Reviews by JxSxPx

You know, there’s nothing explicitly wrong with this version of A Star is Born, it’s just missing that extra spark that makes a very good movie a great one. This first version, from 1937, tells the melodramatic love story involving a rising star and a fading one. Much like the subsequent remakes, the fading star plays both lover and Svengali to the bright, young talent. It does everything well enough, but is rightly considered the second-best variation on this story.

 

Esther Blodgett (Janet Gaynor) is a farm girl from North Dakota with dreams of movie-stardom and fame. After a pep-talk, along with a few words of warning, from her grandmother (May Robson), Esther is off to Hollywood, valiantly trying to make her dreams come true. The indifference and jaundice with which she is first greeted feels real and lived in, as does her eventual elation at being given a chance in a bit part. Her relationships with best friend Danny (Andy Devine) and alcoholic Norman Maine (Fredric March) are well handled, even if they feel a certain air of inevitability.

 

If the story beats and character interactions feel inevitable, a slow march to their tear-stained conclusions, the characters are completely unaware of the darkness on the horizon. In fact, from scene-to-scene the film can veer wildly in tone and mannerisms. One scene will find Gaynor working as a waitress and trying out a series of impersonations (her Garbo isn’t great, her Katharine Hepburn is spot on, and her Mae West is decent) is purely comedic, while her meeting with Norman is fraught with tension and complicated sexual attraction. These scenes happen back to back.

 

Gaynor and March deserve credit for the entire delirious experience holding together, but so does director William A. Wellman. Something of a journeyman director in the studio era, his camera work wasn’t remarkable, but in this film and a few of his Pre-Code jewels he manages a breakneck energy and sense of pacing that smooth out any tonal incongruities. He even finds a few moments of expressive lighting to juxtapose and highlight the conflicting emotional undercurrents involved in the central romance. 

 

Strange to think of Wellman and the word “delicate” being used, but A Star is Born has numerous moments of tremendous delicacy and power. None better than March’s shadow-covered realization that he’s not only burning down his life and career, but Esther’s by proxy. March is solid for the duration of the film, but his climatic work pushes the performance to a higher plane. Maine’s suicidal dip in the ocean at the end appears as the product of careful consideration and some twisted notion of love in March and Wellman’s hands.

 

But any spin on A Star is Born belongs to the leading actress. Gaynor is magnificent here, never appearing to be outwardly acting except when appropriate in the script. I’m fond of a throw-away sequence of her sitting in the studio cafeteria doing various vocal spins and character choices on her bit part. It’s not the big, fiery dramatics of her defiant, proud and aching “Hello everybody, this is Mrs. Norman Maine,” but it’s finely detailed and acute bit of character work. A great performance is made up of specific choices and details, and Gaynor’s full-throttle commit to looking silly in that scene is emblematic of her work throughout.

 

If A Star is Born pales in comparison to the Judy Garland masterpiece, well, it’s not its fault. It does so much of it right and with tremendous artistry, but no other version can truly hold its own against that titanic triumph. Yet this version does have a few problems, mainly the ending which doesn’t stop at the fade out of Esther’s declamation of love and devotion, but on a title card from the ending of the script. This undermines some of the drama and believability, effectively reminding the audience that the story we were just asked to invest in was purely speculative fiction. Or a scene in which the lovebirds go on their honeymoon and devolve into slapstick and sitcom-level circumstances. It detracts too much and adds too little to be of much worth.

 

Lastly, and this is not the film’s fault, it looks rough. A Star is Born fell into the public domain, and the wear-and-tear of the intervening years shows. The colors aren’t terribly vibrant, the print is littered with debris, and the sound is a little unsteady. Force yourself through these issues. The journey is well-worth the struggle. Just remember kids, you can dream about movie-stardom all you want, but everyone pays for it.  

If screwball comedy has a personification, it is in the beautiful and frantic visage of Carole Lombard. Immensely likable, Lombard shone best in roles that encouraged her to let-it-rip, to bring an erotic charge to her pratfalls and verbal rat-a-tat zingers. Nothing Sacred follows in this mode, and while it may not be a top-shelf masterpiece, it is a great, tremendously enjoyable second-shelf pleaser.

