Top 15 Disney films I grew up with, #11

I forgot last week!!! And I haven't written the next one yet!! But here it is!

#11: The Sword in the Stone (1963)

Critically speaking, The Sword in the Stone, based on the 1938 T. H. White novel of the same name, ought to be way lower down on the list. But nostalgically and sentimentally speaking, it’s one of my favourites. I don’t even like the movie as a whole. Parts of it are flat out boring, and in lieu of other Disney movies from the 60s to the 80s, the production standard is far below that of Disney’s golden years. Also, obviously, I have the whole “this is historically inaccurate because Arthur wouldn’t know what tea is” pedantic angle on this film, but it’s based on mythological rather than historical events, so I can forgive it, as I forgive the likes of Robin Hood. Nothing in this film is actually very noteworthy at all apart from Merlin and Archimedes.

            The main character is of course King Arthur, at the time a twelve-year-old pageboy acting as your run-of-the-mill incredulous orphaned everyman protagonist who turns out to be the chosen one. Yes, yes, very original. Anyway, so he pretty much falls into the cottage of the wizard Merlin in the woods, and the wizard apparently wants to be his tutor, for no apparent reason. Oh, yeah, and there’s a sword in a stone, which is explained by Disney’s beloved picture book exposition at the beginning, before being completely ignored for the rest of the movie while Arthur … learns … things … before finding it by chance while visiting London at the very end. It ends on less upbeat note than you would expect, with Arthur just sitting on a throne in an empty palace, sheltering from the paparazzi and accepting the rather daunting burden of being a twelve-year-old king.

            And yet, I adore this movie. It’s more of a fun lesson about life that goes surprisingly deep with the philosophy than the action-packed save-the-day adventure we usually see in a work of fantasy. The best adjective I can give this movie is “adorable”, and I mean it in the least patronising way.

            Merlin is the kind of teacher I’ve always wished I had. Nay, the friend I’ve always wanted. He’s got a crazy, awkward, airheaded side to him that shows he’s really not much of a people person, but he’s got magic. And some of the most useful magic I’ve ever seen in a Disney movie. The packing scene – “pockety wockety wockety wack!” – is one of my favourites of any movie, ever. As is Merlin’s battle with a witch (one of the four or five villains) and his battle with the well at the beginning: “A Dark age indeed! No plumbing! No electricity! No nothing!” Merlin’s anachronistic references, his lapses of senility, his bursts of outrage and his tendency to turn himself and Arthur into animals in order to teach stuff, make him Disney’s best old man (and don’t say Rafiki is – he’s a monkey). The running gag of his long beard getting caught on things is enough to make anyone laugh. Merlin is perfectly complemented by Archimedes, his “highly educated owl”, with whom he seems to have spent far too much time to the point where all of their lines could be just as easily spoken by an old married couple.

            Though it might be one of the more flawed and less innovative of the Disney films, I love it. The giddy ingenuousness of the animation, the voice-acting and the music are infectious, yet interwoven with a didactic coming-of-age story about the real world and the intellect and courage required to get through it. The hours I spent watching and re-watching The Sword in the Stone were definitely some of the best hours.

(image source: http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m6xay4PRrl1rqejf5o1_500.jpg)

Top 15 Disney films I grew up with, #12

#12: Alice in Wonderland (1951)

We have now reached the territory of Disney films I still actually enjoy and do not shy away from re-watching. Even now that I’ve read Lewis Carroll’s original novel, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, I’m still pretty satisfied with the Disney version, which pretty much left in all the bits I considered essential, and added in some stuff from the sequel Through the Looking Glass, like Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee. Disney’s nonsensicalness and ignoring of logic is often a point of criticism for me, but Alice is meant to be set in a world of absurdity, and Disney recreates that world brilliantly with superb colours and animation that would have been top-notch for a 50s movie. They just don’t make them like this anymore! (hint to Tim Burton)

What works very well in this movie is Alice herself. She is a very pleasant person, but not so nice as to be unrealistic – at times she does loose her patience, being a very logical person in an illogical world. I think she’s the most developed pre-90s Disney heroine, though she’s not up against very stiff competition (Aurora in Sleeping Beauty, for instance, spends half the film either a baby or asleep, and she has zero lines after waking up). The story is … well, there’s not much of a story, per se. It’s just Alice, after a nice little expository song as she wanders around with her kitten Dinah, falling down a rabbit hole and ending up in Wonderland. Here she tries to find a way home and is increasingly frustrated in the process, before accepting that the world is not actually real and waking up from the dream. I guess she must have dreamt the whole impromptu song with her cat as well, because she ends up in the very tree she began in, with her sister (it’s her sister in the book, at least) reading a boring history lesson.

