteran Sterling Holloway, whose natural inclination towards the sardonic and dry was completely avoided in his vocal portrayal of Pooh: he captures the sincerity and enthusiasm of a very young person with sensitivity and humor.

As the story progresses - actually, hold that. The story doesn't progress as much as all that. The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh maybe be made up of three shorts, but those can be readily broken into two only vaguely-connected sequences each, meaning that this 76-minute film is at heart a collection of six stories, none of them longer than 15 minutes (if we do the math, the average is a bit more than 12m30s). This is as important as anything else in the telling of the story of Pooh, for the incidents in the film are not such weighty matters; like most things in the life of a child, they seem very important only for as long as they are actively occurring. Have I mentioned before that I dislike episodic narratives? Better to say maybe that I dislike them when they are done poorly. For here, it is impossible to think of a better structure.

As the film progresses, we move into the second part of "Honey Tree", which is just as innocent and sweetly simple as the first. Pooh visits his good friend Rabbit, eats all his honey, and gets stuck crawling out of the front hole of Rabbit's burrow. The solution? He must not eat until he gets thin. That's the part that always kills me, the matter-of-fact way that Christopher Robin pronounces this sensible advice. In the guilelessness of youth, that does make sense, as does every other bit of logic presented in this first third of the feature. This sequence also includes one Walt's personal favorite moments in any of his films, when Rabbit draws a moose onto Pooh's engorged posterior, hoping to fool himself into thing that it's a piece of decoration, and not a stuck visitor.

The juvenile sensibility that dominates this first segment is also reflected in the sheer number of songs the Sherman Brothers packed into its tiny frame: it is, inch for inch, the most musical Disney film outside of Fantasia and its poor cousins from the later 1940s. And quite an absurdly wonderful set of songs they are: the title theme might well be my favorite song in the Shermans' whole career, including their amazing work in Mary Poppins. My point being, an emphasis on nonsensical singing is a narrative dead-end, but as an exploration of Pooh's primal innocence, it is everything.

Produced in the period between The Sword in the Stone and The Jungle Book, it is hardly surprising that "Honey Tree" shares their scratchy aesthetic; but it utilises that style far better than either of them, almost as well as One Hundred and One Dalmatians. Like that film, "Honey Tree" solves the problem of the lower detail of xerography by commensurately changing the style of the backgrounds; they are inked with heavy, graphic outlines, to look as much like the line-drawing illustrations of the Pooh books as possible, and it matches the character animation perfectly. The effect is not at all a "moving illustration" in the Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs mold, even less a "moving painting" like Pinocchio or Sleeping Beauty; it is like a moving drawing, where the pencil marks are not simply an unavoidable fact of life, but a deeply vital part of the whole aesthetic. If Pooh and his friends sometimes look like pencil sketches with color splashed on them, well, their whole world is on the pages of a book - all three shorts in The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh take the Disney trope of a storybook opening to usher us into the world of the film to its logical extension, by having the action of the film take place within a very physical book that the characters interact with, jumping across the spine, complete with a pleasant narrator who sometimes interacts with the characters (this would be Sebastian Cabot, that marvelous voice actor, who retired after completing the third Pooh short and the feature's framework. I think it worth mentioning that, unless I have unaccountably forgotten something, only The Jungle Book and Robin Hood used the opening book image after "Honey Tree" premiered; there was never a Disney film to do so after the Pooh cycle was complete.

The second short, "Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day", followed hard upon The Jungle Book, and for my tastes it is without doubt the best thing produced by Disney in the 1960s (it won an Oscar; how the other two failed to match it - the first one wasn't even nominated! - is a question for the ages). The charming meta-humor introduced in the first short, with the physical book as a stage for the action, is continued and improved upon; for in this film, the letters in the book are subject to the same environmental conditions as the characters. And since it is a rather windy day when this story takes place, and then a windy night, and then a rainy night, there is plenty of opportunity for the lettering to blow or drift or run in the water. Above and beyond being a nifty and singular gag, this speaks to a level of imagination rarely equaled even in the Disney Studios.

And if it's possible, the rest of the animation is an improvement on "Honey Tree": I am not terribly thrilled about the new coloring (Pooh's shirt is an alarming shade of primary red now, not the pleasant bright red it was before), but the use of pencil shading in characters is something I don't think appears anywhere else in Disney, particularly in the case of... hold on, I haven't introduced him yet.

Storywise, "Blustery Day" doesn't really advance much on "Honey Tree": they have the same very gentle humor and child's logic and the non sequiturs that come from it. And good for Disney - when you have a perfect formula, it's well not to muck with it. Ask New Coke. But there is an especially important addition made, besides the interactive text: two new characters, both taken from Milne (there is only one Disney-created character in the movie, in fact: Gopher, who appears in the first two segments, and speaks with the same lisp as the beaver in Lady in the Tramp; his refrain "I'm not in the book" is one of the few truly self-referential gags in Disney's canon). One of this is the fragile, magnificently nervous Piglet, voiced by John Fiedler, gorgeously representing everything uncertain and terrifying about childhood: the fear of the unknown, the worry about what it means to go forward and grow up. The other character is Piglet's exact opposite: absolutely sure of everything, even when he's dead wrong, afraid of nothing, completely unconcerned about anything serious.

Personal bias time: in all the history of animation, Disney or other, American or not, Tigger is my favorite character. Played by veteran voice actor Paul Winchell in the kind of performance that single-handedly proves how much better people who do cartoons for a living are than randomly-chosen celebrities cast for their name value, Tigger is a triumph of personality, the very paragon of thoughtless bravado expressed without malice, the very spirit of anarchic play. He is one of the greatest achievements in the estimable career of Milt Kahl, who wrings every scintilla of expression from the character's simple, largely empty features, much as Thomas did with Pooh - my God, but Thomas and Kahl were a well-matched pair of titans in the Disney animating department! Has anyone ever come so close to their perfection of the Disney style, where character is prized above all else?

Tigger's fullest range of potential is explored in the third segment, which I'll turn to shortly, but as long as I am speaking of the character I must express my admiration for the end of that short, where he is confronted for the first time with loss: the loss of his spirit of fun in the face of the fussy, mature Rabbit. Winchell's vocal expression of Tigger's uncomprehending disappointment, married to the comically oversized but still deeply touching look of sorrow on the cat's face, is one of the all-time finest character moments in animation.

It must be said that Tigger also introduces us to the unpleasant world of recycled animation in The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh. I doubt it's so noticeable when the shorts are separated, but there is a great deal of footage re-used between the three shorts: "Honey Tree" and "Blustery Day" both end with the same parade, all three films feature the same animation of Christopher Robin climbing over a fence (the tell-tale detail is Eeyore the donkey, who looks up in a very particular way in the first two instance), and above all, the number of times that Tigger launches into exactly the same dance is kind of appalling. And yet, I don't mind it, again because of that childhood thing: to me, this reads as the enacting out, over and over again, of a certain kind of play ritual, in which Tigger does a certain thing the same way always, because that is what Tigger does. There must be some reason it doesn't bother me, at any rate, and I can't come up with a better explanation.

The final short, "Winnie the Pooh and Tigger Too!", is the only one to date from the 1970s; it came out a year after Robin Hood. And it is, sadly, the least of the three - though it would still be be far the best work done by the studio in the preceding ten years, if it stood alone. The animation is not so detailed: in particular, the marvelous use of pencil marks a shading element, both in the backgrounds and in certain character details (especially Tigger's stripes) is gone. And the plot is the least interesting of the three films, particularly since Pooh himself is sidelined for such a long time (something the narrator warns us about, to Pooh's chagrin).

At the same time, there is still most of the innocence left intact, particularly in the deeply Poohvian details of a walk through the woods at night, when the sound of his honey pots can call his tummy home, away from the mysterious walking sand pit that they always seem to stumble across. To steal a metaphor, this is a triple not a home run: and if it looks somewhat cheap, it has nothing on The Aristocats or Robin Hood in that respect, and shows off, maybe, how much better work an animator does when he is given something to work with that he feels strongly about. As the final expression of one of the last projects Walt Disney started, it is easy to see why it inspired passion and a sense of direction, even in the heart of the '70s interregnum. (I say "final"; yet of course there was still 1983's "Winnie the Pooh and a Day for Eeyore" - by my opinion a much lower project than these three, lacking as it did Sebastian Cabot and Sterling Holloway and the classic era animators; still enjoyable in its own right, but very minor).

And thus it ends, with a tiny little epilogue that manages to capture the moment that a child becomes a little bit older with the advent of school, in a manner that is touching and tender, but not at all sad; because sadness is something that could never exist in this placid vision of the Hundred Acre Wood. The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh is not perfect, but I think it is one of the great examples in the canon of the Disney dictum that the first thing is the characters: they must capture the audience's affection and sympathy, and gags and story will proceed from that. Top to bottom, the Winnie the Pooh cast - and I feel terrible for not evening naming some of them! - are appealing and warm indeed, and even without Disney's unstoppable marketing machine, it's not hard to see why Pooh currently reigns as the best-selling character in Disney's stable: more than Mickey himself. For he is a truly wonderful evocation of all things right about childhood. I know that I am not alone in being glad for my own sake that somewhere, a little bear will always be waiting.

LEO-NARD BERN-STEIN!

You just go on ahead and ignore that Right-Aligned Poster of Dismissal, which I put in only out of a sense of intellectual duty. Because Roland Emmerich's newest disaster epic 2012 is absolutely a bad film, and it would be a disservice for me to argue otherwise. At the same time, it's so deliciously trashy in its badness that it's actually a bit of fun if you go in ready to laugh; whether with the film or at it, I'd have a hard time saying, but a more delightfully bad movie hasn't been seen in all of 2009. Really, the only thing that keeps me being completely giddy about the picture is a punishing 158 minute running time that it comes not even close to earning.

In the grand tradition of such films, 2012 presents us with a right panoply of characters defined in the most reduced, simplistic terms possible. They're "the" characters, the kind who you expect to see on the poster or in the trailer with the actor's face and a description of his or her profession: John Cusack is The Writer! Chiwetel Ejiofor is The Scientist! Danny Glover is The President! I suspect that a sufficiently attentive fan of the genre - or even just somebody who saw Emmerich's previous forays into the field, Independence Day and The Day After Tomorrow, just by knowing the plot hook and a couple specific character types: so the world is ending, and a dad (Cusack) who is estranged from his kids has to reconcile with his ex-wife (Amanda Peet) and her new boyfriend (Tom McCarthy); a scientist with some U.S. agency or another (Ejiofor) is part of the team seeking to find any kind of solution to the problem, under the supervision of some high-level bureaucrat (Oliver Platt); there's a crazy conspiracy theorist (Woody Harrelson) who wants to be the first to die when shit goes down, and a venal Russian (Zlatko Buric), and a Tibetan family who know something about the super-secret international collaboration to build some kind of structures up in the Himalayan mountains that will, maybe, save a sample of Earth's culture and animal life (including humans).

There's a problem common to very nearly every single disaster movie I can name, and 2012 is no exception: the first act is a grinding chore, as we are introduced to a field of characters sketched as it were in crayon upon cardboard, so that when terrible thing start to happen, we will recognise the victims of the happening as human beings like ourselves, and not for example ambulatory table lamps. This is the kind of bad that isn't so bad it's good; it's the kind that's so bad it's boring as hell. Thankfully, 2012 is a good deal lighter in this department than Independence Day (co-scripted by Emmerich's then-partner, Dean Devlin; the two men were quite a fountain of unwatchable mediocrity back in the day. Godzilla, anyone?), and so a fairly healthy portion of that slab of running time is spent where we want it to be, focused squarely on devastation winding its way across the face of the planet. I will give the screenplay (which Emmerich co-wrote with Harlold Kloser, the composer of the film's soundtrack) some tiny credit for not playing out exactly the way I expected: the ex-wife's boyfriend isn't at all a dipshit prick, like the standard form calls for; nor did I correctly the manner of his death.

So, once 2012 switches on the destruction, it becomes a fun popcorn movie? Not exactly - rather, it goes from stupid and boring to stupid and wonderfully silly. Taking its cues from the the conspiracist "fact" that Mayan astronomers predicted the end of the world on December 21, 2012, the movie posits that starting in 2009 (why, my God, that's right now!), it was found that the sun was spewing out more neutrinos than at any point in history, and they're awful, mutant neutrinos that are heating up the Earth's internal temperature. There's nothing that anybody can do about it, and in just a few years, total planetary collapse will occur. When it does, it starts with an earthquake in California that sends Los Angeles spinning merrily into the sea, before Yellowstone National Park explodes into a giant ash cloud that destroys most of the central United States. And that's when the crust starts shifting, causing tidal waves that eventually rise so high, they nearly drown Mt. Everest! All of this happens in August, by the way, not December, but Ejiofor does observe, numerous times, that things are going faster than his models predicted.

