Disney Sundays: Make Mine Music (1946)

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)