51 Days of Disney (Day 31): Aladdin

The year is 1992 and a then 3-year-old Ryan is in the movies for the first time. He has his popcorn and his juice, so what is a 3-year-old to do? Not knowing how the movie theatre works, he asks his mom to start the movie. Aladdin was the first movie I ever saw in theatres, and  I am exceptionally pleased about that.

The movie begins with a merchant entering the city of Agrabah. After the merchant (Robin Williams) tries to sell the audience some cheap, useless junk, he shows them a lamp that is “more than what it seems” and proceeds to tell the story of how it changed a young man’s life.

Jafar (Jonathan Freeman) hired a simple thief named Gazim to find the other half of a magical pendant that would summon the mystical Cave of Wonders when combined. When the two halves are put together, the tiger head shaped cave rises from the sand and gives them two simple warnings: “Only one may enter here. One whose worth lies far within. A diamond in the rough” and “touch nothing but the lamp”. Jafar tells Gazim that all he wants is the lamp, but unfortunately for the humble thief, Gazim is not what the Cave of Wonders wants and he is swallowed up as the Cave sinks back down into the sea of sand. Jafar’s pet parrot Iago (Gilbert Gottfried) is less than surprised and makes sure that everyone knows it.

The actual story begins with our hero Aladdin being chased by the palace guards led by the Captain of the Guards, Razoul (Jim Cummings, which is a name that is going to come up. A lot), after stealing a loaf of bread. It turns out that Aladdin is a thief with a heart of gold (he gives the bread he went through the trouble to stealing to some children) and desperately wants a better life for himself and his pet monkey Abu (Frank Welker). He’s trapped in his poor existence.

The film shifts to the palace, where Jasmine, the princess of Agrabah, turns down another suitor because she wants to marry for love, not for political convenience. The Sultan tells her that she has to marry by her next birthday due to the law and seeks the help of his Royal Vizier, Jafar, to find her suitor. Jafar uses his hypnotizing snake staff to hypnotize the Sultan into giving him his royal blue diamond to help with the search, which it turns out is needed to find the Diamond in the Rough, who of course turns out to be Aladdin, that can enter the Cave of Wonders. That night, Jasmine runs away from her trapped existence as a princess and escapes into the city.

The next day, Aladdin saves Jasmine from a hostile shop owner because she doesn’t understand how the marketplace works. The two find out that they both feel trapped in their individual lives and instantly connect, but are separated when the guards finally find Aladdin’s hideout and drag him off to prison. When Aladdin is brought back to the palace, she confronts Jafar about his crime and punishment. He says that Aladdin’s death sentence has already been carried out and Jasmine slumps into a period of depression.

Aladdin is broken out of prison by an old man, who takes him to the Cave of Wonders to get the lamp. This leads to one of the many amazing action scenes in the movie where Aladdin and Abu meet the Magic Carpet and eventually get the lamp, but Abu’s kleptomania makes the Cave turn against them. When they reach the top, the old man takes the lamp but tries to kill Aladdin. Abu fights the man off, but the two fall down into the dark depths of the Cave of Wonders. After Aladdin and Abu are out of sight, the old man reveals himself to be Jafar and finds out that the lamp is gone. Abu stole it when he attacked him, and Aladdin rubs the lamp to try to read the inscription and ends up setting free the Genie found inside (Robin Williams). The Genie tells Aladdin that he has 3 wishes, but the Genie cannot give any more wishes, kill anyone, make anyone fall in love with anyone else, or bring people back from the dead. Aladdin tricks the Genie into getting them out of the cave without using a wish and they all land in an oasis. It is here where Aladdin finds out that the Genie is a prisoner and vows to use his last wish to wish the Genie free right before wishing that he could be a prince to woo Princess Jasmine.

Jasmine sees the now dubbed Prince Ali version of Aladdin as being just another stuck-up suitor, but when he starts showing more of his true self, she starts to fall in love with him. Eventually, Jafar steals the lamp from Aladdin and turns the entire city of Agrabah on it’s head by wishing himself Sultan followed by wishing to become a Sorcerer and it’s up to Aladdin to set things right.