 

The story finds Lombard’s small-town girl incorrectly diagnosed with radium poisoning, taken in by a big-city reporter (Fredric March) as a way of gaining back his prestige job, and trapped by a swirling publicity machine. The script takes a moment to get going, one must endure some of the early too-cutesy small-town hick caricatures before hitting the good stuff. Once we’re off and running in New York City Nothing Sacred finds its madcap footing and never slows down.

 

A jaundice about journalism permeates the film, which should come as no surprise since it originated from Ben Hecht’s poison pen. Hecht’s probably best-known for writing The Front Page, which was remade as His Girl Friday, possibly his most beloved film adaptation. Much like those films, Nothing Sacred takes the piss out of reporters looking to make a name by exploiting a big story. The love story is a bit harder to believe since Lombard and March don’t generate much heat together.

 

If Nothing Sacred has a major flaw, it’s the lack of chemistry between the leads. Lombard feels at home, and her continual mental deterioration as the plot goes on is pleasurable to watch. As her guilt over pulling one over on March grows, she throws herself fully into cracked displays of anxiety and worry. A scene where she is drunk at a party in her honor, giddy and carefree while absorbing all of the attention, only to descend into tears is wonderful. March, by comparison, seems stiff and ill at ease. In dramatic parts he flourished, but he seems miscast here. Knowing that the role was originally written for that great blustery glazed ham John Barrymore only exacerbates the gulf between their approaches to the material. A reunion of the Twentieth Century co-stars would have been a dream to witness.

 

Lombard’s lone Technicolor film before her untimely death in 1942 at age 34, Nothing Sacred allows her daffy talents to shine brightly. No one looked quite as gorgeous as her while doubling over in hangover pains. Nothing Sacred is a sour comedy which lets Lombard be the creamy delight to balance out the palate. While not quite as remarkable an achievement as My Man Godfrey or To Be or Not to Be, Nothing Sacred is definitely essential viewing for fans of the actress, or people curious about where to start to get a feel for her gifts. 

It has a few moments of charm, but mainly it’s the beginning of the major problems the studio would encounter in the Bronze era. The Sword in the Stone, or Disney-does-King-Arthur, should have easily been a slam dunk, and maybe if the material had been tackled a decade prior it would have turned out better. As it exists, The Sword in the Stone suffers from too many cut corners, too many episodic moments that don’t add up to much, and a general feeling that it ends just as the story appears to be going somewhere.

 

Revisiting this was caused a bit of heartache. I loved this movie as a kid. I watched it so damn much I’m surprised that VHS tape survived. Watching it now, the only moments that captured my attention were mainly revolving around Merlin and his duel with Mad Madame Mim. Everything else left me as indifferent as the animation.

 

That’s the major problem with the film, a general sense of indifference and lack of care. Arthur’s voice, comprised of three different actors, changes from scene to scene, and more than once during the same scene. Characters frequently fly off model. The whole thing just looks sloppy, bordering on ugly.

 

Only Merlin retains his appeal. As envisioned here, Merlin is a wise sage, but prone to stuttering fits and flighty moments. His sidekick, a talking owl named Archimedes, provides numerous moments of peanut-gallery commentary and insight. His crotchety nature balances out Merlin’s more bubble-headed moments, or his cunning insights while training Arthur for his inevitable destiny. Merlin’s best musical number, “Higitus Figitus,” is little more than gibberish as he shrinks down the contents of his cottage to fit into his traveling bag.

 

After this moment of whimsy and ingenuity, The Sword in the Stone turns anemic as it drifts from one moral lesson to another. Merlin transforms Arthur into a variety of animals, uses these transformations to stick him into life-or-death situations in which he must learn valuable lessons that will aide him once he becomes king. These moments are cute and occasionally fun, if nothing more. They feel borrowed over from latter day Looney Tunes, especially a scrawny, hungry wolf that chases after Arthur during the first act.

 

After experiencing life as a fish and a squirrel, Arthur is turned into a bird and lands in the cottage of Mad Madame Mim. Once she appears, the film finally wakes up for an enchanting duel between the dark sorceress and the noble wizard. Mim’s mania and grotesque energy is much needed, and feels more authentically realized as a character from Arthurian legend than the forgettable band of knights and lords we’ve met up to this point. Much more of this was needed instead of the family-friendly banality on display.