Boy oh boy, the number of loopy holes in science that are proudly marched in front of our admiring gaze in 2012! I would quite exhaust myself before I could name even a portion of them. It starts with the very beginning of the whole entire movie: if neutrinos had suddenly changed and raise the temperature of matter, it's unlikely that any human would care much about trying to save the planet; we'd all be too worried about how we were boiling to death from the inside. Of far greater delight is the film's vast number of "geology doesn't work that way" missteps, including Emmerich and Kloser's apparent inability to understand that the magnetic poles and the geographic poles are not the same thing, or the amusing conceit that the entire crust of the earth could shift by 25º in a few hours, and there'd be some earthquakes and large tsunamis, rather than the very surface of the planet shearing apart from the stress, forming a whole bucketful of new mountain ranges in the process (odd, because you think that the added possibility of rampant destruction would have appealed to the filmmakers). Also, it becomes quite apparent that neither writer understands how many feet are in a mile, where water goes during a tsunami - and though I will not give away the ending, in which land is found, the precise nature of that land is a real doozy.

In short, an Emmerich film; and for reasons I cannot fully understand myself, I found this particular entry in this particular oeuvre to be exceptionally amusing. The reels of CGI mayhem are not especially convincing (the L.A. sequence in particular), but they are pleasingly over-wrought and tawdrily exploitative: it's not enough to watch one city sink into the bowels of the earth, there must be two! And a car barely outrunning an earthquake is so exciting the once, let us see it again several more times! Let us then see a plane outrunning an earthquake! And just when you think it's all done and everybody is safe and snug, a whole new batch of crises poke their head up, extending the film that extra 30 minutes and giving Platt a chance to transition into the Designated Jerk Asshole, who like all member of that species actually says things that are smart and reasonable while the heroes mouth of platitudes and suggest courses of action that would get everybody killed in any situation that wasn't delicately contrived by a screenwriter, or gets praised by the whole bridge crew for fixing a problem that he caused in the first place; not that we're supposed to notice that kind of thing.

The whole thing is so gaudy, like most of its modern stablemates can't really achieve. Now, it's no The Swarm, for few movies indeed are; but it still has a kind of crap magic to 2012 that makes it far more enjoyable, even with a bloated length, than something as inert as Independence Day. Would that more movies had the fearlessness to be so uncompromisingly inane!

4/10

DISNEY ANIMATION: INCREDIBLE AS IT IS INEPT

Walt Disney Production's 1973 Robin Hood, I must confess, holds a very important place in my heart. It was while re-watching the film as a young person (for I had a marked tendency to watch Disney films very often in youth) that I first realised that there was such a thing as a Disney picture that I really didn't like very much. And so do I continue to not like it very much; in fact I should be happy to call it the worst feature that the studio made to the end of the 1970s, replacing the heretofore unassailable Saludos Amigos at the bottom of the heap. I say this, but only with some degree of regret and sorrow. After all, a good friend of mine declared (in college, but I do not know that he's changed his mind) that Robin Hood was his favorite of all Disney films; another friend goes even further to call it one of his favorite movies of all time. Neither of these men are what you would call cinematic imbeciles, nor are they alone in people I know in harboring fondness towards the movie. Besides, to quickly scan its IMDb user ratings - hardly a bastion of critical genius, but it's a good way to quickly gauge the general impression that the anglophonic film-lovers have of a particular work- you would get the impression that Robin Hood is one of the all-time masterpieces of animation (you would also get the impression that Disney history includes only this movie and those made after 1989). Prior to re-watching it for this review, I began to seriously doubt my memory: I couldn't possibly really dislike any movie that much if so many people seemed to regard it with such affection, right? Well, I've seen it again, for the first time in a good decade, and I stand by my initial response: this is a pretty damn dreadful 80 minutes - at the time of its production, the longest Disney feature since Fantasia, and only the fourth to hit the 80-minute mark - serving little purpose other than to mark another layer of suck in the inordinately swift decline in the studio's quality following its founder's death late in 1966.

Surprisingly, the film actually has its roots in a project that was abandoned in its cradle while Walt was still alive; there had been some extremely preliminary work done on a project involving the French folk character Reynard the Fox, but the boss eventually nixed it, concerned that Reynard wasn't a sufficiently familiar character to carry a feature. Many years later, Ken Anderson, one of the company's oldest production designers and story men, recalled this aborted attempt to make an adventure tale with a talking fox, and bent it into a very different direction altogether: he came up with a whole cast of anthropomorphic woodland critters to populate an animal kingdom retelling of the legend of England's famous communist thief. Other than the idea and the character designs, however, Anderson wasn't responsible for the rest of the story development; that task fell to Larry Clemmons, himself no spring chicken when it came to concocting animated narratives. Once again, the film was directed by Wolfgang Reitherman, who with The Aristocats had also established himself as the de facto "New Walt" producing all of the studio's features throughout the decade. The idea of a whole cast of bipedal animals was, at the least, something new for the animators, and in theory the film should have been an opportunity for them to stretch out and do something new.

Unfortunately, the rot that had infected the animation studio after Walt's death wouldn't be shaken off so readily; Reitherman might have stepped in as producer, but he could not replicate his predecessor's all-encompassing vision; and everything that The Aristocats did poorly, Robin Hood did worse, as well as coming up with some brand new flaws all its own. Save in one case: the fifth feature made using the xerography technology, Robin Hood is also at least arguably the film that really started to iron out the kinks that this technology entailed, and while it still has a particularly graphic look to it, and the unusually heavy lines found in The Aristocats are still present, it is otherwise the cleanest-looking of all the xerography films made to that point.

I might as well begin with the single biggest issue that, love the movie or hate it, is unquestionably the most obvious characteristic of Robin Hood: the animal thing. It is sometimes advanced that this is a significant work for being, after Bambi, the second of only three Disney features with an all-animal cast; but even those making this argument invariable feel the need to qualify the degree to which this actually applies. As well they ought, for there's nothing about Robin Hood that demands a universe of anthropomorphic animals, nor does the film make any attempt whatsoever to exploit the fact, except in the case of Sir Hiss the snake, loyal advisor to the usurping Prince John; his serpentine form is frequently pointed out, and often made the butt of physical gags. I cannot regard it as a coincidence that these gags are without fail the most successful in the film, and thus wonder how much better the film would have worked if the film had emphasised everyone else's animal characteristics.

As it stands, there's precious little reason why this very prominent decision needed to be made. At the very least, the choice of which animal should represent each major character is made with some care: Robin Hood, being a crafty and cunning sort, certainly makes sense as a fox; so too is it reasonable that the avaricious Sheriff of Nottingham would be a wolf. That Maid Marian would have to be a vixen was no doubt dictated by Walt Disney Production's fear of inter-species romance (a concern that did not apply to the Golden Age shorts, in which Horace Horsecollar and Clarabelle Cow were uncontroversially presented as a couple); though this does not account for how she could therefore be the niece of King Richard I, who befitting his sobriquet "Lionheart" is, obviously a lion. This naturally means that his brother, John, would have to be a lion as well. Why Little John should be a bear is not maybe so obvious: because he's big and strong, and, um, cuddly? Perhaps there was a gay underground in Sherwood Forest that we are not otherwise privy to.

But why the inhabitants of Nottingham should be rabbits and dogs and raccoons and the like is certainly not obvious, any more than the reason why Friar Tuck should be a badger. And I want to stress that the mere fact that it makes some kind of vague sense for e.g. Robin to be a fox, that doesn't necessarily justify the fact that he is a fox; there is not one joke, plot-point, or even a single line of dialogue that would have to be altered if he were a man instead. I'm going to go out on a limb, and suggest that maybe the reason is that the studio was adapting a story that had already been given definitive cinematic form. Previously, it was the case that their films were in the main taken from source material that had never been filmed at all, or if it had been (as in the case of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Alice in Wonderland especially), the previous film was of no especial significance. With Robin Hood, though, Disney was treading on ground that many feet had stepped on before; without even glancing at a list of adaptations that preceded 1973, I can confidently identify the 1950s British TV series as a well-loved version of the story; and then there is a certain 1938 film, The Adventures of Robin Hood, that just so happens to be a masterpiece, one of the all-time great examples of Technicolor cinematography and a cracking great adventure film to boot. Maybe it was the case that Disney wanted to do something that would set their version apart. I really can't say.

The only other idea I can come up, and frankly it's at least as likely, is a great deal more cynical: Robin Hood was populated by animals because kids like animals. And there was never before a Disney feature that so blatantly catered to a juvenile audience, without making even the slightest attempt to entertain the grown-ups unless it so happens that they liked silly, Saturday morning cartoon-level hijinks (I can only think of one - maybe two - that would match this level of kids' movie shallowness). There is no attempt to exploit the animal characteristics of the characters because there doesn't need to be - the heavy lifting is already done when the child watching a TV ad shouts, "Mommy, I want to see the funny movie with the fox!"

That it's so transparently a kid's movie is an excuse to paper over quite a few holes that really start to nag if you give them any real thought: like, why do some of the characters speak with English accents, but some sound like character actors from a Western (I adore Andy Devine, but my God, he has too distinct a voice to be plopped indiscriminately into anything: try watching the 1936 Romeo and Juliet without getting the giggles at his performance as Peter, I dare you)? No, it doesn't "matter", but it speaks to a lack of care that would have never passed muster even ten years earlier: just look at One Hundred and One Dalmatians and wonder what atrocities might have befallen that great movie if 'twere made in the age of celebrity stunt casting.

On the other hand, stunt casting is the only thing that saves Robin Hood from committing the most egregious sin of The Aristocats: lame villains. As scripted, Prince John is even more pointless a bad guy than Edgar the butler was: one of the first things we learn about him is that he has mommy issues which send him into a neurotic fit, tugging his ear and sucking his thumb (he's also the first of Disney's male villains who may or may not be coded homosexuals - but I have to say, there are enough reasons to disdain the company's problematic representations throughout the years without hunting down phantom homophobia). No way does Robin Hood have a problem stopping this bozo; even when he's tied up and surrounded by rhinos with axes, we never ever fear for his life. When a villain is this transparently ineffectual, he must become a comic relief figure; must perhaps even become the sympathetic character who gets beat up by the dick hero - has anyone ever liked Bugs Bunny more than Elmer Fudd? And thankfully, Prince John and Sir Hiss do eventually emerge as the most likable - the only likable - characters in Robin Hood, thanks mainly to some absolutely canny celebrity casting: Peter Ustinov as John, and the mostly forgotten British comic character actor Terry-Thomas as Hiss (who shares his performer's characteristic tooth gap). They're not the only famous voices to be heard: Phil Harris once again makes his presence felt as Little John (though he's deprived the chance to sing a crappy jazz song this time), Devine and Pat Buttram (the Sheriff) represent the Western contingent, and the somewhat noteworthy stage actor Brian Bedford plays Robin. But they're the only ones that fit very well, and Ustinov particularly manages to sell what would otherwise be a horribly feeble bad guy as a fine object of comic abuse. Prince John functions, ultimately, rather like Captain Hook in Peter Pan, though do mostly to the acting and not to the story.

But I was talking about the kiddie-picture trashiness of the piece, non? The plot is nothing to speak of, just another in the intermittent run of Disney films that substitute an episodic series of comic sequences for a proper narrative throughline. And the songs are an outrageous joke. Having made two "jazz" films in a row, the rather dubious choice was made to make Robin Hood a "folk" film. Then the even more dubious choice was made to have Roger Miller provide the folk songs, one of which later gained a second life when it was sped up and made the soundtrack to the early internet sensation Hamster Dance. There are two non-Miller songs on the soundtrack: Johnny Mercer's "The Phony King of England", which is a fairly poppy, fun bit of nonsense, and Floyd Huddleston and George Bruns's awful, Oscar-nominated "Love", a romantic ballad so insipid that one's ears practically shut down in protest.

God, even the opening credits smack of cheapness: they're presented in a plain sans serif font that says "the medieval adventures of Robin Hood" somewhat less than "corporate letterhead".

It should not be surprising that the animation is of reasonably diminished quality, on top of everything else: for when an animated picture is made for loose change and aimed at an indiscriminate child audience, that is of course the first thing to suffer. It cannot have helped matters that, by the time the film was in production, most of Disney's veteran animation staff was getting pretty old - the youngest of the six remaining Nine Old Men was 61 when the movie was released. I suspect indeed that they would have retired before this point, except that with Walt gone there was the idea that some continuity had to be maintained; but they really had nothing new to say with the art form, and the chief feeling one gets from the animation in Robin Hood is one of fatigue: these were men who had worked on the most expansive, ambitious animations in American history, and now they were being asked to make a matinee picture. I don't blame them for the general stiffness that pervades the film, particularly Robin himself - only Prince John (directed by Ollie Johnston, with some input from Frank Thomas) is a particularly well-achieved bit of character animation, and I imagine that Ustinov's performance helped with that. Even the great Milt Kahl, responsible for the Sheriff, couldn't do much with the character, who is at any rate marked by a truly outrageous amount of recycled animation from scene to scene.