Aladdin tackles some pretty deep messages such as the idea that you can be imprisoned without physically being put into some sort of holding. The film is also about the idea that even though you might get exactly what you wish for, that act might have some repercussions that you were not expecting, this message actually came about through some major story revisions that came about during production.

This film was all Howard Ashman’s doing. He pitched the idea to Walt Disney Feature Animation in 1988. Ashman and Menken wrote and scored some songs and Linda Woolverton wrote a treatment of the screenplay. Directors Ron Clements and John Musker came onto the project and wrote their own treatment of the screenplay, which eventually won out over Woolverton’s own treatment and a number of the elements of the story that Ashman’s songs were about were removed. Three of the five songs written by Ashman remained, but a number of them (one of which was a song sung by Aladdin to his mother, who was also left on the cutting room floor) ended up being excised from the film due to story changes. Aladdin would have turned out to be a very different movie if that original story were to have been kept. If Ashman had been around longer into the production of the film, the film would have most likely stayed the way it was originally. Howard Ashman passed away due to complications from AIDS six months before the release of Beauty and the Beast in 1991.

The music is on the same level of quality as the past two Disney musicals, but it is very easy to tell which songs were written by Howard Ashman and which were written by his replacement Tim Rice. The music takes on a very different tone than the previous musicals, though. Ashman and Menken were very much inspired by Cab Calloway and other jazz musicians of his type, which is seen the most in the song “Friend Like Me” which is the real stand out of the film besides the very obvious choice of “A Whole New World”.

All of the characters except for Jafar were inspired by the caricature works of Al Hirshfield. Hirshfield’s distinctive flowing and simplistic art style was chosen to compliment the inherent forms that are prevalent in Persian architecture. Jafar was designed to look nothing like the other characters in order to make him stand out from the rest of them. It basically hung a “I’m the villain” sign around his neck, but it works out well from a design standpoint. The character of Aladdin went through the most design revisions out of the all of the characters. When the story included Aladdin’s mother, he had a much younger looking design which was originally based off of Michael J. Fox appearance-wise. When his mother was excised, it was decided that he should look more like a young adult than a teenager and his design shifted to looking more like Tom Cruise than Marty McFly.

The colour choice of this movie is very specifically designed. The good characters were represented with lighter tints and colours, specifically a light blue. The evil characters were dark colours like black, red, and dark blue. All of this was contrasted upon the neutral canvas that was Agrabah.

The Genie is probably the most interesting character in the Disney canon, part of which comes from having Robin Williams as a voice actor. Williams’ stand up style can best be described as frantic, and it really shows through in the character of the Genie. Very little of the Genie’s lines were even scripted, they essentially told Williams what needs to be said and he extemporized it. The audio editors took the most usable and funny segments of the recording sessions and sent them to be animated. The very beginning of the movie was literally recorded by giving Robin Williams a box full of random items and he made jokes for all of them. Disney, of course, advertised the heck out of Robin Williams being in the movie and it made Aladdin be the first Disney animated film to 1. have a huge star lend a voice and 2. be advertised as having that star in it. Aladdin was also the first Disney animated film to directly reference other Disney films and even had a reference to Robin Williams’ role in the Magic of Disney Animation attraction. Pinocchio, the Little Mermaid, and Beauty and the Beast are all referenced, the last more subtly than the other two.

Unfortunately, Aladdin created a rift between Disney and Robin Williams. He took the role out of gratitude for the immense success that came out of the Touchstone film Good Morning Vietnam and only wanted the standard SAG pay ($75,000) but with the condition that his name cannot be used for marketing and that the Genie would not take up more than 25% of the artwork used for advertising. Disney did not follow these conditions almost at all and even made it so that Robin Williams got top billing for his roles. Eventually everything was worked out and Robin Williams became a Disney Legend in 2009.

Glen Keane was the supervising animator for Aladdin and produced more fabulous work, but this time more along the lines of Ariel rather than the Beast. Andreas Deja (who animated Gaston, Roger Rabbit, and King Triton before this film) animated Jafar and made him one of the most imposing villains in the Disney Canon simply by the fact that he looked so different from everyone else and the fact that he did not have that many funny scenes to himself.