 

It’s never truly terrible, it’s mostly just forgettable. Which is the bigger sin? The Arthurian legends are populated by an overabundance of colorful characters, and not enough of them are present here. This Arthur has no character. He’s just a scrawny kid who stumbles about, exhibiting little of the traits he will eventually come to possess. If for no other reason, watch it for Merlin, Archimedes, and Mim. The Sword in the Stone isn’t the worst film in the Disney canon, it’s….fine, I suppose. 

Trapped in a state of flux after Sleeping Beauty’s failure nearly bankrupted the studio’s animation division, Walt Disney needed a hit, and he needed one badly. He also needed to find a cheaper, easier way to make a fully animated feature. In times of desperation, sometimes great things can be created, and 101 Dalmatians found the Disney studio creating back-to-back masterpieces.

 

Unlike the preceding Sleeping Beauty which trafficked heavily in some of the studio’s beloved practices, 101 Dalmatians feels more modern, sleek, and jazzier. Loose-limbed and more energetic than many of the previous films that studio had made, Dalmatians finally found the studio creating a more “modern” film. Granted, the Xerox process frequently caused various stray lines to emerge causing characters to occasionally look off-model or laying bare the animators’ pain-staking artistry.

 

More often than not, this actually improves the quality of the film. These line drawings are more spontaneous, adventurous even than the normal look of a Disney offering, which veered towards hyper-polished and glossy images that looked like they never saw a human touch in their life. Uncle Walt hated the look of the film at first, but eventually warmed up to it before his death in 1966. History has proven him wrong, as Dalmatians has become a cherished institution in the studio’s oeuvre.

 

If Dalmatians continues to endure and endear, much of that credit goes to Cruella De Vil, one of the more grotesque and ostentatious of the villains. Many of Disney’s films are dominated by their villains, and the tones appear to match, as if the studio knew that people came to see good versus evil, but they wanted evil to be far more enthralling before its inevitable defeat. With her continuous smoky haze hovering around her, too large fur coat, shock of two-toned hair, exaggerated angularity, and absolutely ridiculous vocal and bodily mannerisms, Cruella is a daring original. Her grand scheme is batty, but grand diva proclamations and her tour-de-force performance snatches the film away from the sexless Roger and Anita, adorable ensemble of puppies, and their heroic parents.

 

Strange to praise the performance of an animated character, but cinema is littered with memorable performances from animals, stop-motion puppets, special effects creations, and the like. Drawn by Marc Davis, voiced by Betty Lou Gerson (a decade after warmly narrating Cinderella, no less), based on Tallulah Bankhead, and acted out by Mary Wickes for animation reference, Cruella is so iconic and memorable a character that even the AFI couldn’t ignore her charisma. She came in as the 39^th greatest villain on their list “100 Years…100 Heroes and Villains.” Her brand of evil isn’t the default state of being that Maleficent finds herself in, nor the product of ego and vanity of  Snow White’s Evil Queen, or the product of enjoyment and mirth as with Ursula, no, Cruella is bad in a banal way. She wants to harm puppies for the fashion, dah-ling!

 

Cruella’s harsh graphics and severe contortions lay the groundwork for the rest of the film. In prior years, the backgrounds of Disney films were lush and densely created watercolor wonderlands, beautiful vistas to enjoy even if the dramatics playing out in front of them is less than stellar. Here, large splashes of color fill the background and finely inked details are drawn on top to fill in the gaps. So a tree is made up a splash of brown, a giant blob of different greens, and inked detail work laid over it all. This visual style is more engaging and sloppy, more energetic than, say, Lady and the Tramp’s warm Americana hues and textures.

 

Funnily enough, as a child I preferred the bland-but-pretty Lady and the Tramp to this grittier, sloppier cousin. The older I’ve gotten, the more appreciation I have for a variation of elements in 101 Dalmatians - a lack of songs, a drag queen-esque villain, frantic and distinct opening credits, a slightly different tone and story structure. Shame that this didn’t exactly point the way towards a new direction for the studio. No, the post-classical period would find the studio animators flaying about trying to keep its battered ship from capsizing. This, to me, feels like the true end of the Silver Era. 