Boy, is there ever a problem with recycling in Robin Hood: it might have the most re-used animation of any Disney feature, especially in the "Phony King of England" scene. A healthy chunk of the "I Wanna Be Like You" dance from The Jungle Book is reworked, plus some dancing from The Aristocats; most notoriously, Marian's movements for a good 15 seconds are taken straight from Snow White herself - which has the benefit, at least, of making Marian look better in those seconds than anyone else in the whole movie. Design elements are stolen from a number of movies, some sound effects are taken from Cinderella, and that doesn't address how much of the animation is reused with the film itself. It's not laziness, it's cost-cutting, but it does certainly add to the feeling that what we're watching could just as easily have been put together by Filmation with a better background artist (I'll say this, at least: the effects animation is top notch. But the effects animation always is in a Disney film, no matter what else is wrong; and that is why I rarely mention it).

At the same time as the old guard was getting, um, old, there was some fresh blood coming in: Eric Larson, former animator and one of the Nine Old Men, quit the animation department during this film's production (he hadn't been a directing animator in some time) to head up the new training wing of the studio, finding new talent and teaching them how to do what the Disney animators in the prime did better than anyone else. These younger generations of artists had been around for a while, of course, but it was with Robin Hood that they first got to take charge. Not as directing animators, of course, but as featured character animators: among them was a man named Don Bluth, given his first on-screen credit after more than a decade with Disney; this fellow's development would be of keen importance to the studio, though not in the way the company might have liked.

The kids couldn't do much, though, for the project was hobbled by a low budget and low expectations, and when it was finally dropped into theaters, it was as a sheer commercial object, with as little artistry as anything in Disney's history - not even the bizarre psychedelia of "Ev'rybody Wants to Be a Cat" to save it. It is said that Ken Anderson was heartbroken to see what his characters had been reduced to, as well he might be.

But the film did a bit of business - more than The Aristocats, at least - and it achieved its tiny goal of delighting young audiences, and presumably adult audiences as well who were sufficiently determined to have a fun time laughing at silly critters. I would hate to deny it at least that success - it is "fun", in an unusually disposable way. More importantly, it seems to have kicked the animators into high gear, because they quickly started on the next feature project, one that would not be any kind of masterpiece, but certainly represented a better achievement on every important level: more interesting, sympathetic characters, brought to life with higher-quality animation and design. Robin Hood may have been a low ebb, but at least it was not protracted.

DISNEY ANIMATION: TO WHICH PETS DO THE OTHERS TIP THEIR HATS?

And so it was, that Walter Elias Disney was dead, but the company to bear his name continued on. The Florida project that had been the chief focus of the last years of his life was being built with a new intensity of purpose: now it was no longer an East Coast mirror of California's Disneyland, it was to be a massive physical monument to Disney's belief in the joy of imagination and fantasy. Renamed by his brother Roy, the place was to be called Walt Disney World, so that in all the years to come, as long as that park stood, it would be testament to the one man whose mind had created such a mighty empire out of a few animators and a puckish cartoon mouse.

But while the theme park division of Walt Disney Productions moved forward with such clarity, the filmmaking side of the company was quite adrift and aimless. The last two projects that Walt had personally overseen, The Jungle Book and The Happiest Millionaire, both met with success in 1967, but he had provided no road map for the filmmaking teams as he had with the Florida project, which provided for not just a Magic Kingdom on the Disneyland model, but also a hugely ambitious (and largely unrealised) Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow, EPCOT. As far as Walt's intentions were concerned, the feature films division might well have ended its life at the start of 1968.

Of course, this wasn't the case. The live-action arm was largely able to fend for itself; 1968 saw the premiere of the tremendously successful The Love Bug, with many other genial family comedies produced at a ready clip of three or four per year (after the MPAA ratings system was established in that same year, it became company policy to avoid producing anything but G-rated fare). But what of the animation studio? Clearly, Disney wouldn't have wanted to see it die along with him. The problem remained, though that at no point in the company's 38-year history had anyone but Walt Disney overseen the production of an animated feature, and now, nobody else knew how to do it. There was nobody minding the shop, and without clear leadership, Walt Disney Productions entered a miserable interregnum that lasted from 1967 until 1984, when it took a bloodsucking Paramount executive of all people to get the company's artistic vision back on track.

That happy day was a long time in the future, though, from where we are now; it's 1967, and the studio is only just becoming aware that nobody is going to step up and take the reigns anytime soon. Fortunately, things hadn't reached the crisis stage just yet. Before his death, while work was continuing apace on The Jungle Book Walt had approved an adaptation of a story by Tom McGowan and Tom Rowe to be the next film to enter production once the Kipling film was completed. So, at the very least, the animators and story men had a specific project to work on; the next film would have to take care of itself, but the 20th Disney animated feature could at least claim the conceptual approval of the boss himself, the last film for which this would be the case.

Titled The Aristocats, the film that emerged at Christmastime, 1970, centered upon a family of cats living in fabulous luxury in Paris, 1910. The mother cat, Duchess (Eva Gabor) is an art lover, who encouraged her three children to pursue their talents as only the idle rich can: Marie (Liz English) studies singing, Berlioz (Dean Clark) plays piano, and Toulouse (Gary Dubin) is a painter. They are all four the dearest treasure in this world to their owner, Madame (Hermione Baddeley), who is prepared to draft a new will to ensure that they will be taken care of using all the wealth of her considerable estate; everything that the cats leave behind will pass to Madame's butler, Edgar (Roddy Maude-Roxby) when the last kitten has finally left this mortal coil.

Edgar overhears this will being composed, and finds it utterly intolerable that after years of being the faithful servant, putting up with the ludicrous indulgences that Madame pays out the animals, he has to wait even longer for so much as a whiff of money. And thus, he decides to accelerate his inheritance by faking a kidnapping (I couldn't bring myself to type "catnapping"), and he brings the family out into the countryside, abandoning them to the elements. Luckily for Duchess and the kittens, they quickly run across a world-wise tomcat named J. Thomas O'Malley (Phil Harris) - a shortened version of Abraham de Lacy Giuseppe Casey Thomas O'Mallley - who falls for Duchess's beauty and charm instantly, and pledges to help them get back to Paris on the double.

Even in that abbreviated form, I think the heavy debt that The Aristocats owes to One Hundred and One Dalmatians is pretty damned obvious. European capital? Check. Adventure from the oddly marshy boondocks back to the city? Check. Greedy false friend of the pet owner gets the whole thing started? Check. Interludes along the way involving other anthropomorphic animals? Check, though I didn't mention that in my précis. My point, anyway, is that with Walt gone, the story folk were clearly inclined to play things safe, and create a story for The Aristocats that closely hewed to past successes. Indeed, the things that the film didn't lift from Dalmatians, it lifted from The Jungle Book, although here I am not speaking of its narrative content so much as its tone, heavily rooted in anachronistic music of the jazz persuasion. Not that Disney had been in the past much inclined to reinventing the wheel with every new story: look no further than how closely the plots of the three princess films align with each other. The problem with The Aristocats is not that it steals cues from other movies, but that it does so poorly.

There are a few ways to tell in any given case when something has gone terribly awry in a film's pre-production, and The Aristocats has one of the biggest: there are seven credited story writers. Now, it's not that Disney films in the past lacked for large story teams: in fact, having small groups of story men (four and under) was a fairly recent development. But just comparing lists of names is a bit misleading, for given the workflow of a Disney animated feature, most of what those story men did was to draw storyboards; the actual progression of the story was something fleshed out from a skeleton derived in most cases from a single man, whose name, unsurprisingly, was Walt Disney. With The Aristocats, I suspect we're looking at a case where it took seven people to whip any kind of story into shape that could be filmed properly, and as is usually the case on any project with so many writers, the final project is rather lumpy with all the extraneous bits that got stuck on, as though everyone had ideas but nobody had the authority to decided which of those ideas to use and which to cut.

Thus it is, for example, that we end up with the entirely pointless comic business between Edgar and a pair of farmyard dogs, Napoleon (Pat Buttram) and Lafayette (George Lindsey), material that adds nothing but slapstick and about ten minutes of running time. Obviously, in a cartoon comedy, there are such things as gags for their own sake that do not strictly advance the plot, but I don't think I can name anything in an earlier Disney film that is this completely meaningless to the actual story.

That, however, is an obvious example. There are better instances of "too many cooks", issues that one or two writers might have noticed and fixed, but a whole mess of writers can easily overlook thanks to the dreaded groupthink. The whole basis of the movie is frankly born in stupidity: not only would Edgar prefer to get the cats out of the picture before Madame dies - so he is not in fact advancing his inheritance by one hour, so far as he knows - but he also takes great pains to drug them so that he can snatch them while they are asleep, perhaps forgetting that they trust him so much that he presumably could just pick them up and put them in a sack (which he in fact does, later in the film). I am almost inclined to spot the movie the seemingly incomprehensible decision that he next makes, to drop the animals off in the country rather than just flat-out kill them, because this is a childrens' movie, and Edgar is a comic villain, not a sadist. Still, Cruella De Vil made a pretty excellent comic villain, and she didn't just want to kill 99 dalmatian puppies, she wanted to skin them. So maybe I should not give the film a pass on some floppy grounds of "it can't be too dark".

It's striking, upon consideration, just how bad of a villain Edgar is. Even as a comic figure, he lacks even the slightest credibility as a threat: his plan is idiotic and it takes about 30 seconds to best him once the cats get back to Paris. I am not certain that I'd call him the lamest villain in the Disney canon (the '00s films have a strong claim in that direction, for a start), but he undoubtedly takes the cake of anything produced up to that point. It is not the case that a great Disney movie requires a great villain - Dumbo, you know - but it makes it a lot harder, and I believe that the contrast between The Aristocats and One Hundred and One Dalmatians shows most readily that when you take away a credible threat to the heroes' success, everything else starts to fall apart. After all, one of the biggest differences between the two films in tone if not in detail is that Cruella is a truly insane, terrifying woman, while Edgar is just a dip.

That, and the music: The Aristocats possesses one of the most schizophrenic soundtracks of any Disney feature, largely because of the number of people it took to produce it. The Shermans contributed two numbers: the title tune, performed by Maurice Chevalier (and by dint of that fact, the best song in the film), and "Scales and Arpeggios", a cute little number for the kittens; a third song was cut. Terry Gilkyson, the gentleman ousted from The Jungle Book is on hand with another song for Phil Harris, the entirely forgettable "Thomas O'Malley Cat". Lastly, Floyd Huddleston and Al Rinker were behind "Ev'rybody Wants to Be a Cat", certainly the most famous piece in the movie, and one worthy of discussion.

As with The Jungle Book, there's something about the specificity of scat-singing jazz music that, while absolutely appealing when you're in the right mood, is certainly anything but timeless. In other words: I have no problem with a 19th Century mermaid singing Broadway ballads, but something about cats in Paris in 1910 playing music that wouldn't exist for decades yet bothers me in ways that I can't describe. But I'm going to set that aside.

Less even than its peculiar anachronism, "Ev'rybody Wants to Be a Cat" - the sequence, not just the song - is jarring because it feels like it has peen plugged into The Aristocats from some very different movie, one that was probably made and best-enjoyed by people under the influence of psychoactive drugs. That might actually be the point, if I wanted to give the studio credit for trying to sneak a head movie into their kiddie movie about talking cats. Consider: after a full day of walking in the countryside, Duchess, O'Malley, and the kittens are looking for a place to sleep. O'Malley refers to his "pad", for the first time in this film suddenly using language that firmly dates the film to the '60s (its era of production, if not release), where everyone can get some rest. Except for the bright lights and music pouring out of the skylight; O'Malley shamefacedly admits that his friend Scat Cat is there with his swingers. By the way, the movie is a lot more fun if you assume that "Scat Cat", "swinging", and everything else that follows is sexual in nature - although when isn't that true?