Aladdin is a fantastic movie that is full of comedy and adventure, but the story is not nearly as good as the one in Beauty and the Beast. It is still one of my favourite films nonetheless and I am glad that this was the first film I ever saw in theatres. What a way to start a lifetime at the movies.

51 Days of Disney (Day 30): Beauty and the Beast

The Disney Renaissance was now going strong with a number of the soon to be classic Disney films being put into production. Walt Disney Feature Animation was looking for another success like the Little Mermaid, but no one could have predicted the success that was created by Beauty and the Beast.

The film opens with the narrator (David Ogden Steirs) tells us that there was a spoiled prince who turned away a old woman from a place to stay due to her appearance. She offered him a rose as compensation along with a warning that things are not always as they appear and that beauty is found within. After turning her away again, the woman transformed into a beautiful enchantress and made his exterior resemble his interior and placed a spell on the entire castle. The spell can only be broken if he can love another person and have them love him back in return, and the rose she offered would bloom until his 21’s birthday, but works as a timer as after it is done wilting, he would remain a beast forever.

The film shifts to a small village where our heroine Belle (Paige O’Hara) lives and is considered to be very odd by the local inhabitants. She is constantly reading any book she can get her hands on. She is the most beautiful girl in the village, which makes the local heartthrob Gaston instantly want her, but he is a boorish, brainless, and Belle doesn’t want anything to do with him. Belle’s father Maurice creates an wood chopping that will turn their life around and starts to travel to a fair that he is going to enter the invention, but gets lost in the woods and attacked by wolves. Maurice escapes into a castle, but is imprisoned there by the Beast for trespassing.

Gaston proposes to Belle the next day, but she pushes him away again. When Maurice’s horse Phillipe returns home without Maurice, Belle rides off to find him and arrives at the castle where her father is being held. Lumiere, Cogsworth (David Ogden Steirs once again), Mrs. Potts (Angela Lansbury) and her son Chip, some of the servants turned magical objects in the castle, think that she is there to break the spell. She finds her father and trades her freedom for Maurice’s. Belle’s selfless act seems to have a profound effect on the Beast, but he drags Maurice out of the castle before Belle has a chance to say goodbye.

Maurice returns to the village to get help rescuing Belle, but all of the villagers think he is crazy when he starts ranting about the Beast. This gets Gaston thinking (a dangerous pastime) that he can get Belle to marry him out of her love of her father if he were to threaten to have im put in an insane asylum run by Monsieur D’Arque (Tony Jay, who is a name that will come up again later in the Disney Renaissance in an even larger and greater role).

During a tour of the castle presented by Cogsworth (by the way, what he is saying about the castle is almost, if not 100%, bull), Belle wanders off into the forbidden West Wing and finds the Beast’s magic rose. He is, of course, not pleased with this and scares Belle out of the castle where she is attacked by the same wolves that attacked Maurice earlier. The Beast saves her from the vicious attack because he felt bad about scaring her off, but is badly wounded in the process. Belle nurses the Beast back to health and he reveals that he has never felt like this about anyone else before. The two get closer as the Beast starts to soften up and through a scene that can best be described as the Oscar Winning Clip joke from Wayne’s World (and the worst part is I never learned to read!). The servants prepare the castle for one of the most breathtakingly gorgeous scenes in a Disney film.

The Beast sets Belle free when she finds out using his magic mirror that Maurice is sick. He gives her the mirror as a way to always remember him and she rushes off to help her father. When the two return to the village, Monsieur D’Arque is waiting to take Maurice away, but Belle shows everyone the Beast to prove that he is not crazy. Gaston sees the Beast as a monster and leads an angry mob to sack the castle and kill the beast, locking up Belle and Maurice in the process as so that they can’t warn the Beast. Belle breaks free and rushes to save the man she loves.

