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Make Mine Music
Oct. 27th, 2019 09:07 amBack on the horse with the Disney rewatch! Make Mine Music is another one of those compilation films, just a series of short films strung together. (Maybe someone ought to remind the Pixar division that this is a style of film that exists.)
Inevitably, any compilation film will be uneven, but on the whole I felt this movie was stronger than Saludos Amigos or The Three Caballeros. I particularly enjoyed the finale, “The Whale Who Wanted to Sing at the Met,” a tragic short about a whale with a beautiful operatic singing voice who dreams of singing at the Met - cue delightful fantasy sequence of the whale on stage in various costumes - only for his dreams to die stillborn when he is harpooned by a mistaken opera impresario who believes the whale has swallowed an opera singer.
On the other hand, Make Mine Music also included “Casey at the Bat,” which features Casey’s three silly female fans (the spiritual ancestors of Gaston’s three silly admirers in Beauty and the Beast), a tiresome and misogynistic trope, and one invented wholesale by the animators: it’s not present in the original poem. In general I feel that the short failed to capture the tone of the poem, the sly affectionate mockery of the athletic ode, and replaced it with something more baldly comic that’s much less winning.
I also wasn’t in love with “All the Cats Join In,” but it is interesting in being an early (1946) and exuberant vision of the emerging teen bobby sox culture. In the 50s and 60s, many portrayals of teenagers were less enthusiastic; I don’t know if Disney was different because it was Disney or because American culture in 1946 had not yet begun its decades-long meltdown about the dread horrors of teenagers.
Inevitably, any compilation film will be uneven, but on the whole I felt this movie was stronger than Saludos Amigos or The Three Caballeros. I particularly enjoyed the finale, “The Whale Who Wanted to Sing at the Met,” a tragic short about a whale with a beautiful operatic singing voice who dreams of singing at the Met - cue delightful fantasy sequence of the whale on stage in various costumes - only for his dreams to die stillborn when he is harpooned by a mistaken opera impresario who believes the whale has swallowed an opera singer.
On the other hand, Make Mine Music also included “Casey at the Bat,” which features Casey’s three silly female fans (the spiritual ancestors of Gaston’s three silly admirers in Beauty and the Beast), a tiresome and misogynistic trope, and one invented wholesale by the animators: it’s not present in the original poem. In general I feel that the short failed to capture the tone of the poem, the sly affectionate mockery of the athletic ode, and replaced it with something more baldly comic that’s much less winning.
I also wasn’t in love with “All the Cats Join In,” but it is interesting in being an early (1946) and exuberant vision of the emerging teen bobby sox culture. In the 50s and 60s, many portrayals of teenagers were less enthusiastic; I don’t know if Disney was different because it was Disney or because American culture in 1946 had not yet begun its decades-long meltdown about the dread horrors of teenagers.