Personally, Sleeping Beauty is the greatest achievement in the Disney canon, as far as narrative features are concerned. Nothing has come close to matching the sheer visual audacity, invention, beauty, and scope of the film. It’s a densely populated film, and any still from the film could be framed and hung in a museum. It is a truly glorious spectacle to behold.

 

Uncle Walt’s reoccurring line to the animators was to top what they had accomplished with Snow White, and that feat is achieved on every conceivable level. Snow White’s satanic villainess is bettered here, as is the sweet and sleepy heroine. The backgrounds are overpopulated with visual details and intricate work. The amount of care and love in each part of the frame engulfs you as only truly great animation can. It’s transfixing in its ability to transport to its various imagined locations, and the fairy tale woods are as alive and enchanting as Maleficent’s twisted stone palace is foreboding and ominous.

 

None of its troubled birth or lackluster reception show onscreen. Spending the entirety of the 50s in some state of production – with the story ironed out in 1951, the voices recorded in 1952, and from 1953 to 1958 spent in the animation process – it finally arrived in 1959. But many of the greatest works have disastrous productions, or they’re under-appreciated in their time. Sleeping Beauty is no different. And if the Disney canon has a film that is widely beloved and considered great while still being undervalued, it is this one.

 

It’s hard to think of a film which has become as ubiquitous in the Disney merchandise machine as this to be undervalued, but for all of the garish pink products emblazoned with Princess Aurora’s face, few people talk about this film as being one of their perennial favorites. You’re more apt to hear titles like The Little Mermaid, The Lion King, Cinderella thrown around. While each of those films contains their own merits, and a few of them are even classics in their own right, Sleeping Beauty needs to be placed among the top five narrative animated features the studio has produced.

 

The high-praise for the film should begin with the true auterist, Eyvind Earle, the background designer and painter, who was given complete control over the settings and color palette. Earle’s influences are immediately obvious – Renaissance art, elaborate tapestries, illuminated manuscripts – in the ways in which the settings are so detailed that objects in the back of the frame are as finely rendered as those in the very front. The settings engulf the characters in their expressionistic splendor, with dreaming orbs and hazy shafts of light dancing around the good characters, while Maleficent’s castle is filled with swirling black and purple hell-fire.

 

The angularity of the characters is a lovely change from the more rounded, softer animation style that Disney had preferred. The animation here feels less embalmed and more alive with possibilities. Princess Aurora’s curls and geometric body shape calls to mind the gamine qualities of Audrey Hepburn in Roman Holiday. She even demonstrates some personality in the brief passage of the film that allows her to speak. Aurora, disguised as wood nymph peasant girl Briar Rose, communicates with animals, displays flashes of intelligence in knowing exactly what the three fairies are up to in sending her out, even some signs of independence in her initial reactions to the realization that her entire life has been a lie. Of course, the story demands that she soon become silent and passive, a slumbering object of desire of the plot machinations.

 

No matter, orbiting around Aurora are a series of fully alive and endearing characters. The three good fairies are a fun trio, and the true dominating force of the plot’s various twists and turns. Verna Felton, a reoccurring performer during this era, voices Flora, the sweet but slightly dotty leader of the group. Barbara Jo Allen voices Fauna, the kindest of the three who is prone to moments of bubble-headed naivety. Barbara Luddy voices Merryweather, and her voice suites the sarcastic and fiery Merryweather much better than the sweet-but-bland Lady. Their voices interact well with each other, and each of them is animated with an individual sense of character and lively spirit. The trio represent the change in fairy folk post-Christianity, in which they became more benign and helpful to mankind. They create moments of great comedy, continually prove themselves to be the real heroines of the film, and are lovable from the first moment to the last.

