Disney Animated Canon 9-11

Incidentally, all numerical scores are a hybridization of my personal enjoyment and objective* criticism, with slightly more weight going to one or the other depending on how much I love or abhor the film in question. I generally try to keep it pretty even, though.

*As objective as I can manage, anyway.

Fun and Fancy Free - 7.5/10

I had assumed this was going to be another collection of shorts like Make Mine Music, so I was surprised to learn that it was only two shorts stuck together, one of which (Mickey and the Beanstalk) I had actually seen before on its own. The other one, Bongo, I had never seen, and was slightly less interesting, but all right. It's a shame they had to combine them into one film, because I think both of them would have done really well as stand-alone features, and the overuse of narration really brought both of them down. Ah, what could have been.

What I have to say I really didn't like about this film was the live-action framing device used primarily for the second short. It was annoying, overdone and at times kind of creepy.

The title didn't really have anything at all to do with either story, and its only purpose seemed to be being repeated over and over again in the theme song until you want to throw something.


 Melody Time -7.9/10

This one's about as close to Fantasia as you can get without actually being Fantasia. The shorts are all enjoyable and much more timeless and demographically friendly than those of Make Mine Music. Also, I got a pleasant surprise with the final segment - Pecos Bill - which was one of my favorites as a kid but I never knew what it was from. Like Mickey and the Beanstalk from Fun and Fancy Free, I always just saw it on its own and didn't know it was part of a larger feature. I had completely forgotten about it until this, so it was a nice wave of nostalgia.

I'm pretty sure I've seen the Johnny Appleseed one before too, and while the imagery was great, the story didn't hold up for me quite as well as Pecos Bill's did.


The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad - 7.0/10

The last of Disney's "compilation" features, and frankly I'm happy to see the tail end of them. Sure, there were a couple of gold nuggets in there, but on the whole I just want to watch a movie. This one was similar to Fun and Fancy Free in that it was just two short stories stuck together instead of a series of short segments. Unlike FFF though, there weren't any annoying framing devices. Once again the stories have Narrators, but Toad's was far less intrusive and that might have been why I liked that segment more. It also could have been because I found his character far less irritating and unlikable than Ichabod (who was a douche), though to be honest I wasn't overly fond of Toad's character either, even if his manic self-indulgence was supposed to be played for laughs.