Apparently
Disney wanted to make new installments of Fantasia
every few years or so, however the financial failure of the film put a stop to
those plans. In a way, Make Mine Music
is an attempt to compensate for that. In as much as replacing classical music
with modern songs and having some segments be only half musical is compensation.
Sadly of the two, this was the one that deserved to be a failure.
To
be fair, Make Mine Music had a great
set-up. Where in Fantasia, animation
was being conducted around classical music, here various popular singers and
musicians come together with the animators to make up a series of diverse
segments. This film actually consists of ten segments, but few of them have had
much lasting power with the exception of the longest, “Peter and the Wolf”. The
visual quality as expected for a package film is significantly less than the
earlier work of wonder, but that shouldn’t stand in the way if the music and
tone works. In a few segments it does, but in most they either don’t connect or
feel cheap for a Disney film. They vary from being dull, clumsy, and dumb, in
spite of a few good moments.
And
I’ll address those first. There is a lot of talent involved in this film. Benny
Goodman the jazz legend sings a couple sequences. Andy Russell, Dinah Shore,
and Nelson Eddy lend their skills as well, and Sterling Holloway and Jerry
Colonna are also involved as narrators. However few except Goodman come off
very well. His segments are actually fairly good. “All the Cats Join In” is
upbeat and energetic being drawn before our eyes, and the characters’. A jazzy
theme set to images being drawn as the story progresses, it follows a teenage
girl getting made up to go out with a local boy picking up friends along the
way. It is really dated, clearly a
cartoon of its time, which here is actually a good thing. It’s the first time
in the Disney films anyway, we’ve actually seen the modern world, complete with
all the trappings of the 1940s. It’s something out of an old Archie comic complete with malt shops,
nickelodeons, sundaes, and the novelty of teen culture. The animation is
actually pretty nice to watch but I feel it would have just been better as a
standalone short. “Blue Bayou” is great, a segment unsurprisingly cut from Fantasia being in a deeper more emotive
tone and with a production quality that’s much higher. The only thing keeping
it from that collective is the use of lyrics. All it is, is a pair of egrets in
a moonlit bayou flying about in a ballet of nature. The peaceful rhythm of the
song Clair de Lune and even the
singers make it a very nice piece. “Without You”, Andy Russell’s showcase is
also very nice, but just doesn’t take advantage of the animation which is kind
of generic and uninteresting.
Sadly,
generic and uninteresting is the BEST the other segments are. Whether they be
unpleasant like “The Martins and the Coys”, annoying like “Casey at the Bat”,
or worse, they’re a drudgery to get through. “The Martins and the Coys” is a
take on the famous Hatfields and McCoys, only adding a Romeo & Juliet story
that eventually becomes uncomfortable when it makes domestic violence the
short’s final joke. Cause that’s the kind of stuff you think of when you think
Disney, spouses beating each other! It’s daunting, especially given the fair
levity the short had used up to that point. By levity, I mean gangs of bearded
men blowing themselves to oblivion in comical ways of course. I guess it’s
supposed to be funny because it’s showing the family feud still raging on and
the woman delivers the only on-screen punch, but it still feels really off for
a Disney movie. “Casey at the Bat” features a lot of exaggerated and
over-the-top animation adding to the ridiculous lyrics of the Ernest Thayer
poem, but it gets repetitive and actually quite irritating. It’s a morality lesson
about cockiness which is good, but I think that lesson could have been conveyed
through less obnoxious animation and pace. Leave that kind of cartoonishness to
Warner Brothers. The final two segments are really something else though.
“Johnny Fedora and Alice Bluebonnet”, how do I put it? It’s stupid! Incredibly
stupid! I admire that they’re thinking outside the box, but really? A love
story about anthropomorphic hats?? Not only does it look so weird, but it’s
also a boring plot. It ought to be laughably bad but unfortunately it’s not
even that. No, no that’s reserved for the final segment. “The Whale Who Wanted
to Sing at the Met” just from the title sounds hilarious, and the short does
get pretty funny. It attempts to be a tragic tale of a whale called Willie
(insert your Free Willy joke here)
who can sing opera fantastically well, and an impresario trying to kill him,
believing him to have swallowed three genius opera singers, rather than simply
having three uvulae and thus being a “singing miracle”. Whether it be from the
visual of this whale singing opera, his uvulae, or the various performances he
gives at the Met, this short is so goofy and so funny in how it tries to take
itself seriously, that I’d actually recommend seeking it out. It’s also really funny
in how it makes light of a kind of tragic finale and how much Nelson Eddy gives
his all to the performance. Though not quite as much as Sterling Holloway.
The
best known and longest segment of Make
Mine Music is “Peter and the Wolf” based on the Russian children’s story,
and narrated by Holloway. I actually remember seeing it on its own as a short
when I was really little and didn’t retain much apart from a few scenes. It’s
got both good and bad elements to it. I do like how the exaggeration of the wolfs’
features actually work to the shorts’ advantage, making it seem more menacing,
as well as a couple moments that seem dark. But those moments don’t turn out to
be so dark when the short cops out in the end in a really poor deus ex machina
that’s grating! Holloway narrates with the same exuberance as the “Pedro”
sequence in Saludos Amigos, and “The
Flying Gauchito” in The Three Caballeros,
but it’s a little awkward that he’s saying all the character dialogue in
addition to the exposition and it distracts a little from the visuals. And
there are way too many sidekicks! It felt like a parody of Disney side
characters, how many showed up. But I guess they were necessary seeing how
bland Peter was (and how dumb, going out to hunt a wolf with a clearly fake gun!).
None of them had much character or interesting design (except for Sonia the
duck who looked a little like a Walt Kelly cartoon –though Kelly had left the
studio by this point). Like the children’s story it’s based on, it has a good
moral and is well-intentioned, it’s gentle and harmless, but that’s not quite
enough to make up for its lack of entertainment value.
And
that can be said for all of Make Mine
Music, it’s well-intentioned, but not actually good. There are some
sequences that are; a couple namely “Two Silhouettes” and “After You’ve Gone”
which are just okay, but they’re few and far between. I’d recommend seeking a
couple of shorts out (“Blue Bayou”, “All the Cats Join In”, and for chuckles
“The Whale Who Wanted to Sing at the Met”), but the movie on a whole can be
skipped. It doesn’t age well; in fact more than a few sequences have moments of
sexism (not only the ending to “The Martins and the Coys”, but “Casey at the
Bat” among other poor female stereotypes includes the statement that women can’t
play baseball, and even “All the Cats Join In” suffers from an instant that
most would interpret as body shaming). It’s really the first Disney move I’d
call a failure. Some good came out of it, but on a whole Make Mine Music isn’t going to be anyone’s jam anytime soon.
Next Week: Fun and Fancy Free (1947)
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