 

Appearing against them is the dark fairy, a figure of equal parts elegance and menace, and my still-standing favorite villainess in the Disney canon, Maleficent. If naming a character is half of the battle in their creation, Maleficent came out a winner. The very sound of it is sensual, elegant, and slightly doomed. Then she appears, in all of her pagan regality and bitchery, damning an infant for its parents perceived slight. Maleficent is a fairy folk of old, a creature demanding respect and subservience at all times, and free-handed in dolling out punishments for any wrong-doing against her. I frequently find myself rooting for her, completely enamored with her wrath, sense of style, and the brilliantly animated sequence in which she transforms from haute-couture fairy tale bitch goddess into a fiery demonic dragon, a creature intent on bringing about the apocalypse on this kingdom. Maleficent alone proves my theory that a Disney movie, much like a Bond film, is only as good as its villain, and she is, without a doubt, one of the all-time greats of cartoon villainy. This hasn’t even taken into consideration the vocal work of Eleanor Audley. Audley’s smoky delivery alternates between a wicked purr and harsh pronouncements and demands. The combination of audio and visual is perfection.

 

Individual moments in Sleeping Beauty have become justifiably famous, but the film is abundant in riches of character animation and smart choices. Everyone loves the scene of the two kings getting drunk, but King Stefan’s paternal worrying is touching. He doesn’t want to overwhelm his daughter with too much new information and changes at once, and is still anxious about her safety, and his character’s rigid body posture begins to loosen up you can track his inebriation. Or Maleficent staring at the celebratory bacchanal after fulfilling her curse on Aurora, a look of boredom overcoming her while she mindlessly pets her raven. This is a tiny bit of character detail that is easy to miss in-between the surreal blessing of the good fairies gifts and the green hell-fire finale of her dragon form. Another solid moment is the emerging cursed thorns sprouting from the ground. They begin by wrapping around the castle before eventually covering the frame and projecting towards the camera like they’re about to burst through and overtake the audience. It’s fantastic work.

 

I could keep praising the virtues of Sleeping Beauty, talking about the film frame-by-frame and lovingly looking at all of the tiniest of details. The craftsmanship on display has never been rivaled by any of the subsequent productions. In fact, the film was so monstrously expensive (for the time), that it’s under-performance threatened to sink the studio’s animation division. And if they had to close up shop, at least they could have ended on a note of tremendous power and grace. Here is a fairy tale given a luxurious treatment, and a studio operating at the zenith of its powers.

You know, when I was younger I liked this film a lot better than I did revisiting it after all of these years. Sure, I think it has several endearing and charming moments, but the central relationship is a little too bland for me. Lady and the Tramp really survives and endures because of its solid supporting players and handful of segments that have entered the pop culture lexicon.

There’s no real story to Lady and the Tramp, which is alternately refreshing and why is the film is ultimately unsatisfying. Yes, Lady and the Tramp fall in love, but that’s about all there is to the film. Other than that, it’s a heavily sentimental slice of Americana in which we view episodes of dog’s life throughout the year.

The romance between the two dogs feels more organic than the rushed princess fantasies, which is a good thing, but most of the memorable stuff happens outside of it. Whoever decided to bring in Peggy Lee was a genius. Her vocal delivery of pound puppy Peg is streetwise and sultry, her Darling the picture of wholesome, and her delivery on Si and Am is a questionable bit of cultural caricature. Lee’s best moment is as Peg during the musical number “He’s a Tramp.” It introduced Disney to the jazzier, more modern sensibility that would blossom in 101 Dalmatians a few years later. Another charmer is the whistling beaver in the zoo. Stan Freberg’s goofy, sweet vocal performance along with some humorous comedic bits makes for a memorable one-off character.

Although, if anything in this movie deserves infamy it is the first date between the title characters. Yes, it’s the famous scene where the dogs eat a large plate of spaghetti and accidentally kiss while being serenaded. The sweetness is overpowering, the cute is so forceful that it almost burns. It’s a quiet moment of true romantic connection between two characters.

Pity than that the overall film is somewhat unsatisfactory for some elusive reason. Could it be that the stakes are so low as to be non-existent? Or that many of the moments of dread or darkness are immediately undercut by a balmy reassurance that nothing bad has actually happened to them? It’s probably all of it. For all of the beautiful backgrounds, lovely animation, and adorable supporting players, Lady and the Tramp is just too dry for me to fully embrace any longer. For me, the best and most enduring of children’s entertainment was always the stuff that flirted with danger and didn’t always play nice. It’s a very good film that just can’t seem to shake off a sense of blandness.