It’s a simple enough narrative, driven completely by Alice’s resolute character and the crazy world around her. The best kind of story, in my opinion. I have little else to say. The Caucus Race. Great. The Walrus and the Carpenter. Great. The Mad Tea Party. Great. The Queen of Hearts. Great! Great! Great! But what really made this movie for me was Alice, beautifully voiced by Kathryn Beaumont, after whom the superb character design was modelled. Beaumont also voiced Wendy in Peter Pan, which came out the following year. This movie is actually pretty comparable to Peter Pan in that it’s based on a classic novel and is about the wonder of childhood imagination, but also the sad reality of having to let go of that imagination in order to grow up. It’s almost the same as Peter Pan, really, just with less action, less characters and more psychedelic artwork.

(image source: http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_qskaSRkns8A/S4zTcJDLDWI/AAAAAAAAMGg/iZuCpRjTZPk/s400/alice-disney-tea-party+(7).jpg)

Top 15 Disney films I grew up with, #13

#13: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937)

Now we come to a film much more deserving of a place in the top fifteen. If it were judged by modern standards, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (yeah, the spelling of "Dwarves" kind of irks me too) would be considered a terrible film. But it was the first feature-length animation that Disney ever made, way back in the 30s when Hitler was just getting started. It’s definitely a ground-breaking film, historically speaking, considering colour had only just become a thing, though the Depression somewhat crippled its initial success.

 Do I even need to explain the story? For the sake of not making this review longer than it should be, I’ll assume everyone knows it. Snow White established the Disney fairy tale genre with the mundane heroine, the mundane prince charming, the comedic side characters (in this case the dwarfs) and the purely malevolent villain. Disney’s more popular movies always have great villains and the evil queen, though some might say otherwise, is no exception. She is very well animated and has always given me the creeps, particularly when she transforms into a hag, though I don’t understand why she also has to go from being quiet and calculating to loud and cackling. She’s not the same character in a different body. She’s a different character.

But I shouldn’t point out every logical flaw in this movie. I did not forgive Pocahontas because it tried to give itself credibility with dates and names. Snow White is a fairy tale, so it doesn't have to make sense. It revels in the fairy tale’s emotional simplicity, and does a good job at balancing the cute and fluffy scenes that make me gag with the scary scenes that gave me nightmares.

As well as the queen, whose very name inspires fear in the other characters, I enjoy all of the dwarfs with their vivid comical personalities, especially Grumpy, who seems to keep the movie grounded with his cynical attitude, and Dopy, whose antics are particularly favourable among younger audiences. Doc, however, is so nice that he’s annoying. Kind of like Snow White.

Snow White is definitely the weirdest-looking of the Disney princesses. She looks like a baby’s head on a pre-pubescent girl’s body on the legs of a grown woman, and she acts like no female of any species in any time period. Watching this as a teenager, I find her simpleness and pure goodness gets downright irritating. And it’s hard not to notice that her relationship with the dwarfs is a little bit messed up. Trust the 1930s to give us a movie in which a bunch of men need a woman to cook and clean for them while they go out working. She is a product of her times, which I guess could function as an excuse for her ditziness. Snow White, like Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty, the other early Disney princesses, unlike the more in-touch princesses of the 90s, accepts her role in a man’s world, wishing and dreaming for the shockingly undeveloped prince to resurrect her preserved corpse with a kiss and ride away with her. Apparently Walt Disney wanted to give the prince a song or something, or a subplot where the villain tries to stop him from saving the princess. He did, however, manage to pull off this very thing Sleeping Beauty, which consequently has a more satisfying and relatable prince.

While slow at times, with perhaps too many working and cleaning songs, Snow White is overall a good film to watch as a young child, as long as Snow White’s behaviour does not have an impact on little girls and rewind decades of hard-won women’s rights. I enjoyed it as a kid for the simple tale it was, as my parents and my grandparents before me did, and as many generations after surely will.

(image source: http://ilarge.listal.com/image/950773/968full-snow-white-and-the-seven-dwarfs-screenshot.jpg)