Musica maestro

These "potpourri" musicals Disney made in the late 40's are usually variable, but this feature's my favorite among that whole batch. The Disney guys are always at their best in animation emphasizing characterization, and those musical sketches stressing this are the ones that work best. But one of the centerpieces here always struck me as Disney at his all-time worst: his attempts to duplicate the artistic success of "Fantasia" with a jumbled treatment of "Peter and the Wolf." I have yet to see a successful visualization of this piece....better to hear it on records, since this is largely a "theater-of-the-mind" piece, geared to help youngsters learn about some of the instruments of the orchestra. The Disney guys turn it into pure sap. But "Casey at the Bat," "Johnny Fedora & Alice Bluebonnet," "The Martins & the Coys," and especially "All the Cats Join In" and "Willie the Singing Whale" more than make up for what surrounds them.

Make Mine Music finds Walt Disney in the midst of the transitional period between his first five animated features (Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Pinocchio, Fantasia, Dumbo, Bambi) and the post-war revival begun with Cinderella (1950).

The idea of a casual variant of Fantasia featuring popular music was a good one. Even though the segments which comprise the film vary in quality, the film as a whole is a bright, colorful and amusing light entertainment which fit wartime needs ideally.

Highlights include two spirited Benny Goodman swing numbers ("All The Cats Join In" and "After You've Gone") and the unforgettable finale, "Willie the Operatic Whale", narrated and sung by Nelson Eddy. The animation is generally first-rate and the Technicolor film will dazzle any viewer not expecting a genuine masterwork.

Make Mine Music was successful enough to warrant a considerably better follow-up, Melody Time (1948).

The undistinguished but harmless "Martins and the Coys" segment, concerning the gun-feuding backwoods families of American folklore, has idiotically been removed from current editions, evidently for PC reasons. It's scary that Disney may start altering their classics to meet artificial modern standards. (If they had cut anything from Make Mine Music, it should have been the tasteless "Two Silhouettes" ballet, all doilies and valentines and icky fake sentiment.)

Chocolate-box potpourri of Disney-animated shorts became Walt Disney's eighth animated theatrical feature, one that plays like a middling excuse to allow the studio's animators to blow off some creative steam. Divvied up into separate musical suites (utilizing pop, jazz, Big Band, and the Russian classical piece "Peter and the Wolf"), "Make Mine Music" is musically of its time, featuring the talents of Benny Goodman, Dinah Shore, Nelson Eddy, etc. In that regard, it dates far worse than "Fantasia", and comes to a virtual halt in the middle of an overstretched slapstick baseball satire, but there are incidental pleasures. The popular "Peter and the Wolf" segment, which was later serialized on Disney's TV program and found a large following, is the only segment that feels fully thought-out (and has involving animation), while "The Whale Who Wanted To Sing At The Met" is an interesting idea (with beautiful flourishes) in search of a narrative (the hero actually ends up in Heaven...complete with angel's wings!). Followed by "Melody Time", which featured more storytelling and less abstract whimsy. ** from ****

Make Mine Music:

What a great collection of stories! I watched it fairly recently with my Dad and some other family at his house in Pinon Hills. I still cry at the "Johnny Fedora" and "Willie The Whale" stories. I grew up watching these and so many Disney cartoons and movies on our old 16 millimeter projector. We still have it, but it needs a bulb. My nephew Kurt brought this cartoon up on DVD. It was great to see my Dad's "name up in lights," so to speak, at least for animation credits. He loved seeing it again, altho' his eyes aren't so good now at age 92. But he is still hanging in there.

Unable to initially return to making true animated features like "Pinocchio" and "Bambi" after the Second World War, Disney turned to making "package features". Like "Fantasia", these films strung together various shorts and featurettes into a feature-length anthology. Between their release in the 1940s and the DVD age, these films were rarely, if ever, shown in their entirety. Instead, the individual segments were re-released as stand-alone pieces, some of which became quite popular. It's understandable why this was done. Whereas the individual elements of "Fantasia" have a similar enough artistic vision to be kept intact as a single experience, the package features do seem like a line of random, individual shorts that have been strung together. As such, the films can seem quite uneven and somewhat unsatisfying collectively.

In particular, "Make Mine Music" stands out as being one of the most inconsistent package features. It consists of ten shorts, all relying heavily on music. Some of the shorts are fairly conventional, story-driven, while others are quite experimental. The real stand-out pieces are "Peter and the Wolf" (initially considered for a sequel/continuation of "Fantasia") and "The Whale Who Wanted to Sing at the Met". The stories are engaging, and they are absolutely charming, although "Peter and the Wolf" relies a bit too much on narration. It comes as no surprise that these two shorts became the film's most famous segments. Special mention should also be given to "Blue Bayou", which uses footage from a deleted segment of "Fantasia" that was to be set to Debussy's "Clair de Lune" (here, though, it's set to a love ballad).

Other segments, however, vary. "The Martins and the Coys", which was rather stupidly removed from the American DVD, is not bad but hardly memorable. "After You've Gone", an interlude featuring anthropomorphised musical instruments, means well but falls quite flat, ultimately appearing as not much more than filler. "All the Cats Join In" and "Without You" equally seem like experimental filler, yet both are more successful. "Casey at the Bat", on the other hand, contains too many self-indulgent gags and overly caricatured animation to be of any real artistic or entertainment merit, a fact not helped by Jerry Colona's obnoxious narration. The two other segments, "Johnny Fedora and Alice Bluebonnet" and "Two Silhouettes", are so cutesy that they become nothing but pieces of unadulterated kitsch.

Ultimately, the only people I would recommend "Make Mine Music" to would be the people who would only be interested in it - Disney fans and animation buffs. To everyone else, as with a good number of package films, it would probably be best seeing individual segments, which is how these films work best.