One of Walt Disney’s great obsessions was to bring J.M. Barrie’s beloved play/book Peter Pan to animation. He secured the rights to the property in the 30s, intent on releasing the film during the studio’s Golden Era, various setbacks pushed the film into development hell, where it languished before finally arriving in 1951. Strangely enough, a similar thing happened with Alice in Wonderland.

Perhaps the cinema gods were smiling down upon the studio, in some strange way, as the delay eventually brought in Mary Blair’s wonderful perspective. Her contributions to Alice in Wonderland cannot be understated, but her vision of Never-Never Land is even greater. A trip with the Lost Boys through the various jungles of Never-Never Land reveals a series of nearly abstract impressions of various landscapes. In a few brief minutes, we travel with the Lost Boys through an overripe jungle, an African savanna, and into a densely populated North American forest.

Blair’s sense of juxtaposing colors bleeds into the film in a variety of ways. The tropics of Mermaid Lagoon, all bright pinks, oranges, lilacs, and the menace of Skull Island, grays and greens abound there, in such close proximity springs to mind. As does the nearly cotton candy colored skies of Never-Never Land. A battle with pirates or a leisurely stroll through the flora of Never-Never Land always shows a hint of menace lurking around the edges. But not too much menace, as is evident in all of the films in the Silver Era between Cinderella and Lady and the Tramp, Disney suddenly appears gun-shy about unleashing hallucinatory and nightmarish images. He still produces a few scares or unhinged pieces of animation, but not at the same scale that they were unleashed in prior films like Bambi or Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

If Peter Pan has one serious flaw as an adaptation of Barrie’s work, it’s that it often too much Disney and not enough Barrie. Granted, it’s a solid adaptation, but some of the darker impulses of the original text are removed to instead play-up slapstick. No film adaptation has found a way to treat the Native American characters in an un-problematic way, and Disney’s indulges too much in caricature. Tiger Lily’s a fierce warrior princess in the book, and is here reduced to helpless, nearly silent victim (her lone line, a stifled cry of “Help!” before a wave silences her) is bad enough, but the song-and-dance number in the tribe’s camp is even worse. It’s an ugly reminder of things that were once deemed perfectly fine, and a distracting segment in an otherwise charming movie.

While the film may shave down a few story elements to become more palatable and “family friendly,” Peter Pan and Tinkerbell remain cold, at times unlikable, and malicious characters. This is a good thing, as it only reinforces the notion that Peter Pan is not truly a hero worth emulating, but a colossal ego frozen in amber. Bobby Driscoll, at the time the first and only boy to play the role theatrically, does great work as Peter. He finds just the right touch between his arrogance, insouciance, pride, and charm to make the character continually engaging. Strange that Tinkerbell eventually became a placid bit of cheesecake for the studio, going so far as to soften her rough edges to the point of dilution. Ah well, her capacity for one emotion at a time, as stated in the text, is shown in a handful of ways. Her rages are more interesting to watch as she burns a hole in a leaf, or changes from flesh colored to blood red.

Where Peter Pan excels is when it indulges in the titanic clash of egos between Captain Hook and Peter. Captain Hook is a delicious villain here, possibly the most pleasing one until Maleficent’s grand bitchery in Sleeping Beauty. At times, he’s an eloquent gentleman, swearing to honor a series of codes and principles, but not opposed to bending them or engaging in prolonged word play to escape it. At other times, he’s a tyrannical monster, happily killing one of his own men for annoying and distracting him, prone to hysterical fits, and coldly calculated seductions. Hook is one of the greatest Disney villains in the canon, even if his encounters with the crocodile play a little hard on the slapstick. In a nice touch, the same actor, Hans Conried, voices Hook and Mr. Darling while the crocodile that chases after him is animated like a dog, owning to the stage tradition of the same actor playing both nana and the crocodile.

Oh, what glorious animation this film has! The various flying scenes, so hard to capture, are rendered here magnificently. Peter truly feels weightless, as he seems to be a constant whirl of motion hovering about the frame. The flight through England into Never-Never Land is an efficient bit of tone changing. While the England scenes were rooted in realistic depictions of actions and character movement, Never-Never Land’s approach sees the background becoming more abstract, and the animation more limber.

