I grew up watching Winnie the Pooh cartoons every Saturday morning as a kid. I remember loving the characters and adventures they embarked on. Watching this original animated collaboration was quite an interesting experience to say the least. Of all the Disney animated films I have watched on this journey from Snow White to present day, The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh elicited the most jarring reaction in me from an adult’s perspective yet.
This film is actually three pre-existing Disney shorts: Winnie the Pooh and the Honey Tree, Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day, and Winnie the Pooh and Tigger Too. The shorts are laced together with new segue sequences. Each segment features Winnie the Pooh and his friends on a new journey with lessons to be learned.
Each of the three animated shorts is enjoyable in their own right. The animation is consistent throughout, so it’s not like you can tell that Tigger Too is almost a decade newer than Honey Tree. Kudos to Disney for that. I also find the storybook animation and what they do with it adorable. Like Disney films of old, Pooh opens with live action scenery, including the opening of a storybook. Instead of transferring into just an animated world, we journey across pages with Pooh and his friends. There is interaction with the writing on the pages and hopping between page illustrations. It’s clever and works perfectly for the story material.
Another bold move is the breaking of the fourth wall. The narrator interacts with Pooh and friends and the characters also make their own sly quips directly to the audience. Children and adults will enjoy this because it’s rarely done in animated films. More importantly, it’s done right. Breaking the fourth wall can completely take someone out of the film, so it’s a dangerous move. It works here because the characters are innocent and likeable.
One thing that I was taken aback by is how irritating and rude Winnie the Pooh is. He’s referred to as being a little on the slow side but since when is that an excuse for being a shameless mooch? He gets hungry and discovers he’s eaten all of his own food so he invites himself inside his friends’ houses to eat theirs without allowing them any time to object. Maybe I’m making a mountain out of a molehill but it seems that the one crucial lesson going unlearned here is that Pooh needs to be more considerate of others.
In the end, Winnie the Pooh and his friends prove to be too likeable to get hung up over character flaws. Was Disney being just a wee bit lazy by throwing three preexisting shorts together? Yes and it comes back to bite them in the end, if only slightly. The slow and delicate pacing works great when you take each short individually but it drags a bit when showing them back-to-back-to-back. Even though it clocks in at only 74 minutes long, The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh feels one adventure too long.
Despite premiering two years after his death, this was the final animated film that Walt Disney had direct involvement with. His presence is felt quite heavily, leaving this film a combination of Walt Disney’s last stand for his artistic vision and his last will and testament to the art form that he helped create.
Using Rudyard Kipling’s story collection of the same name as a launching point, The Jungle Book focuses on a young human named Mowgli. Lost in the jungles of India as a baby, Mowgli is raised by wolves. When his adoptive family learns that the human-hating tiger Shere Khan has come back into the region, they decide that Mowgli must be taken to the nearby human village for his own safety.
A very wise panther named Bagheera is tasked with getting the boy to safety. Mowgli does not understand why he can no longer stay in the jungle with all of his friends and rebels. This leads to a string of encounters with a number of colorful characters: Baloo the bear, “Colonel” Hathi and his elephant herd, “King” Louie and his ape friends, the treacherous python Kaa, and even Shere Khan himself.
If you’ve been following my recent reviews, you know all about my complaints against Disney’s switch to the Xerox technique to streamline the animation process. I’d like to think that Disney himself wasn’t impressed with the end result either and called for something different to be done with this film. Perhaps this is why the Xerox use is kept to a minimum, allowing The Jungle Book to use all of Disney’s techniques to maximum effectiveness.
An overwhelming amount of this film is animated in the old Disney way- artists make their animation sketches and then re-drawers trace over the best lines to produce a crisp and consistent product. The Xerox technique does rear its head occasionally but its sparse use only comes about in scenes where the technique actually helps the film look good. Specifically, scenes involving Colonel Hathi and the elephants make good use of the Xerox technique. Elephants are wrinkly creatures to begin with, so guide lines merely look like wrinkles. During scenes with lots of cuts and lots of quick motion, the Xerox technique works great. When a scene calls for a static shot or slow fluidity, the traditional process is used.
Another issue I had with the last two Disney films is the use of loosely defined blobs of colors instead of a wide swath of detail. The Disney team manages to hit the best of both worlds at all the right moments. In the depth of the jungle, it makes sense for line and form to blend together with the myriad of colors. Lots of greens, yellows and tans run together and actually help give the jungle its vague sense of depth and thickness.
The story in this Disney version has been criticized for being little more than vignettes but I disagree. Each story segment teaches the reluctant Mowgli a lesson or two about why it’s dangerous for him in the jungle. Try as he might to fit in, he finds that he just doesn’t belong there after all. There is maturity and character development involved here for both Mowgli and his animal friends, and each segment moves him one step closer to joining the other humans in the nearby village.
I would be remiss if I were to ignore one of this film’s biggest highlights- the songs! As with the best of Disney’s hits, The Jungle Book features a terrific score and plenty of toe-tapping tunes. I’m not talking one or two good songs. There are at least four songs that will stick with you. Half of that is due to the magic in the music itself and the other half is in the presentation. The Jungle Book also features one of Disney’s best casts of characters in the studio’s history.