So, the cats meet the swingers, and - if you follow my rational - there is a heavy cloud of marijuana smoke, probably mixed with PCP or something else with mild hallucinogenic effects, and Duchess and the kittens can't help but get a contact high. That would certainly explain the physically un-anchored fantasia that comes to follow, by far the most surreal moment in any Disney feature since the druggy conclusion of The Three Caballeros. Colored lights from no particular source keep flashing about, and people are dancing everywhere, and we get to meet a whole lot of weird characters (most notoriously, a Chinese cat played with minimal cultural sensitivity by the wonderful voice actor Paul Winchell, in his second turn with Disney: the first one, paradoxically, doesn't appear in this retrospective quite yet). And at the end, everybody is pleasantly mellow, with Duchess and O'Malley acting a good deal randier than most asexual Disney couples are permitted to be.

I don't want to say anything too positive or too negative about this sequence: mostly I just like to gawp at it, wondering what in ten tells the studio was thinking when that sequence was conceived and animated - oh right, the studio wasn't thinking, because up to this point, "the studio" meant "Walt Disney", and now the studio had no functioning brain. If that had resulted in a string after one pedestrian talking animal adventure after another featuring a bizarre psychedelic sequence, I have to wonder how much different the future of the company might have looked - though the next film isn't entirely without its psychedelic angle. It's fascinating like a terrible car accident is fascinating, though at least the song is catchy.

I've beat up on the film quite a bit, so let's play nice for a little while: the animation is a definite improvement from The Jungle Book, though not quite up to The Sword in the Stone. Other than Madame, a grotesque mask of shifting lines and pencil marks, none of the characters are especially plagued by the half-finished look of nearly every character in the Kipling adaptation, although for some reason, it seems that the lines are much thicker in all cases. The character animation is still pretty decent: I particularly admire the expressiveness given to each of the kittens, although none of them come within a country mile of Disney's all-time masterpiece of the feline form, Pinocchio's Figaro. As seems to be turning into a refrain for me in these last few reviews, this is more of a cartoon, that was more of a painting. And even as a mechanical act of reproducing the animal form, Figaro had a great deal more catty personality to him. God, I love Figaro. Oh, right, The Aristocats - the kittens are cute and have sweet personalities; I particularly love Berlioz's little shit-eating smirk during "Scales and Arpeggios".

Now, I don't want to make it seem like there's not any more cheapness to the animation; for there is. There's plenty of recycled animation: obvious lifts from Dalmatians, and one segment of Toulose's hissing is repeated three or maybe four times. I also can't tell you how many continuity errors I spotted, which is all the more surprising given how much forethought has to go into cel animation by its very nature.

Back to praise: for all I hate him as a character, Edgar is a really fine example of how the animators could exploit the limitations of xerography. A collaboration between Milt Kahl and John Lounsbery, the butler is perhaps the first character animated by Disney under this technology who exhibits that classic old squash-and-stretch technique without seeming a bit grotesque (viz. Wart in The Sword in the Stone. Perhaps I am not giving Kaa the python his due in this respect. But at any rate, Edgar's rubbery expressions are quite well-achieved and funny, and he simple would not have looked as good without the sketchy lines of the 1960s-'70s technology to dictate how how could be designed and animated.

I might as well add, the backgrounds work better here than in The Jungle Book, about as well as in The Sword in the Stone, and for much the same reason as that film: they are clearly painted, but not so detailed or colorful that they draw out the flatness of the cels. There's a bit of texture to them; a bit water-colored, almost, although I am certain that they are oils and gouache, as was standard at the studio for many years.

It's hard to say when the change occurred that Disney animated features were clearly products, without any real pretensions to artistry - not that they were ever completely un-commercial affairs, but there is a real difference between something like Alice in Wonderland and something like Robin Hood. That change, which started I think after Sleeping Beauty, was complete by the time The Aristocats came out: it is the most formulaic of all Disney features to that point, and insofar as it has any real ambition driving it, that ambition seems to be that the Disney brand name must be kept alive until somebody could figure out what to do with it. It really is drearily commercial, continuing the trend of famous cast members (Eva Gabor is passable as Duchess, but it should be a surprise that the only really outstanding performance is given by Disney regular and non-celebrity Sterling Holloway, as a mouse), and out-of-place pop music. And yet, it was something of a failure upon its first release - not that the company hasn't retconned it into a classic anyways, but in this as in other ways, The Aristocats points towards the dismal future of Disney feature animation more than anyone at the time could have wanted or feared.

ALAN J. PAKULA: SEE YOU IN THE MORNING (1989)

And now we at last come to the long-awaited "let's just get this Pakula retrospective the fuck over" part of our program.

In 1973, Alan Pakula married for the second time, following his divorce from Hope Lange in 1971. This second marriage was apparently a much happier one, for he and Hannah Cohn Boorstin remained together until his death, 25 years later.

There came a point when Pakula decided that his experience had made him well-qualified to launch into a cinematic study of the ways that families break apart and are re-built, and so for only the second time in his career (following Sophie's Choice) he actually wrote a screenplay all on his own - this time without even a novel to adapt it from. And the film from that screenplay was released in 1989 under the title See You in the Morning; ten year's after Pakula's first attempt at making a divorce picture with Starting Over. That film was part of a weird little subgenre at the end of the 1970s, and was for my money one of the more entertaining and truthful of them all; See You in the Morning has on its side the benefit of uniqueness (for who else was making lightly comic divorce dramas in the late '80s? Woody Allen, I suppose, but he was always more cutting than Pakula), but suffers in comparison to the earlier film by being - and I wish there was some more polite way of putting this, but I really can't think of one - absolutely pointless.

Let me first make the confession: unlike anything else in this retrospective, the only means I could find of watching SYitM was on a pan-and-scan VHS tape (boy, you forget how good DVD and Blu-ray really are until you back to the ol' videotape, that's for sure). So I am not judging the exact movie that Pakula and cinematographer Donald McAlpine actually shot, and that's not a little tiny problem. If someone plopped me in front of a full-frame VHS copy of Contempt, I am absolutely sure that I would not love it as I do; that I would in fact find it boring and aimless. I am also absolutely sure, however, that Alan Pakula is not Jean-Luc Godard.

At any rate, Pakula's screenplay makes some early attempt to do something interesting and unusual with its structure, and this works well enough that for about 40 minutes - the first third of the movie - I was quite uncertain why the film enjoys such a lousy reputation. To begin with, we are introduced to two families: first the Livingstones, Larry (Jeff Bridges), Jo (Farrah Fawcett), and their children Robin (Heather Lilly) and Billy (Macaulay Culkin). What we see of them is that they are quite content, and that Larry adores his kids, and then Jo says the most dreaded phrase of them all: "We need to have a talk". This unfortunate moment fades to black and we next meet the Goodwins: Peter (David Dukes), Beth (Alice Krige), and their two children, Cathy (Drew Barrymore) and Petey (Lukas Haas). They are just moving into a new house, and seem exuberantly happy, with the single exception that Peter, a concert pianist, is struggling with an unspecified trauma that has rendered his left hand all but unusable.

Three years later, the structure becomes fascinating, as I mentioned: the action keeps drifting back and forth through time, leaving us mostly uncertain what is happening or how long it took to do so, but eventually we figure out that the Livingstones separated, and Peter Goodwin died. The particular event that we land at, three years later, is an anniversary party, where the hostess Sidney (Linda Lavin) makes a point of putting Larry and Beth face to face, clearly hoping to spark a love connection. She does, but we don't quite see how it happened in the order it happened: Larry keeps flashing back from some unspecified moment to points in the past couple of years (making it about five years in the future from the start, if I don't miss my guess), not chronologically, and we find that eleven months after their meeting, Larry and Beth start dating, and get engaged despite both of them having significant emotional baggage, which Larry is quite confident that he can manage, being a practicing psychiatrist and all.

Their marriage happens at the 40 minute mark, give or take a few minutes, and that's when the film abruptly stops. Oh, not literally: there's 80 minutes yet of events. But it stops nonetheless. SYitM is what video catalogues refer to as an "adult drama", which means a film about adults that is a drama i.e. a serious movie. Drama means something else, though: a narrative in which a situation is threatened by an internal or external conflict. And boy, though Pakula sure does try to pretend otherwise, there's precious damn little conflict in the remainder of SYitM, which I might summarise as "Larry and Beth are quite happy, and the kids adapt fairly well to their step-father's presence, and any small issues that crop up are dealt with swiftly and maturely, with little negative repercussions."

That leaves the film to function as one thing alone: a character study. Now, I can enjoy a good character study, and this one happens to be unusually well-acted: Bridges and Krige are both outstanding, and the kids are all pretty fine themselves: Haas and Barrymore were of course both established by this point, and it's no surprise that Culkin went on to have a proper career. Nor can you fault Pakula's fine sense of observation: I have never been married, let alone divorced and remarried, but I imagine that exactly the set of emotions that I would experience in such a state are the ones that Larry and Beth go through, particularly since I share a number of Beth's neuroses. And maybe that is the point of the film, and it's value: it presents a particular emotional state in such a way that it's easy to understand it.

And if that's the case, then, great? But it might have been nice to actually have some kind of emotional response to it, in addition to just nodding and thinking, "ah yes, this seems to be properly observed." Maybe the recently-divorced would get some use out of the film, I don't really know. What I do know is that I was fully engaged and moved by Starting Over, and I was lightly hypnotised by the almost complete lack of incident in See You in the Morning. I know as well as anyone that Pakula had a career-long interest in clinical observation of human beings - he even games it a little in this, his first original story, by making the male lead a mental health professional - but usually that observation leads to something, anything. This is just boring. A cheap, uncritical word to use, but I cannot better it.

I feel dirty commenting on the visuals of the film (full-frame videotape, yo - though calling it "full-frame" when I watched it on a widescreen TV seems a bit hurtfully ironic), but it doesn't seem to me that it has any particular merit aesthetically, either. The director and cinematographer's last effort, Orphans, may have looked rather pedestrian, but I found that it engaged in some rather unusual choices of angle and movement, if not in lighting. SYitM doesn't look pedestrian, it is pedestrian, except that in one scene a garish red light pours out of the bedroom, signifying "lust" in the most inane way possible (I must admit that it might have seemed a good deal less inane if it weren't on VHS, with its notorious inability to hold reds steady).

Can I call this an abject failure? No, for I am certain that Pakula made exactly the film he wanted to: a no-holds-barred look at the mind of the recently remarried, unencumbered by any fake melodrama. Unfortunately, the fake melodrama is the only thing that would have kept my attention, and while I cannot in good faith claim See You in the Morning as a wreck on the order of Sophie's Choice or Dream Lover, it's appallingly bland nevertheless.

DISNEY ANIMATION: FORGET ABOUT YOUR WORRIES AND YOUR STRIFE

There is a famous story told about how Walt Disney, having picked the story for his studio's 19th animated feature in his customary jolly autocratic style, handed copies of Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book and its sequel to four of his story men - Larry Clemmons, Ralph Wright, Ken Anderson, and Vance Gerry - and gave them only one piece of instruction: "The first thing I want you to is not to read it".

Instead, Walt described for the writers his ideas for the characters, based upon Kipling's original figures but made, across the board, much more comic and lighter. Lightness, it would become clear, was a major concern for the producer. Which would, you might think, make Kipling's novel an odd choice of subject matter: though it was written for children, it is (like much Victorian children's fiction) full of danger and darkness, trusting the that it's young target audience will be able to survive the experience of reading, and therefore surviving in the popular imagination for more than a century, while so many "nice" children's stories have faded instantly from memory. At any rate, I was starting to say that I suspect that Disney selected this project because he knew that its large cast of a wide array of animals - pythons and tigers and bears, elephants, wolves, and oh yeah, one little human boy - was ideally suited to the medium of animation, and smarting from the lukewarm response to The Sword in the Stone, and still probably resisting the sketchy, graphic animation style that had been introduced by One Hundred and One Dalmatians, he wanted to make a fun, epic-sized cartoon that would show off what his team of animators could do, while still being a delightful, bouncy entertainment for kids of all ages.

Walt's personal involvement with the development of The Jungle Book was greater than it had been for any other film of the Silver Age: he suggest gags, vetoed plot-lines and characters that weren't going anywhere, and generally fussed over the story like he hadn't since World War II came along and took the fun out of animation. When the initial story drafts hewed to closely to Kipling's darker vision, he threw them out and started from scratch; when the original songwriter, Terry Gilkyson, presented a soundtrack that was far moodier and inflected with Indian flavor, Disney took him off the project, saving only "The Bare Necessities", which would become the film's signature tune, and putting the Sherman Brothers on the case. The important thing was to keep it fun and bubbly: his vision for the project can be quickly spotted when we observe that for the first time since The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad, all the way back in 1949, there was a celebrity voice cast hired. And not just any celebrity cast: Phil Harris (playing Baloo the bear) and Louis Prima (playing King Louie the orangutan) were both noteworthy figures in jazz music, at least the kind of edges-sanded-off jazz that Walt Disney would have been comfortable enough. And their personae did a great deal to drive the film: not only with the characters they played largely derived from the actors' personalities and mannerisms, but the whole tone of The Jungle Book can be called "jazzy"; it is by far the most contemporary in expression and attitude of any Disney animated feature to that time, re-casting the Indian jungle of the late 19th Century as some kind of 1960s music club, not only featuring a beatnik sloth bear who is perfectly sanguine to use phrases like, "I'm gone, man. Solid gone", but a quartet of vultures who would very much like to be The Beatles (and, allegedly, almost were; but the band vetoed this idea, preferring to do something dignified like Magical Mystery Tour instead).