Stressing narrative propulsion and a mischievous sense of fun and adventure, Peter Pan is the first classic in the Silver Era. An imperfect one to be sure, but finally one that adheres a stronger narrative to the various unwieldy segments. A little more focus on the darkness hovering over the edges would have been nice, but I can’t complain too much. It’s a decent enough adaptation of the book, and I’ve loved it since childhood. It may be a little too scatterbrained, but it’s also refreshingly simple.

Prior to Tim Burton’s billion dollar grossing live action reimagining, films based on Alice in Wonderland failed to connect with audiences. It didn’t help that the release of this was met with sneers from literary critics, the British press accusing the film of pandering to more American sensibilities, and reaction from the major creators being indifferent about the completed project. Disney’s Alice in Wonderland isn’t that bad, but it’s not great.

As an introduction to the books, it works effectively enough. Many of the major players and sequences from the two Alice novels are present. If something has been lost in the translation, I think the words of Ward Kimball, one of the Nine Old Men, sum it up effectively: “It suffered from too many cooks – directors. Here was a case of five directors each trying to top the other guy…. It had a self-cancelling effect on the final product.”

It’s true, a lot of the sequences and characters are aimed not for individuality and specificity, but an obvious attempt to prove how rubbery, dexterous, and comedic they could push the animation. Tweedledee and Tweedeledum spring immediately to mind, as their really nothing more than bombast and a series of gags that don’t entirely land. A similar thing happens with the caucus race and the Dodo, who strangely feels too sheepish for the surrounding material.

Much like the books, Alice in Wonderland doesn’t contain much of a narrative, as it’s just a series of vignettes with increasingly strange and erratic denizens, flora and fauna. Alice’s character in the books was more precocious, prone to moments of great wit and challenging authority, and here she’s a bit of a plank. Disney’s version has become the de facto image of what Alice should look like, but her personality got lost in the translation. Where is the glee with which she discovers Wonderland? Or her childish change of emotions? She’s too placid here to resemble the character as described in the books, and this harms the film as the center of it has been deflated.

Yet there’s still much to appreciate about Alice in Wonderland. It’s certainly an improvement over the previous year’s Cinderella, and a few of the images within reminded me of the surreal, borderline frightening work of earlier films like Fantasia and Dumbo. And a handful of characters emerged from Lewis Carroll’s prose to Disney’s animation intact.

The Queen of Hearts bluster, bombastic nature, and aggressive narcissism are a huge jolt of energy in the last few minutes of the film. She doesn’t appear in much of the running time, but her comedic rages and tyranny pack a punch. The Mad Hatter, March Hare, and their corresponding tea party have long been my favorite moment. Here is a sequence in which the delirium and perverse oddity of the Carroll books is given full bloom. If more of the film had been like this, Alice in Wonderland may have been a masterpiece. The White Rabbit is appropriately squeezable and anxious, the talking flowers are charming in their bubble-headed passiveness, and their musical number contains the prettiest harmonies in the film. The best for me has long been the Cheshire Cat. He comes along with a gentle voice that is almost too purring and soft to be consoling, with a grin that is too wide to be normal, and a subtle hint of menace in his actions to make him the tiniest bit creepy. He’s also the most bug-nuts character in the entire thing.

Even better are the backgrounds. Mary Blair, a children’s book illustrator, came into the studio towards the end of Wartime Era, and brought with her a more modern and fresh approach to the films she worked on. Her backgrounds in Cinderella were splendid, but her talents came into fruition in this film and Peter Pan. Her angular, colorful Wonderland is a visual feast, and keeps your eyes engaged even when the film is losing you.

Granted, I am aware that my opinion as anything less than an unimpeachable classic in the Disney canon is not the norm. But I grew up reading Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, so my love for the wordplay and John Tenniel’s illustrations is deeply ingrained into my nature. No film has ever given me 100% satisfaction in its translation, but they are a lot of them that I enjoy. It’s a great introduction to the books, and it is a nice take on the material. Even if the jettisoning of the more obscure Wonderland residents in favor of Disney's newer creations does leave a sour taste in my mouth. Oh, what I would have given to watch the Jabberwocky, Mock Turtle, the chess pieces, the Duchess, and numerous other characters given life. Like many of the Silver Era Disney features, it's pleasing in episodic spurts, but a little disappointing as a whole.