My only reservation with this film is the fact that I watched the 40th anniversary DVD edition. The colors were remarkable for a 40+ year old film. This leads me to wonder if a little touch-up work took place. Baloo the bear looks remarkably light grey but he is more a dark grey in older promotional posters. This potential tinkering with the product doesn’t take anything away from the film’s merits though.
Looking ahead in the chronology of Disney animated films, it seems clear to me that this is the last truly great Disney film for quite some time. Everything comes together in all the right ways. Lots of color, great songs, loveable characters- it’s everything you want in a Disney film. The story may not be as heartwarming as the masterpiece fairy tales but The Jungle Book was the right film at the right time. With Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs as its counterpart, this film stands as a splendid bookend to Walt Disney’s career and his genius imagination.
This is a tough film to place. I have never studied, nor even read, Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland or Through the Looking Glass. I don’t know if that leaves me at a disadvantage when approaching this film from a critical perspective. Literary types go gaga over the source stories and artsy-fartsy types (not to mention recreational drug enthusiasts) adore the trippy animation employed by Disney’s team. Seeing as I don’t really fall into any of the above categories, it should come as little surprise that this film fails to get much of a reaction from me.
The young and lovely Alice grows tired of living within the strict rules of reality. Dreaming of a world unlike her own, she spies a White Rabbit hurrying along and talking to himself. Following the curious creature, Alice falls down his rabbit hole and into a world full of nonsense. Along her pursuit of the White Rabbit she meets various unique characters that have become timeless: the Mad Hatter, Tweedledee and Tweedledum, and the grinning Cheshire Cat, just to name a few.
Not many of the characters Alice meets along the way are helpful but her quest isn’t much to get excited about. Through most of the tale she is merely trying to catch up to the White Rabbit and find out where he is running to. She does a good job of staying on task, despite being bombarded by gibberish and nonsense at every turn. Once she gets to where the Rabbit is headed, her life is put in jeopardy by the headstrong Red Queen.
The story itself is interesting, despite going off on a tangent with the seemingly random vignette of ‘The Walrus and the Carpenter.’ Then again, there’s really not much to the story at all. Alice is trying to find the White Rabbit the whole time and eventually realizes what a mess a world of nonsense would be. I guess the point of the tale is for Alice to learn a simple lesson while encountering a world of bizarre people and creatures. In many ways, this is similar to a number of other children’s fantasy tales. Alice in Wonderland just happens to be wittier and smarter than most.
Disney keeps much of the manic wordplay that made Carroll’s stories popular with the literary crowd. It is fun to hear the double entendres and usage of dual-meaning words. It is also enjoyable to watch the weirdness play out. The Cheshire Cat is really the only animation marvel in the film though, as he fades in and out of existence with ease. Yes, there are plenty of creative settings but Alice features Disney’s plainest animation since Dumbo. That takes away from the visual impact that could have turned the film into a real mind-bender.
I understand why Disney played up the story for a family-friendly vibe but Alice in Wonderland misses the mark a hair for modern audiences. I don’t know how kids were back in the 50s but nowadays it’s mostly the under-10 crowd that goes to see Disney movies. Kids that young won’t get much of the wordplay and will be more likely to watch it on the surface as a goofy fantasy with funny characters. Parents may pop it in just to entertain the kids and not think much, but they’re apt to find their brains in overdrive processing the literary lunacy being cut loose.
The utter weirdness of Disney’s Alice in Wonderland has made it memorable for generations. I remember seeing it and reading the Diseny read-along-on-tape book when I was a kid. Do I remember it for being awesome and fun like Cinderella? Nope. I remember it for being weird and being creeped out by the Cheshire Cat. Elements of the story remain in our cultural consciousness and I believe that this animated version has kept it there for the past 60 years much in the same way that Disney’s Cinderella has for that tale. Do many parents read Carroll’s stories to the kids anymore?
Maybe I just don’t belong to the niche audience that Alice in Wonderland was made for. It is entertaining to watch, albeit frustrating at times, but the conclusion lacks profundity. Alice learns that a world of nonsense is not a place worth living in. Any adult could have told her that but, like any stubborn child, Alice has to learn it for herself. Unlike most other Disney films, there are no central themes or morals to the story. Perhaps, given the source material, none are needed, and I’m just used to children’s stories having a lesson behind the colorful, musical fun.
Perhaps I’ll change my tune once I read the works of Lewis Carroll. Until then, I’m not surprised that this film isn’t remembered as part of the upper echelon of Disney classics.
I grew up watching Winnie the Pooh cartoons every Saturday morning as a kid. I remember loving the characters and adventures they embarked on. Watching this original animated collaboration was quite an interesting experience to say the least. Of all the Disney animated films I have watched on this journey from Snow White to present day, The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh elicited the most jarring reaction in me from an adult’s perspective yet.
Despite premiering two years after his death, this was the final animated film that Walt Disney had direct involvement with. His presence is felt quite heavily, leaving this film a combination of Walt Disney’s last stand for his artistic vision and his last will and testament to the art form that he helped create.
This is a tough film to place. I have never studied, nor even read, Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland or Through the Looking Glass. I don’t know if that leaves me at a disadvantage when approaching this film from a critical perspective. Literary types go gaga over the source stories and artsy-fartsy types (not to mention recreational drug enthusiasts) adore the trippy animation employed by Disney’s team. Seeing as I don’t really fall into any of the above categories, it should come as little surprise that this film fails to get much of a reaction from me.