The "pop culture and celebrity" angle that would later be exploited and driven into the ground by DreamWorks Animation in the 2000s was not a mode that Disney had explored yet, and this more than anything speaks to the new direction Walt wanted this project to take. This was going to be fun movie, dammit, something delightful and silly, driven by appealing characters who felt modern and relatable, not like fusty old fairy tale creations out of a storybook. But at the same time, it was going to have heart, and real heartwarming drama, that's what. It was in short meant to be everything that a Disney Studios feature could be, but hadn't been for too long.

Walt Disney died on December 15, 1966, while The Jungle Book was still in production (I have read that most of the animation had been completed, but very little had been painted; this could well be a romantic ahistoricism to make it seem that Walt saw a complete workprint of the film). A lifetime of smoking had caught up to him, and his left lung had been removed the month prior, riddled with tumours; he came out of the surgery and underwent chemo, but the damage had been done, and he spent the last two weeks of his life - including his 65th birthday on December 5th - in the hospital.

The last animation he saw released was the short "Winnie the Pooh and the Honey Tree" in February of that year, and its success pleased him; he certainly had high hopes that The Jungle Book would continue the legacy of Disney Animation, even in the new cheaper form that it had been obliged to take during the 1960s. This would indeed turn out to be the case, for when the finished project was released on October 18, 1967, it was greeted by some of the most uniformly positive reviews of any Silver Age feature, while becoming the highest-grossing film of the year. One must assume that a large part of this was due to nostalgia and mourning; how could it not be? Walt's death was one of those national traumas that comes along only rarely, though more often in the 1960s than in most decades.

This is not the place to talk about the particulars of Walt's life, but I hope you'll indulge me: for I must confess that for all his notorious character flaws, be they antisemitism, a racism that was not probably more pronounced than anyone else felt in his generation, but given a bullhorn because of his cultural prominence, a nasty habit of fighting unions, and all the rest, I do completely buy into the company-promulgated myth that he was a uniquely imaginative genius of popular entertainment; his desire to create new worlds to play in and to share with others has been only rarely matched and never surpassed. I have the sense that if Walt could have died penniless, knowing that he'd spent every dime on making something truly wonderful, he would have been thrilled to do so, and the financial empire he created when Disneyland opened was merely a nice bonus. For it is known that he took to heart the failures of his most ambitious projects like Fantasia, and I think that he was probably not upset that Fantasia did not make money, so much as he was upset that he therefore did not get to keep making more Fantasias. His was a creative soul, doubtlessly given far too much to sentimentality and easy traditionalism, but I can never for a moment believe that he was insincere. If the man who appeared on television to ramble on about his EPCOT project in Florida was faking his genuine, boyish enthusiasm, then he missed his calling: for in that case Walt Disney could surely have been the finest actor of the 20th Century.

This, then, is the man who was finally re-energised to pitch in with the animation studio to make The Jungle Book the best it could possibly be. Which makes it not merely disappointing but frankly soul-wracking that The Jungle Book isn't any better than it is - for my tastes, the worst film of Disney's Silver Age, and not by a terribly close margin, either. It has the feeling of a transitional film, with almost as much in common with the sometimes dreadful movies to come out in the two decades following it as with the films in the decade-and-a-half preceding it. The animation quality in particular is a shocking sight: if someone told me that it was the halfway point between the invention of xerography-based animation in One Hundred and One Dalmatians and the smoothness and refinement of that technology in The Sword in the Stone, I'd believe them without a thought; but to know that The Jungle Book actually followed The Sword in the Stone by four years seems an impossibility: it is such a dramatic roll-back in quality as to beggar belief.

As for the narrative content of the film, well, there is the obvious matter of the sickly-cute ending that it even annoyed the animators responsible for executing it (the directing animator for this sequence was Ollie Johnston: and when he of all people thought that something was too sentimental, you can be damn sure that it was too sentimental). But that's just the capstone to a movie that was ambling about without much of a point for quite some time before it finally ends. It suffers in particular from delaying the introduction of its villain, and thus the active stage of its conflict, until about two-thirds of the way through the movie; everything before that is simple, and mostly unengaging, comic banter.

In essence, the problem is this: the movie banks everything on the characters being so delightful that you just enjoy spending time with them, watching as they have low-key little adventures, and this would work brilliantly - if the characters were up to it. I certainly know that The Jungle Book has a fairly cast-iron reputation, so I suppose I must be in the minority in this respect, but I don't really have that much affection for several of the major characters: Baloo in particular annoys me with his boisterous idiocy (and for that matter, I have little use for Phil Harris's two other Disney characters, but we'll get to them soon enough), even if "The Bare Necessities" is a pretty fun song. By the same token, although I like King Louie - Prima's performance is wonderfully energetic, and it is possible that no person was ever so outspoken about his delight in having voiced a Disney character - and his number "I Wanna Be Like You" is one of the Sherman's best compositions, his monkey retainers are so insanely irritating that I very nearly want to fast-forward every time I re-watch the film (which, oddly, is more often than for several Disney projects I like a great deal better).

As for little Mowgli (here pronounced MOE-glee, rather than Kipling's preferred "MAU-glee"), the human "man-cub" whose return to a man village forms the narrative spine of what is otherwise a mostly episodic movie, he's essentially just a blank slate. Voiced by director Wolfgang Reitherman's son Bruce without much distinction, his only function in the film is to be in peril that he doesn't really understand, and to outglare animals who should, in theory, be able to destroy him in an eye blink. But he's fundamentally impossible to understand or sympathise with; while everyone around him insists that he is a human and must be around humans, I rather agree with Mowgli himself that he's no human at all: he was raised around animals, in an animal way of living, and frankly nothing he does up until that ridiculous cutesy-poo finale has anything to do with any human feeling I can recall having. I mean, I was a ten-year-old boy myself, once - I suspect that I saw The Jungle Book at least once in that period, for its VHS release occurred when I was nine - but I can't recall ever having a glimmer of affection for Mowgli at all. He simple doesn't have a personality worth mentioning.

Happily, to my mind the characters that work are better than the characters that fail are bad. King Louie, with his broad physicality and loopy personality, I have mentioned (an aside: I once read a well-intentioned complaint that Disney would have the temerity to cast a black actor as an ape, something that I imagine would have amused the Italian-American Prima if he'd ever heard it). I also have great affection for the panther Bagheera, largely a function of the great vocal work done by Sebastian Cabot, a recently-minted member of the Disney Stock Company (he'd voiced Sir Ector in The Sword in the Stone, and narrated the Winnie the Pooh short), very serious and ceremonial but a great humanist (is that the word?) nonetheless. And I am always amused by the caricatured English elephant regiment, boasting two great performers: Disney regulars J. Pat O'Malley and Verna Felton, in her last of many great turns for the studio (she died just one day prior to Walt Disney), stretching back to playing the imperious matriarch elephant in Dumbo, 26 years earlier. It has always given me a peculiar degree of joy that she bookended her Disney career with two pachyderms.

Unquestionably, the two stand-out characters are the film's villains: Kaa the python (voiced by the irreplaceable Sterling Holloway), and Shere Khan the tiger (speaking in the bored, silken tones of the magnificent George Sanders, in the only voice-acting work of his career). It was not the first time, and it would hardly be the last, that a Disney film should be overwhelmed by its antagonists; but they are particularly well-rendered in this film, nor could they be more different: the snake is a mewling, pitiful idiot who has to rely on his cunning to do anything, while the tiger is so aware of his reputation and presence that he knows that he doesn't actually have to act threatening, thus the hint of bored amusement throughout. The one scene these two characters share is the non-musical highlight of the film, with two very different concepts of wickedness dueling for prominence and ending in a draw.

That particular scene was also supervised entirely by Milt Kahl, the directing animator for both characters, and much as Frank Thomas and Marc Davis did their best work in villains, so did Kahl (usually cited as the animators' animator among Disney's Nine Old Men) never surpass either Kaa or Shere Khan - the tiger especially, who is a case study in how to create a character through the most delicate movements. Watch his shoulders as he walks! it is not only a miracle of observation but of mood-setting as well: you know from his every step that Shere Khan is just a moment's thought away from pouncing. And the smug, bastardly grin he perpetually wears matches Sanders's performance to a T. He really is one of the most amazingly dangerous villains in Disney, with none of the comic padding that keeps so many of them from true wickedness.

"But Tim", you may ask, "didn't you say the animation was bad? Well, is it or isn't it?" Ah, yes. It's both, which isn't as cheap an answer as it sounds. The actual physical act of character animation is quite extraordinarily good in The Jungle Book, the best of the '60s: Shere Khan alone makes that argument, as would the dance between Louie and Baloo (Thomas and Kahl working together, a reunion of the great team behind the wizards' duel in The Sword in the Stone). And I would also not hesitate to praise the very Ollie Johnston-esque degree to which characters in this film are in constant physical contact; I have seen it alleged without reference that Johnston did more work on this film than anyone else, which I would believe if only because it was his innovation to stress how character touching can have an emotional impact, and he was always the best at it - and say what one will about the value of Mowgli and Baloo, their physical affection is one of the best parts of the film, emotionally speaking. Wolfgang Reitherman, in his second solo directing project, absolutely did a wonderful job marshaling the talents of all the animators, better than he ever did before or after.

No, what I dislike about the animation - strongly - is the actual look of it. This was the third "sketchy" Disney film, and the two earlier ones had managed to work around it: One Hundred and One Dalmatians by marrying the graphic character design with equally graphic backgrounds that looked just as stylised, and The Sword in the Stone by advancing the graphic technique enough that it didn't really seem so rough. But The Jungle Book seemingly goes out of its way to emphasise the rough, pencilled quality of the animation, even more maybe than Dalmatians did: there are certain details, such as Mowgli's loincloth or Baloo's whole body, that don't even look like they were transferred to cels first, but just painted right there on the paper where the animators drew them.

Arguably, this half-finished look is well-combined with the jazzy, loose style of the narrative; but it clashes terribly with the lovely oil backgrounds, more detailed by far than in the last two films, and never before in any Disney film did the essential contrast between painted scenes and cel-animated characters seem so jarring. The characters, both in design and execution are so obviously cartoons; the backgrounds are of the same realistic quality of Cinderella, and it bothers me.

Even worse is the slipshod cheapness that the sketchy animation implies. In the previous xerographic films, it seemed like it might be legitimately an aesthetic choice, but here it can only be regarded as cost-cutting. This impression is underscored by the amount of recycled animation present, far more than in any previous film: the scene of Mowgli and his wolf brothers is taken from The Sword in the Stone (and Mowgli's design overall seem rather similar to the Wart), a chase scene in the ruins between Louie, Baloo and Bagheera was lifted from The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad, and Shere Khan's introduction comes when he is seen stalking a deer that you would never find in the jungles of India - because it's Bambi's mother.

Far more damningly, the recycling is even of animation from within The Jungle Book itself: Kaa falls from a tree in the exact same way twice, and is indeed lit the same way: never mind that it's night in one scene and midday in the other. And both times we see the elephants, they walk in exactly - exactly - the same way. Ironically, in the one place where a little bit of recycling could have been useful, it's ignored: and thus Shere Khan's stripes change, sometimes dramatically, from shot to shot.

I do not know if this was laziness, sloppiness, a desire for speed, or just the need to keep things cheap, but it set up a pattern of sub-par animation quality - as compared to technical skill of the animation - that would prove a severe Achilles' heel for the studio in the years to come. The combination of Walt's death and the box-office success of three consecutive cheap kids' movies led to a devaluation of basic craftsmanship, and that in turn to the first sustained run of truly mediocre films in the studio's history. But that is a story for another time.

