And so we've come to this: After 18 theatrical animated features, a slew of live-action features, countless shorts, TV specials, and exactly one theme park later, we arrive at the last movie Walt Disney produced before he passed away in 1966 from lung cancer. The last work of famous artists is frequently a footnote to …
The run was never going to last. After more than a dozen years of near-unparalleled creativity starting with Cinderella in 1950 the well had to run dry at some point. Regrettably The Sword in the Stone, the last movie to be released in Walt Disney's lifetime, is the movie to break Disney's hot-streak. The movie's problems begin …
Continue reading Disney Silver Age #7: The Sword in the Stone
A dirty little secret in Disney movies is that while they have created many great heroes, both male and female, for kids to look up to and emulate it is almost always the villains who are the most interesting characters in whatever movie they end up in. Villains are the characters animators dream about getting …
As is often the case in the earlier half of Disney Studio's existence, the quest for artistic excellence without any consideration of cost often came back to bite them hard later. This happened early on where the artistically superb Pinocchio and Fantasia proved to be such financial flops as to ultimately cripple the studio for a good decade. History …
Continue reading Disney Silver Age #6: One Hundred And One Dalmatians
Sleeping Beauty came during a time of tumultuous change for the Walt Disney company. Walt himself was quickly being pulled away in multiple directions by the company's forays into live-action films, documentaries, the TV-division, and a little project called Disneyland. In addition the animation division itself was starting to get serious competition from new upstarts like …
Lady and the Tramp was a first for Disney for several reasons. After a series of fantastical stories it represented Disney's first domestic picture based not on a fairy tale but in a more realistic human setting (with Bambi of course being a realistic movie set in the wilderness). It was also Disney's first feature film not …
I was three-quarters of the way through watching the classic Ginger Rogers-Fred Astaire musical Swing Time and just about ready to declare it one of the best things I had ever seen. Up to that point it had been a breezy and sweet musical filled with splendiferous dance numbers and a touch of old-school Hollywood class. …
Within five minutes of Alice in Wonderland opening Alice has followed a frantic rabbit down a hole and fallen into a zany portal of sorts with floating household objects only to land in a room reminiscent of a set from The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari in which she encounters some biscuits that either shrink her to a mere fraction …
The fruitful Golden Age of Walt Disney Studios in the 1930s and 40s is a period of critical success unrivalled by most studios. In the space between 1937 and 1942 they released five powerhouses in a row in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Pinocchio, Fantasia, Dumbo, and Bambi. Each of those movies are iconic in their own right and instrumental …
First things first: One should not take one's daughter to this movie on a daddy-daughter date without mentally preparing oneself for Pixar's penchant to deliver devastating emotional gut punches. Otherwise that same hypothetical person should also be prepared to give an explanation for why her daddy is a blubbering mess. Speaking entirely hypothetically and not …
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