Walt Disney’s Babes in Toyland seems only barely to be a Christmas movie, the holiday appearing in the third act as merely a plot device more than an organic feature of the story, which is itself rather choppily episodic. This is in keeping of course with its’ source, the nursery rhyme-themed operetta by Victor Herbert first performed in 1903 and not necessarily designed around the holiday. Credit to Disney though, the film does feel like it comes from that turn-of-the-century era in its’ whimsical presentation -something it shares with the movie that most likely inspired it, The Wizard of Oz. The Disney Company has long wanted the rights to Oz, the only movie of the Golden Hollywood era to replicate (and in some respects exceed) Disney in the realm of fairy tale-themed family musicals. But it was done in live-action, which has always been more impressive to Hollywood types; and I suspect that as its’ iconic status grew over the years, Disney became more determined to match it in the live-action medium. They would eventually do it, with Mary Poppins in 1963 -but before then Babes in Toyland seems to have been their clearest effort at a Disney Wizard of Oz. They even brought over the Scarecrow.
Babes in Toyland is set in a fairly loosely defined world of Mother Goose-style Nursery Rhymes. Mother Goose herself appears and in Disney fashion has a talking goose companion called Sylvester (a puppet, which is somehow both creepier and more endearing than if it were a Disney cartoon). The aforementioned Scarecrow, Ray Bolger is the most fun performer in the movie as its’ camp 60s-Batman-villain antagonist Barnaby, who conspires to marry Mary Contrary (Disney star Annette Funicello) for her great inheritance and get rid of her love interest Tom Piper (Tommy Sands -who looks like a discount Tony Curtis). Disney and director Jack Donohue wisely choose to focus on him more than the heroes of the story, seemingly understanding how much more entertaining he and his bumbling Penn & Teller henchmen are. Gonzorgo and Roderigo, played by Henry Calvin and Gene Sheldon, are clearly creative remnants of an earlier 1934 version starring Laurel and Hardy; but they perform the slapstick well and fit in as silly sidekicks.
Unfortunately, for a long stretch of the movie there isn’t much life in the story outside of their scenes. The producers know that Mary and Tom and the children who dote on them (which include Boy Blue, Bo Peep, and Jack and Jill) are boring -and so their sequences of story have to be filled with musical performances, either densely choreographed or assisted through special animation effects. I don’t begrudge these choices as lazy though -it’s the right call, even if the stage numbers aren’t particularly dynamic or interesting, certainly not when compared to Wizard of Oz or other musicals of that scale. I do quite like the “I Can’t Do the Sum” sequence though for its’ colourful special effects ballet. Disney perhaps learned here that their specialty for countering sweeping crowd dance numbers (a staple of the big musicals of the 60s) was with grandiose animation-assisted musical segments. We might not get “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” without “I Can’t Do the Sum”, much as the quality of the songs themselves are vastly different.
Indeed the only other musical pieces the film offers that are in any way memorable are the title song -that has had some small permeance in pop culture, “The Forest of No Return” which gets by only on the corny charm of the dancing tree suits, and the final orchestral “March of the Toys” -the most famous musical track from the operetta. And from a production standpoint they are all pretty light, even with the nifty stop-motion effects that are used in the last of these. In lieu of so much visual mediocrity within the frame in these musical sequences though is some lush and vibrant colouring that gives them a dose of life regardless. Maybe because of its’ child sensibility and young audience, the makers of this film cared about it being bright, about its’ colours popping -in a way some of their other live-action offerings of this period didn’t. With Mary’s bright yellow dress, Barnaby’s purple lair, the rainbows of Toyland when they eventually reach it, and the glowing Santa Claus red and white of the costumes in Mary and Tom’s last scene, it’s a pretty attractive movie -possibly Disney’s most radiant live-action project up to that point. The aesthetics are quite striking too, every home in this world looks like a doll’s house, with the exception of Barnaby’s angular haunted mansion -each of his props likewise in some way twisted. Every design seems deliberate in shape and dimension to accentuate the storybook nature of the movie -even the Forest of No Return, up to the somewhat bare and quietly imposing Toyland, though in itself abiding by the same principle of simplicity.