1939: CHAMPIONS OF LOST CAUSES

Frank Capra is a hard director for me to get a bead on. Once upon a time, he was one of the most successful working filmmakers in Hollywood, only to have his reputation start to tarnish in later years as he was increasingly regarded as an auteur of banal, feel-good corniness. Then, sometime around 15 or 20 years ago, somebody watched It's a Wonderful Life, realised that it's incredibly depressing for 128 of its 130 minutes, and went about refurbishing Capra's reputation, as a guy who's actually willing to delve into some pretty dark spots, and I think that's generally what is thought about the director now, except for when it is. Basically, I can't tell if Capra is a director who is unfairly held to direct drippy, cutesy pictures, when most of them actually have a sharp edge; or a director unfairly said to be willing to show off the cruelest parts of human nature, when every one of his films has a relentlessly happy ending, more often ridiculously contrived than not. It's damned hard to figure him out, that's all: he makes a groaner of fuzzy wuzzy sentimentality like Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, and he follows that up with a corker of an adventure film in Lost Horizon. In a four-year span, he made Best Picture winners out of two comedies: the magnificent It Happened One Night and the perfunctory, irritating You Can't Take It With You.

In the fall of 1939, this arch-populist made one of his most paradoxical, confusing films ever. On the one hand, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington is quaint and almost embarrassingly naïve in its fervent belief that righteousness will out in the fever swamps of American politics. On the other, the film became such a firestorm of controversy due to its no-holds-barred depiction of the casual culture of corruption on Capitol Hill that it caused a minor breach between Hollywood and the Washington establishment for a short while, and naturally ended up as one of the highest-grossing films of the year.

Though the film is an undeniable classic, it's possible that some people still haven't seen it, so here's the plot: a senator from an unidentified state (it has prairies and mountains) has died, and the governor (Guy Kibbee) looks to the other senator, Joseph Paine (Claude Rains) and the local political machine boss, James Taylor (Edward Arnold) to help him decide who to pick as temporary replacement. Their party loyalist is met with hostility by the public, and before you can say "sop to popular sentiment", local youth activist Jefferson Smith (James Stewart) is tagged to fill the spot.

In Washington, Smith meets with his pretty, devastatingly cynical aide Clarissa Saunders (Jean Arthur), who has plenty of ties to the Washington press, primarily "Diz" Moore (Thomas Mitchell). She doesn't trust anybody as transparently idealistic as Smith, so she engineers his humiliation at the hands of the press corps, and Paine, looking to keep his patsy happy, suggests that Smith should propose a bill, as damage control. It just so happens that Smith's bill, setting up a national boys' camp, runs directly against a rider to a massive public works bill, setting a useless but highly profitable dam in the same exact spot that Smith wants to build a camp. When Smith learns that his hero, Paine, has been accepting hand-outs from Taylor, he is shocked - shocked! - to find out that politics has been going on in Washington, and though he's been railroaded by a trumped up corruption charge, he uses his last breath in the Senate to launch into a filibuster; at first serving no discernible purpose other than to air his grievances, but quickly turning into a chance to lift the cloud of wickedness that the Taylor machine has been operating under for decades.

It seems on the one hand churlish to speak out against Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, for it is in the main an exceptionally well-made movie; it competes only with It Happened One Night for the title of Capra's most entertaining film ever. James Stewart gives here the performance that made him a star after toiling for a half-decade as a character actor (he doesn't even get first billing, despite being the title character with by far the most screen time). The big part that everybody remembers is the filibuster, in which Stewart famously used bicarbonate of soda and mercuric chloride to dry out his throat for that ragged, been talking all night hoarseness that makes his impassioned monologue at the end all the more touching, but that's not actually the most impressive part of the performance. It's the uncanny ability Stewart had for seeming like an innocent bird, fluttering about and gawking at the landmarks of Washington, only to be wounded with palpable hurt when he realises that he's being played. It is hardly the best performance of his career (Hitchcock was down the line, doncha know), but it is the kind of performance that made it a desperate necessity that he should start getting star roles, to pay off the promise his earnest face and great range of emotional expression demonstrated in this film.

Meanwhile, Jean Arthur, a gifted actress who was a bit too willing to play smart women that just wanted a man so they could stop bothering about having their own personality for my tastes, give her one truly outstanding performance for Capra (a director much too willing to depict that kind of woman), following hard upon her outstanding work in Howard Hawks's Only Angels Have Wings. The requisite love plot is attached thoughtlessly to this particular film, meaning that her transformation out of cynicism is not part of a flirting strategy, but an actual, legitimate transition that a callous observer might actually undergo after being confronted with someone genuinely sincere about his beliefs. The supporting cast, beginning with the ever-brilliant Rains and including a whole army of great familiar faces, including Mitchell, Eugene Pallette, and Harry Carey, is all in fine form as well.

Beyond being a well-acted movie, the screenplay (written by Sidney Buchman from Lewis R. Foster's story) is brisk (the 125 minutes barely feel like 90) and full of clever lines and a fairly advanced knowledge of senatorial bureaucracy, especially in those days before it had become especially fashionable or common to peer inside the sausage factory. Under Capra's direction, this all flows painlessly and energetically, and while I persist in believing that he wasn't a particularly creative director (Rouben Mamoulian wanted a crack at the screenplay - the mind reels at the possibilities, even if he had been on a downswing for years), the way he shoots the Senate chamber sequences is rather smart and unusual: a combination of wide shots and extremely judicious cutting (Al Clark and Gene Havlick were deservedly nominted for an Oscar for editing, though of course they lost to the Gone with the Wind juggernaut) leaves the Senate looking like an empty, devouring monster, while Smith - who is never seen in consecutive shots, thus isolating him all the more - is framed to seem lonely and impotent, with close-ups only on his anguish and wider shots serving mostly to show how he stands without support. If the rest of the film is directed without any particular distinction, well that's why they called it the Dream Factory.

As far as Capra's biggest contribution to the film, though, we must look to the treatment of American iconography seen within its frames, which was shot guerrilla-style in the Mall, but still manages to have the worshipful gawking quality of a man who honest-to-God believed every word in that screenplay about how there is nothing brighter than the promise of American democracy. Even in 1939, when patriotism was a much more common thing in Hollywood than it is now, not many people would have made Washington, D.C. look more heavenly than Frank Capra did, nor capture the details of the Lincoln Monument especially (what the hell is it with Classical Hollywood directors and Abraham Lincoln?) in such a way that makes the words written on the statues of that city seem like messages passed down from angels.

And here we come to the crux of my problem with the film. No, not that Capra was a patriot, that's his right. Being a blind optimist was his right, too, but it doesn't necessarily make Mr. Smith Goes to Washington a particularly wise film - it is giddily childish about democracy's perfection. Even in something as cockeyed in its idealism as Aaron Sorkin's The West Wing recognised that compromise and failure are part of being in politics. But Jefferson Smith, by dint of being a swell guy of good moral fabric, manages to achieve a victory that is quite inconceivable (I believe Paine's conversation not one iota), while fighting off foes whose transparent venality is just as unlikely. In real politics, Paine and Taylor wouldn't have shut down Smith by tarring him with a bogus corruption charge; they'd have arranged for him to have a seat on some massively pointless committee, convincing him that he was going to achieve great things while ensuring that nobody in the public would hear his voice for the next five years.

Besides, the film's carefully precise apoloticism makes it difficult to contextualise what's going on, anyway. Like Dwight Eisenhower, Jefferson Smith isn't much of a party ideologue per se, so it fits that we never learn what party he and Paine belong to; I suspect it's for a similar reason that we learn nothing about this dam project other than that it will give money to Taylor, nor does the public works bill as a whole seem to have any characteristics other than being well-supported on both sides of the aisle. This is necessary for the film's dramatic success, but its reputation as a brilliant film about politics is in severe doubt because of it; politics in this film are a consequence-free game, where what matters is the hero's success, even though we never actually learn what he's fighting against. Certainly Capra was a strong conservative, and this affects even the film's concept of progressive activism; Smith's boys' camp, though a sweet idea, is pretty damn stupid as far as policy goes, and rooted in a rosy traditionalist glow that has very little to do with effective governance. We are not supposed to notice this; Smith fights for the little guy, and that is what we are meant to respond to. But on all the evidence we see in the film, Smith would have turned out to be a pretty awful senator, more of a poet than a legislator.

Certainly the film's argument that corruption can be weeded out of the government is charming but painfully innocent: compromise, graft and power-mongering are as old as the Continental Congress and the drafting of the Declaration of Independence (I would point you to the unjustly-ignored musical 1776, which does a fantastic job of being gooey-eyed about the events of that summer while still acknowledging the political machinations of the fathers of America). No, this is not a nice thing, but you don't fix it by sending pie-eyed optimists to Washington; what good has Dennis Kucinich done for anyone lately? And insofar as Mr. Smith Goes to Washington promotes the myth that a good man can thrive in government, it is a borderline dangerous film. Just ask the progressives who had high hopes for Barack Obama to change things in D.C. - selling out those same progressives on just about every issue under the sun isn't any kind of change at all. I'm not crediting Capra for Obama, but both Senator Smith and the president are points in a mythological history that is undeniably appealing - and this makes the movie smashingly entertaining, especially if you think of it as nothing but a fable - but just as corny as anything else in the great populist's filmography.

And so, that is my final word on the matter: let us think of this as a fantasy movie, divorced from reality as much as the Technicolor panoramas of The Wizard of Oz. Because I should really hate to feel compelled to throw out a movie which is as pleasant to watch as Mr. Smith just on the grounds that it is a damnable well of lies. It is, as a cinematic and entertainment construction, one of the highlights of late-'30s Hollywood. And let me never deny it that achievement.

DISNEY ANIMATION: FOR EVERY TO THERE IS A FRO

Following the success of One Hundred and One Dalmatians, Walt Disney Production's most contemporary and "hippest" film yet (though "hip" and "Disney" are correctly thought of as mortal enemies to one another), the studio immediately ran as far as possible to the other direction, making a film rooted in an antiquity that hadn't even been approached by the medieval fairy tale adaptations - in fact, there would be only two Disney features, three and a half decades later, adapted from more ancient source material.

I refer to the Arthur mythology of Britain, rooted in a legendary tradition lost to time but almost certainly dating to earlier than 1000 CE; though the best-known shape of the myth begins with Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae from 1138, and significant portions of the legendarium were still being added by (mostly French) sources throughout the early medieval period. That the Matter of Britain would make a fine subject for a Disney animation must have been obvious long before the studio actually completed The Sword in the Stone in 1963, and I imagine that it was particularly appealing because, like Peter Pan, it presented a "masculine" narrative, rather than the more common and distinctly more feminine treatment given to classic Western fairy tales in the "princess cycle" of films. This is based upon nothing but my own suppositions about the Disney Studios' generally reductive treatment of gender roles, but one does not need to subscribe to the company's paradigm to observe that historically, they made more as it were "girl" films than as it were "boy" films - at the very least, the "girl" films have a significantly more prominent place in the company's history and box office records (of course, most of the studio's projects were quite gender-neutral, with the acknowledgment that any film made almost solely by men will naturally take on a masculine perspective; and I think this only really serves to indicate how ultimately irritating it is to try and view everything in gender-theoretical terms).

The Arthur myth is of course a matter of great seriousness and sobriety, and as I have hopefully argued convincingly in regards to One Hundred and One Dalmatians, seriousness and sobriety were two qualities not well-served by the animation style Disney was forced to adopt in the early 1960s. A convincingly epic retelling of the Arthur legend would frankly have looked stupid were it rendered in the scratchy, graphic aesthetic that the new xerography technology demanded.

Here is where even sheer speculation comes grinding to a halt, and I now continue in what can only be considered a spirit of idle curiosity. Unlike many of Disney's features before and after, I know nothing of how The Sword in the Stone came to be developed as a story; of its history I can say not even say with certainty when it entered animation, although the last quarter of 1960, when the finishing touches were just being put on One Hundred and One Dalmatians, seems to be likely, giving the film a comfortable 2.5 year production.

So I cannot say, though the question deeply interests me, of whether the idea first came up to do a feature adaptation of the Arthur legend, and T.H. White's 1938 novel The Sword in the Stone was selected on the basis that it provided a suitably comic revision of what had been, to Thomas Malory, a perfectly humorless work indeed; or whether Arthur hadn't indeed cropped up at the studio at all until somebody chanced to read the novel and saw in it a likely candidate for future canonisation. I have found one reference that, in 1944, it was announced that Disney had acquired The Ill-Made Knight, the second sequel (published in 1940) to White's first Arthur novel, although I do not feel quite comfortable trusting this nugget. At any rate, by the time The Sword in the Stone: The Movie entered production, White had anthologised and revised his three novels and added a fourth, combining the whole package into a thick 1958 text called The Once and Future King, and the closeness of that date to the active development of Disney's film makes it impossible for me to believe that the latter event wasn't influenced - even spurred on - by the former. But as I said, which element of all this came first, and why, is something that I am entirely unable to say. All I know is that White provided a very convenient version of the Arthur story that hardly could have been better-tailored for Disney's needs in the early 1980s: it treats heavily upon the king's boyhood, it is broadly comic, and much of the humor is pointedly modern, thanks to White's innovation of suggesting that the great wizard Merlin was born far in the future and is aging backwards through time, leading especially in the first book of the tetralogy to a great many anachronistic gags that story man Bill Peet (once again working totally solo) was perfectly eager to bring into his version of the story.