As dear a place in my heart as Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, Goofy, and all of the rest hold, I’ve always found returning to their adventures to be something of a mixed bag. Lots of the shorts are filled with beautiful animation, but they’re a snore to get through. I have had much better luck in returning to surreal world of Fleischer’s Betty Boop or the anarchy of the Looney Tunes.

Snow-White may just be the weirdest, wildest, best of the Betty Boop shorts. From the first frame to the last, inanimate objects spring to life, Betty Boop’s giggly sweet sexuality is on display, Bimbo and Koko the Clown are on-hand to aide her, and everything is just gloriously strange. Granted, it holds little to no resemblance to the actual fairy tale. It merely uses it as a springboard and loose connective tissue for a series of musical numbers, sight gags, and inventive visuals.

Sure, the wicked queen’s design is a bit obvious, revealing her witchy nature before she transforms and being no one’s definition of fairest in the land, but this is a minor fault. Her use of the magic mirror to transform into a witch is a smart and economical bit of narrative propulsion. It’s also a great piece of animation. It’s followed immediately by the cartoon’s greatest segment, Koko the Clown singing “St. James Infirmary Blues.”

This sequence, which a level of surreal and deeply odd that’s impressive even for a cartoon that’s already trafficked in it heavily, is a masterpiece of Golden Age animation. Rotoscoped from Cab Calloway’s performance, who also gives voice to Koko, it sees him singing the song while descending into the coalmine, mourning over Boop frozen in a coffin of ice, and transformed into a strange creature by the witch/evil queen. After his transformation into some strange monstrous…thing, Koko begins to shape-shift regularly, and the animation begins to move even further away from reality, becoming rubbery and dream-like. If German Expressionists had made a cartoon sequence, I’m sure it would look something like this. What a wonderful bit of nonsense and Pre-Code smuggling of vice. Boop-Oop-A-Doop-Oop, indeed.

(Snow-White is in the public domain, and can be viewed in full [Link removed - login to see])

Poor Cinderella is a fine vehicle for beloved cartoon icon Betty Boop. By plucking our favorite Bronx flapper kewpie doll into the European fairy tale, the Fleischer’s found a way to breathe some life into the well-known story. While the Disney version remains the more widely watched version, Betty Boop’s does a few things much better.

Granted, Disney had Technicolor and an army of the best in the business, but Fleischer had ingenuity and the ability to play around with tone. The sequence here that introduces the fairy godmother does so in a much more ingenious and unique way. Whereas in Disney’s version she just magically materializes out of thin air, here a candle’s flame gains life, swirling around before transforming into the fairy godmother’s final form. It’s a limber and free bit of animation that is completely charming.

Cinderella’s transition from torn rags to haute couture is one of the crown jewels of Disney animation, and Betty Boop can’t compete, but she more than makes up for it in personality. Betty’s transition sees her torn clothes disappearing, indulging in her loopy, flamboyant sexuality as the garments reappear from the sexy lingerie outwards. Her giggles and squeals are endearing to me, crafting an actual persona to the normally thin-gruel role of the heroine. Not mention that this is a Cinderella with some oomph! Betty Boop’s outfit is fairly daring for a future princess, but one would expect nothing less from a creation such as her.

The grotesque way the mice and lizards change to horses and horsemen is a reminder that while Disney had the market cornered on state-of-the-art animation, his rivals produced work that has held up better by playing towards humor, crafting beloved characters, and indulging in drawings that didn’t rest on being pretty. Cinderella’s step-sisters are bratty and catty in Disney’s version, but they’re not the hulking grotesqueries of Betty Boop’s troubles, and the cartoon ends with them arguing until their faces turn blue and their voices hit a shrill tone that begins to resemble chirping. The prince seeing her at the ball and promptly getting beat over the head by a Cupid with a mallet is funny bit of cartoon violence. That gag feels like it wouldn’t be entirely out-of-place in one of the Looney Tunes parodies, to be honest.

(Poor Cinderella is in the public domain, and can be viewed online in full [Link removed - login to see])