It’s in Toyland, where the protagonists and the kids are taken by the talking trees (here I am, talking about talking trees again) after an episode where the kids get lost in the woods looking for Bo Peep’s sheep, that they encounter the other noteworthy ex-vaudevillian of the film, Ed Wynn. He plays the Toymaker, one of the only living residents of the otherwise eerily empty Toyland -alongside his put-upon apprentice Grummio (Tommy Kirk). To the story’s mythos, the Toymaker seems to fulfil the role of Santa Claus -determined to make enough toys that can be delivered in time for Christmas, but of course lacking any of the Saint Nick aesthetic. And Wynn plays the Toymaker as a rather high-strung scatterbrain with a particularly nasty habit of ruining the inventions of a genuinely gifted Grummio by his madcap enthusiasm and then blaming the ensuing chaos on Grummio himself, punishing him with more work. This is what happens when he inadvertently destroys Grummio’s mass-producing super-computer thereby relying on the assistance of Mary, Tom, and the kids to finish the job. I suspect the charm of Wynn’s blithering caricature and goofy voice had a cushioning effect at the time -it does not anymore. He was a Disney mainstay during this period (most likely he’s best remembered as the voice of the Mad Hatter), which accounts for his appearance here, but if he’s meant to be a kind-hearted counterpart to the scheming Barnaby, it really doesn’t come across. His gags though distinctive, feel less in line with the movies’ spirit, and the fact the movie strangely carries no sympathy of an arc for Grummio in spite of his youth and talents, content to merely be the Toymaker’s whipping boy, underlines his masters’ arbitrary meanness.
Toyland on the whole is so small a part of the film, despite giving its’ name to the title -not showing up until more than an hour into this hour and forty-five minute feature. It’s a bit of a dully constructed place at that, with nowhere near the kind of imaginative whimsy a name like “Toyland” evokes, especially for a child. It’s hard to imagine Disney working on a budget, but it almost looks like that is the case here -and the seemingly living toys are thoroughly absent from all but the climax. I’m unfamiliar with the original, but I have to imagine there’s a little more to that ending sequence than simply some shenanigans involving a shrinking ray. The stakes are mostly muted or forgotten by this point, a casualty of the movie’s episodic structure.
Though more than episodic, Babes in Toyland is odd in that it completes a full narrative in the first half of the movie that has nothing to do with the eventual adventure in Toyland. The first plot that Barnaby hatches involves the kidnapping and drowning of Tom, only for Gonzorgo and Roderigo to instead decide to sell him into slavery to the Romani -or rather a very vaguely defined stereotype version of Romani identified by the “G” slur. Mary is informed of this, goes through mourning, and just as she is about to marry Barnaby out of necessity after an undisclosed period of time, a Romani troupe arrives to perform, and wouldn’t you know it -disguised as an old lady mystic singer is Tom! The happy couple are reunited and the dastardly villain is thwarted by the end of the first hour. It’s an elaborate narrative, with its’ own internal structure and satisfying if problematic pay-off. But unlike something like Into the Woods, which similarly subverts structure, nothing is built on or expanded out of this thread afterwards, as though both preeminent stories were individual tales. And the former, the weaker of the two, can’t help but feel like a waste -the filler episode of a cartoon show before getting to the thing people want to see.
I hear the 1980s made-for-TV remake dispenses with the episodic plots, or more organically intertwines them. That version is notable for its’ early Keanu Reeves appearance (alongside a pre-teen Drew Barrymore), but not much else. Disney’s film certainly isn’t memorable much either -it would shortly be eclipsed by a stronger era in the studio’s live-action output, but it remains curious. A strange, colourful product of calculation and envy, through which there are several pretty moments and a few fun camp performances. But I think I expected Babes in Toyland to be The Nutcracker, which Disney made a movie of far too late. What it is actually is a mere light entertainment, not good enough to dwell on, not bad enough to ever hate; one of those fluffy and inconsequential movies Disney used to pump out like clockwork before they hired other brands to do that instead. This one just happened to have a more respected title.
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