This was the only possible way that Disney could have made this film in this period: it is not exactly a modern dress version of King Arthur, but rather a modern attitude version, with vernacular and gags that are based on the contrast between the 20th Century and whatever ill-defined period the film takes place in - Merlin often refers to it as the Middle Ages, which in British history usually denotes the period after the Norman Conquest of 1066 CE, although Merlin also claims that the London Times won't start publication for more than 1200 years, setting the story in the late-6th Century. Upon reflection, this is not an issue of particular importance. What I was first trying to say is that this is a peculiarly ironic and modern take on the Matter of Britain, and ideally suited for the scratchy aesthetic of 1963.

White's novel and Disney's film were produced for two different audiences in two entirely different contexts (the book can only be read as a work of anxiety presaging what was in 1937 and '38 looking to be an inevitable war with Germany's Third Reich; the film was made for kids at a period when American influence and optimism was at its all-time peak), and it is hardly shocking that they are thus rather different beasts, but it's surprising, to me anyway, to observe how well the Disney version tracks the spirit of the novel, if not its specific incident (it is not at all unusual for Disney adaptations of particular works of literature to do neither of these things). Obviously, it's not an improvement on the source material, nor even its equal in another medium; but every time I re-watch it, I find that I like it more than I remember, and frankly more than I think I have any right to. As far as Silver Age Disney features go, The Sword in the Stone is probably the most obscure these days, and no one could objectively call that a crime against art history (whereas, for example, I am constantly distressed at how few people apparently have seen The Three Caballeros). But it is nevertheless a fun movie, with good animation, and it represents a significant refinement in the xerography technology of One Hundred and One Dalmatians, a far bigger jump indeed that I would have imagined likely in the span of just one film, and it makes a good effort at being something like My First Arthur Story - which it was for this particular Arthuriana buff, if nobody else.

The broadest strokes of the story are basically the same in both version: the foundling Arthur, nicknamed the Wart by those around him, meets with the great wizard Merlin one day, and Merlin - knowing that Arthur has quite a profound future in front of him - takes it upon himself to become the boy's tutor. This tutelage includes not only important subjects like reading and mathematics, but a social sciences curriculum like never otherwise seen on this earth: for Merlin takes to transforming the Wart into a variety of animals, and the things the boy learns by observing the world in this form give him an understanding of abstruse moral and philosophical issues that will one day serve to make him a more gentle and wiser king; an event that happens at the very end, when the Wart quit accidentally and in total naïveté pulls a sword from an anvil upon a stone and proves himself the proper heir to the late King Uther Pendragon. I cannot quite say why Peet made some of the particular changes he did to the subject matter: that Merlin is now a time-traveler and not living backwards through history was probably done to keep such an esoteric concept from blowing up the children's minds in the audience, but I have never particularly understood why it made sense to turn Kay from the Wart's best friend and near-contemporary to a smug, monotone bully with fully ten years on the preteen hero. These are of course fairly minimal concerns.

The film itself boasts a blend of thoughtfulness and silliness that remains fairly exceptional in the Disney canon. None of the studio's other work is so forthright about raising a number of philosophical considerations, in a family-friendly way of course; much less intellectually rigorous than the book, to a dead certainty. At the same time, it does not present its issues with the "here is a Lesson" flatness of an Aesop fable, like so many of its other animated features. I might put it a different way: most Disney films have a single message, raised in the first act, largely ignored by the entertaining second act, and hammered home in the third act: "Growing up is not a terrible thing" in Peter Pan, "Don't judge a book by its cover" in Beauty and the Beast, "Never give up on your dreams" in damn near all of the rest. The Sword in the Stone doesn't present a message so much as a system of thinking, which is developed piece by piece in each of the film's three major sequences - the story follows, I think, a five-act structure, found nowhere else in Disney: a prelude, the three parts in the middle, each with their own system of conflict, and an epilogue. In this, it surely counts as one of the most interesting narrative systems of any film the studio ever produced.

At the same time, the themes of the film are undoubtedly of secondary importance to its humor; this is only the second Disney film that is first and foremost a comedy, which is an observation I shall hereafter cease making; it is true of every film made at Disney in the '60s and '70s that it is first a comedy, for which I can only feebly point to the xerography revolution and its attendant graphic simplicity as the likeliest cause. Now, the comedy is sot so effective here, I think, as in One Hundred and One Dalmatians, which is of course largely a matter of taste, and if I am inclined to agree with The Sword in the Stone's faintly hidden place in Disney history, this would be a primary reason. Some of the jokes are tremendously effective, mostly the ones that primarily involve Merlin's rather distracted perspective of life in the First Millennium. In this the film owes a huge debt to TV character actor Karl Swenson, whose voice performance (his only one for Disney) is an impeccable example of comic timing and inflection. And some of the jokes are just sort of there, and this includes virtually all of the film's physical humor, which is a significant step down from the previous film, which had three excellent comic villains upon which to rain its slapstick.

Besides its gag-heavy plotting, the best way that the film promotes its overall lightness of tone is through its songs, and a more jingly collection of hummable, fun numbers had never been seen in a Disney film. For this, we must thank the brothers Robert and Richard Sherman, Tin Pan Alley songwriters whose first work for the studio (probably written about the same time as their Sword in the Stone work) was the live-action The Parent Trap, in 1961; it would take no time at all until they had become one of the most important creative forces in Disney history, writing the songs for three of the next five animated features, as well as the sublimely iconic soundtrack to the 1964 masterpiece Mary Poppins. They also wrote one of the most notorious earworms in the history of song, the theme to the Disney theme park ride it's a small world.

But let's not skip ahead. For right now, they contributed five songs to The Sword in the Stone, and the barely-heard scraps of a sixth; discounting the drowsy opening tune as a necessary bit of scene-setting, what remains is a marvelous mix of playful numbers that are all irritatingly memorable (for this is the hallmark of the Sherman Brothers' songs), and which combine with each other in quite effective ways. The two songs which Merlin sings to the Wart during his animalistic sojourns, "That's What Makes the World Go Round" and "A Most Befuddling Thing" make a rather effective pair, and combine to express the sometimes weighty concepts explored in the film with sprightly efficiency:

It's up to you how far you go
If you don't try you'll never know
And so my lad as I've explained
Nothing ventured, nothing gained.

We also have Merlin's nonsense song "Higitus Pigitus, an early example of what would become an important element of the 1990s films, the Big Ol' Showstopper number in which a lot of crazy things happen accompanied by a particularly high-tempo song, and "Mad Madam Mim", which is just a fun little comic number for the villain. All in all, it's one of the best scores to any Disney film in the Silver Age: it lacks a flat-out masterpiece like "Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo" or "You Can Fly", but it also lacks any outright clinkers, like "So This Is Love" or "Your Mother and Mine".

The downside to all this playfulness is that the film is plagued by shallowness, the second primary flaw with the movie. Of particular concern is the third segment, in which the Wart becomes a squirrel and learns about implacable forces, like gravity and love, and breaks the heart of a pretty girl squirrel in the process. There is no more jarring transition in the film than that from Merlin's sad observation that love is one of the most powerful things in the universe, as we in the audience watch the squirrel descend into mourning for her lost love, to the comic disaster of Merlin's kitchen-cleaning spell. It's like on the local news, when the anchor goes from talking about the teenager who was murdered to the tap-dancing pig without missing a beat. And it happens semi-frequently; not so drastically, but the film is distinctly anxious to keep real emotions out when they threaten the integrity of the comedy.

My God, I still haven't more than mentioned the animation. Well, like I said, the xerography is a great deal more refined here than it was in One Hundred and One Dalmatians; there are virtually none of the ghostly pencil marks found so frequently in that movie, although they do have a tendency to appear rather frequently around characters' hairlines. Beyond that, The Sword in the Stone finds the animators much more comfortable, on the whole, with the angular aesthetic they had now been saddled with, and so the overall look of the movie seems to more of a single piece than it did in the last film, where Cruella De Vil especially tended to overwhelm everything else on screen. Which may well be just another way of saying that none of the design The Sword in the Stone is as singularly memorable as Cruella, and I will not seek to correct anybody who wanted to make that argument.

(In this context, it would to mention that Wolfgang Reitherman was the solitary director of the film, something we have seen before; but this was the first film to be made without sequence directors also. Meaning that Reitherman was more singularly responsible for this film than any Disney director before him).

One of the primary differences between the two films, as far as the look of the thing is concerned, is most of the characters in The Sword and the Stone are humans. In Dalmatians, nearly every important person was a dog or other four-legged beastie, and the human beings we saw most regularly were caricatured villains. The dogs owners are seen only briefly, and make no kind of real impression. Here, though, we have characters ranging from the totally sympathetic to the villainous, all of them meant to look much as you or I do, and the results are not uniformly successful - the third primary flaw. Of particular concern is the Wart himself, who is frankly one of the less appealing protagonists anywhere in Disney. Partially, this is due to the accident of the film's production that, thanks to the speed with which 12-year-old boys' voices change, it took three actors to portray the character: Reitherman's two sons Richard and Robert, and Rickie Sorensen. Fortunately, the three boys sound passably like each other, but they were not all navigating puberty at the same rate, and so, in addition to modest but noticeable fluctuations in the Wart's voice, there are also a great many places where his voice cracks and squeals unpleasantly. But that's not the half of it.

I have never been able to figure out exactly who was the directing animator for the Wart, but that person hasn't much to be very proud of. As long as he's just standing there, it's fine: Bill Peets character designs for this movie are a fine example of the graphic style, and Arthur set a look for young Disney males that would last into the 1980s: particularly in the nose and the gangly limbs. He's awkward when he moves, but in an appealingly innocent way. And then, there are his facial expressions. There is something awful about his face, especially when he's shocked - everything stretches weirdly, and his eyes become great blank discs, and he is quite unaccountably horrible to look at. It is a rare thing to find an animated character mugging, but this is exactly what we find in the Wart: he gives the performance that you'd expect an amateur preteen to give in the same scenario in live-action, except that every motion of his body was selected by trained animators. It is absolutely fair to say that the Wart contains some of my least-favorite animation of any major character in a Disney film up to this point: not exclusively, maybe only a total of five minutes of the whole. But they are five minutes that dominate.

180º away from the Wart, the film also boasts one of the most technically perfect sequences ever animated, the wizard's duel between Merlin and Madam Mim, the comic villain brought in for virtually no other reason than to facilitate this great piece of character animation, executed primarily by Milt Kahl and Frank Thomas. The content of the duel couldn't be simpler: the two sorcerers turn into one animal after another, hoping to create a form that the other cannot defeat. But the execution is the finest work done by the Disney Studios in the 1960s. At its most basic, this is a tremendously effective example of personality animation: no matter what form either character transforms into, it also looks, instantly, like that character did as a human (that they are color-coded, blue and pink/purple, helps; but it is not the only thing going on here). At the same time, they never look like a human version of whatever animal they have taken on. That alone would make it an impressive sequence: but the choreography of the action, and even some of the little details of what we see (Mim's gradual fading-in as a crocodile is my favorite bit of animation in the film) are all examples of what the Disney animators could achieve when they were at their most inspired. It is often the case that a Disney cartoon will not bend reality as much as animation might; that they are so concerned with replicating reality, the animators sometimes only depict things that could be filmed in live-action, given a sufficient amount of time to train animals or design effects. But sometimes, they did something that had to, of its nature, be presented as a cartoon, and this wizard's duel - all of the "magical" sequences in film, in fact, but this one most of all - is a prime example of that.

As far as the rest of the designs go, the backgrounds are a good deal more textured and "painted" than the sketchy line drawings which mostly served as the backgrounds in One Hundred and One Dalmatians, and I must admit, for this I am grateful: those designs worked in that film, but as a new discipline I think it would have been intolerable. At the same time, they are much simpler than anything from the 1950s, to say nothing of the Golden Age: a simple color palette, little if any extraneous detail. It matches to the style of the character design well (Sleeping Beauty-like backgrounds would have been horrible here), but it still all points to the same direction as the last film: cheaper style, simpler animation, a less artsy inclination for a younger audience.

The film was a success; yet another Disney animated feature in the year-end top 10 box office hits. It was not as much of a hit with critics, who were perhaps beginning to spot Disney's new retreat into juvenalia; the film was attacked for its thin characters and over-reliance on jokes. That's an excessive reaction, because it's awfully charming and entertaining despite those things, and this reading ignores that it still has some very deep thoughts in between the laughter. But maybe I am just giving it credit for being better than the mediocrity waiting so very near into the future.

But even so, the film spoke to the continuing vitality of the company, as a business if not necessarily as an artistic powerhouse. And it was to be the final animated feature released under the Disney name while Walt Disney himself was still alive.

DISNEY ANIMATION: LONDON, NOT SO VERY LONG AGO

It is both convenient and at times very useful to divide Disney's history into certain periods. The simplest (and thus, the least useful) of these divisions is into the classic period - from the beginning to Walt's death - and the modern period. That this is plainly undesirable is because it suggests, among other things, that e.g. The Aristocats and Mulan are somehow related to one another.

Thus, there has grown up among animation buffs, with the encouragement of the Walt Disney Company (never missing a chance to re-write its own history!), a sort of standardised breakdown of the major periods of Disney feature animation. The Golden Age begins with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and ends with Bambi, including the five great films produced when money was easy to come by and ambition flowed like water. It was followed by the eight years of the package films, produced to keep costs down during and immediately after World War II; though this period lacks an "official" name, I like to think of it as simply the War Years. Whatever the case, this ended and the Silver Age began with Cinderella, the first in a mostly uninterrupted run of box office hits produced around the explosive early popularity of Disneyland, inaugurating a period of financial stability like the studio had not yet enjoyed. The Silver Age, so named because the films are neither as well-animated nor as well-loved as those from the Golden Age, ended with The Jungle Book, the final animated produced under Walt Disney's direct supervision. This was followed in turn by a lengthy interregnum in the 1970s and 1980s, during which Walt Disney Productions nearly blinked out of existence, until a team of bloodless, gifted businessmen took it over and introduced the Disney Renaissance, which lasted until the end of the century, and brought us at last to whatever period of Disney history we now find ourselves in, but each of these later periods will get its fair treatment at a later point in this retrospective.

The curious thing about this breakdown is that it takes no account of arguably the most important shift in aesthetic that occurred at any point in the whole 72-year-and-counting history of Disney. From an animation point of view, Disney history can be split into thirds: the hand-inked period, the xerography period, and the CAPS period (a fourth era is just starting up with The Princess and the Frog). It is at the dawn of the xerography period that we now find ourselves.

Now, the official story is this: Sleeping Beauty cost an arm and a leg, and it was a box-office failure, so the studio had to massively downsize its staff. Xerography gave them the chance to do more work with fewer people. Something about this has always struck me as deeply unlikely. See, it's damned hard to find completely trustworthy figures for box office returns 50 years ago, particularly for a movie that has received multiple successful re-releases, but the best info I can find is that Sleeping Beauty earned $21 million in 1959, or about $154 million in 2009 dollars, with a production cost of $6 million ($44 million in 2009). This meant that it grossed less than Cinderella, Peter Pan or Lady and the Tramp, which all produced extremely robust profits. Now, I'm no studio accountant, thank the good Lord, but I don't think that a movie which grosses approximately 3.5 times its production cost is so readily deemed a "failure", and with the profits from other three still sitting in the studio vault, with Disneyland showing no signs of slowing down, the notion that Disney simply HAD TO cut staff seems awfully unlikely. If you asked me, I'd blame mere indifference: Walt had been losing interest in the studio ever since announcing the theme park, and he likely knew quite well there'd be no more Sleeping Beautys in the future, making a large staff redundant. If we want to think the very worst of him, it could even be that he knew this new technology meant that he could fire all those people, and so he did, but I see no reason to be that willfully cynical.

Here, in a nutshell, is the technology I'm talking about: photocopying cells. In the traditional mode of doing things, the animators would draw in pencil or ink on paper, and send their sheets of paper off to the Ink & Paint Department, where the real work was done: a small army of uncredited artists - this is where most of the studio's female employees found themselves banished - laid a blank celluloid sheet over the sketch, and copied it in ink. This inked cel was then painted, and finally photographed. The revolution that Disney's great tech genius (and father of Mickey Mouse) Ub Iwerks made in 1959 was to figure out how to run blank cels through a Xerox machine, cutting the time the films spent in Ink & Paint dramatically. Because of this new technology, the studio could move ahead on what would become its 17th feature in 1961, One Hundred and One Dalmatians, a tale of two dalmatians who journey across Southern England to find their kidnapped puppies; to animated each of the 6,469,952 spots that would appear in the final movie would have been a nightmarish process without photocopying, and it is probably safe to say that the film would not have been produced otherwise.

The extremely primitive state of xerography at the time had dramatic implications for the animation. The technology had a hard time handling round objects, meaning that the flowing, soft look that had been the hallmark of Disney animation since its inception had to be replaced by a much more angular, graphic style - making Sleeping Beauty something of an accidental trendsetter in that regard. If I am not quite mistaken, it was around this time that Milt Kahl became the primary character designer for all the studio's films, and his love of angular graphic art doubtlessly helped to define the new aesthetic under this technology.

Moreover, since the animation was now coming directly from pencil sketches, there was a certain roughness to much of the drawing: there are many points, especially in this, the earliest of all the xerography features, where you can clearly see pencil marks meant to help the animator guide the shape of the character, that had never been erased. That was something that always happened at Ink & Paint! Why would the animators need to worry about it?

Because of these limitations, the look of One Hundred and One Dalmatians, and the next several films afterward, has a very spontaneous, drafted feeling to it, that I have always privately though of in my mind as the "scratchy style". It cannot be over-emphasised how utterly different this makes the animation look even from a film released as scant two years earlier. I cannot say whether this new look, so modern and raw, is an improvement or not on the rounder, more flowing classical approach; that is certainly a matter of private opinion, and I can name a great many people who use words like "embalmed" and "stuffy" and "fussy" to describe '50s-style Disney animation who think that the new aesthetic is like a breath of fresh air, loose and not nearly so painfully serious. I can also say that Walt Disney allegedly despised the new look, preferring the storybook illustration approach of his company's earlier films. For myself, I think that it is a tremendous accident of history that this new design mentality should have been prominently employed by films that boasted some of the worst screenplays in the studio's history, tarring it by association, and that's a pity: it is a bit thrilling to see something new like this, particularly after 16 consecutive days of classic Disney. At the same time, it's strictly a cartoon aesthetic: you could never have a masterpiece of animated painting like Sleeping Beauty with a look like this.

If I believe One Hundred and One Dalmatians to be the single truly great work from the early, unrefined xerography period - which I do - it's because this is the only one that has a story particularly suited to the new aesthetic. It was followed in short order by The Sword and the Stone and The Jungle Book; two stories that conceptually could have been produced at any point in Disney history. Dalmatians is different. In this case, I think the story men - I'm sorry, the story man! For this was the first Disney feature that was a solo writing project, courtesy of Bill Peet. Now what Peet realised is that the sketchier look of animation fundamentally altered the kind of story he could tell: it had to be just as loose and playful as the animation was. It's no coincidence that the films made in this style are, two a one, some of the most straightforward comedies that Disney had ever produced. In fact, prior to Dalmatians, I don't think they'd ever made a straight-up animated comedy feature.

So that was the first step: it had to be a comic tale. Secondly, though this was a function of the Dodie Smith book, it was set in contemporary times. Only Dumbo and maybe Bambi had previously enjoyed that distinction, along with some of the package segments. With the very next film, Disney would experiment with applying the scratchy look to period-piece stories, and it frankly just doesn't work as well: in so many ways, Dalmatians was the most modern Disney film at that point, with a distinctly contemporary sense of humor and attitude (in the previous features, only the prince's joke about "This is the 14th Century" in Sleeping Beauty has anything like this modern sensibility). The modernised look of the animation contributed to that greatly. At the same time, the mentality guiding the background paintings changed dramatically to fit this new order: they are every bit as sketchy and angular as the characters, with a clearly deliberate rejection of detail or subtlety to help set off the animation. I would say that the film oozes cheapness, for especially coming when it did it has the definite feeling of a cost-cutting measure; except that the marriage between the character animation and the backgrounds is quite unusually good here. It was perpetually a problem in Silver Age Disney films, and even worse in the '70s, for the solid-color character cels to clash with the richly painted backdrops. There is none of that seen in One Hundred and One Dalmatians, which might indeed be the last film for which that is completely true until the rise of CAPS in the early 1990s.

Now as I said, this might all have failed without a particularly strong, well-designed screenplay, and Dalmatians has exactly that. Mixing pop culture and pop culture satire (the Kanine Krunchies commercial is hilariously banal, and the true-crime game show "What's My Crime?" still works even today as a parody of excessive reality programming) with a fine adventure story, some nifty conceptual stuff involving the way that canine society in England is structured, a whole bunch of great slapstick gags, and just enough love story to keep it all human, this is absolutely a kids' movie, but it's a pretty great example of my oft-contended idea that a kids' movie needn't be pandering. A family of dalmatian puppies is kidnapped so that a crazy, vain woman can make herself a dalmatian-skin coat: I dare you to imagine that a studio executive would even think of greenlighting that today, if it didn't have the classic imprimatur already. It can't be done. And anyway, that's ignoring the many little touches that give the story weight and texture: the father dog Pongo's gently arch narration, the throwaway details about the human home of Roger and Anita, owners of the dalmatians, the well-defined and perfectly individualised personalities of every single animal in the movie, even the ones that get just a couple lines of dialogue. There's even a brief tossed-in scene about the creation of pop music, as Roger comes up with the "melody first, my dear, then the lyrics" for a song about Anita's awful school "friend", Cruella De Vil - one of the catchiest, wittiest songs in all Disney.

It doesn't hurt any that Cruella just so happens to be a fairly magnificent achievement of character animation. I - look, I absolutely adore Maleficent and Ursula, I think that the Queen from Snow White could not have been improved upon, Lady Tremaine is the most evil bitch I have ever seen in a movie, Scar is a painfully brilliant piece of physical acting, I adore that Ratigan has Vincent Price's voice, and Chernabog still makes the hairs on my neck stand up. But in my heart of hearts, I know that Cruella De Vil is my favorite Disney villain. She is the one character to take full advantage of the scratchy style: from her hair to her toes, literally, she exploits every last savage pencil mark and straight line. Her grossly angular face; the skinny, bony shoulders that poke out every now and then; her reed thing arms and legs - all of these are things that would have never been imagined before the xerography era, and yet are perfect for this character, especially as contrasted with her omnipresent giant fur coat. Near the end, when she becomes truly insane with rage against the dogs who have been plaguing her, she turns into a monstrous caricature of femininity - and it must absolutely be conceded that she is one of the most misogynistic villains in the canon - that is both terrifying and hilarious.

Nor is all the genius in her design: she moves as much as any character in any Disney film, flailing about and storming back and forth in a hectic flurry of activity. And not once does she move with anything less than flawlessly-executed animation. She was the last animation created by Marc Davis, who left to help design such timeless Disneyland rides as Pirates of the Caribbean and The Haunted Mansion; and a better swan song he could not possibly have asked for then this amazing, amazing beast of a woman, the epitome of all the thing he knew about the art of animation.

Cruella so dominates the film, both visually and narratively, despite being in it for only a relatively small number of scenes, it can be hard to pay attention to the rest of the animation, which is a shame indeed. Given the technical changes happening around this time, the extremely fine work done across the board should not be taken for granted. It's no Lady and the Tramp in this regard, but the animation of the dogs is always quite appealing and natural, especially in the case the two parent dalmatians. There are many tiny gestures that fall somewhere between dog and human that work quite well in the cartoon universe of this film; the animals' personalities come out so clearly through their animation - Pongo's reactions during the birth scene are a particularly well-executed example.

I think it's also perhaps the case that the animation isn't so immediately obvious because for the first time in a long time, it wasn't supposed to be. This was the most light-hearted and fun Disney movie in more than a decade, not least in its unpolished, sketchy look; a look that practically scream, "look, this is just a funny cartoon. It's no art installation, or anything". Of course that's deceptive - the Disney animators were dedicated craftsmen who would never give anything but their finest work, and One Hundred and One Dalmatians is certainly noteworthy for the significant contrast between its simple lines and the complexity and perfection of its character animation.

But it achieves that without trying to show off, and when all is said and done it really is one of the most entirely fun, entertaining of all Disney features. 1961 audiences would apparently concur: it was a pretty decent-sized hit, proving to the company that this stripped-down aesthetic would still bring in a crowd, and so they could spend some time refining it. The immediate effect was a movie that had cleaner, more ambitious animation, but a bit less of everything else: this was one case where lightning didn't strike twice, and none of the "light and funny" features of the next decade and change had one tenth the wit and charm - and, I daresay, the humanity - of One Hundred and One Dalmatians.