Like the Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast had it’s roots in a film that was planned to be released in the 40’s or 50’s by Disney, but luckily for us, the project was shelved due to the complicatedness of the story. When the project was started up again, it wasn’t even planned to be a musical. Eisner wanted the film to be scripted out before the storyboarding process started, which was an odd choice as that process had been reversed for the entire back catalog of Disney films. He brought in a screenwriter named Linda Woolverton to script it and after she was finished, the storyboarding process began with her working directly with the story team. After seeing the storyboards, Katzenberg decided to shut down the project so it could be completely restarted from scratch. With that blow, the original director left and was replaced by the team of Kirk Wise and Gary Trousdale, and that is when the film everyone knows and loves started to take shape.

The amazing success of the Little Mermaid (compared to the little success that the Rescuers Down Under) made Katzenberg hire Howard Ashman and Alan Menken to work their magic on Beauty and the Beast. Howard Ashman had been working on his pet project, Aladdin, at the time, but reluctantly joined the production of this movie, but a horrible blow struck him. Ashman found out that he was dying due to complications with AIDS, but he kept on working on the films he was hired onto. Wise, Trousdale, producer Don Han, Woolverton, and now Ashman and Menken started retooling the story to both account for the new musical numbers and to make it stronger as a whole.

The original faerie tale for Beauty and the Beast only has two main characters and is actually very gloomy and depressing, so Disney made some changes to spruce it up. The 1946 French film adaptation of the story added an oafish suitor for Belle and magical objects to the Beast’s castle, so Disney took these ideas and made them their own. In the 1946 adaptation, the magical objects were not really characters, so Disney created a plethora of characters based off of the idea of magical items and added some needed warmth and humour to the story along with characters to guide Belle through the story. They also expanded the character of the suitor into a full-fledged villain that created a definite dynamic to Belle and the Beast’s relationship.

The characters are what makes Beauty and the Beast as mind-numbingly good as it is. Ariel was the first Disney Princess who actually felt like a character and actually showed not only a backbone, but independence. Belle takes that step up to the next level as the Beast actually needs to grow and change as a person in order for her to love him back, unlike Ariel who instantly falls in love with the incredibly milk-toast Eric at first sight. She is also incredibly intelligent and has a burning desire to read every book she comes across, as stated above. The Beast starts out as an antagonist, but eventually turns into a hero and love interest through Belle’s involvement. The choices of clothing even visibly shows the growth and change in his character from primal animal to gentleman. Gaston is an interesting character as in any of the Disney movies that came before, he would have been the hero and love interest. He is as “perfect” as the early Disney Princes, but is incredibly misogynistic (some would argue that the others are misogynistic, but they didn’t have enough of a personality to really get that feeling out of).

The music took what Howard Ashman and Alan Menken started in the Little Mermaid and upped it to the next degree. The songs were bigger, the score was better. The score had better audio cues for each of the characters and there is much more variation in the score for each character’s theme and “Transformation” is probably one of the best pieces of score written for a Disney film. “Be Our Guest” is a better version of the same style of song as “Under the Sea”, namely the song that is just there for fun. It doesn’t necessarily progress the story, but it makes for pure entertainment. “Beauty and the Beast” is the first in a long line of serious love songs in the Disney Renaissance rather than the fun love song “Kiss the Girl”. “Gaston” is a much more fun villain song than “Poor Unfortunate Souls” (and is my favourite song in the film and is made even better in the Broadway adaptation with it’s reprise that includes the line “Who can make up these endless refrains like Gaston”). There is actually two villain songs in Beauty and the Beast, the aformentioned “Gaston” and the “Mob Song” which gets bonus points for having a Macbeth reference in the lyrics and a reference to a popular song from the 20’s.

The one song I do not like in the film is the one added to the extended edition of the film. “Human Again” was a song originally written for the film, but was cut from the original theatrical release. It returned as a song in the Broadway adaptation and was the “fun” song for the second act, but the problem is that it is a really boring song. It should have stayed cut entirely from Beauty and the Beast, but it was added back in and the results are the same as in the show. Fun scene, but the song is boring. I would have much rather seen the song written for the Beast in the show, “How Long Must This go On”, added to the film as it is a much better and much more emotional song. Also, the changing of the story that Belle reads the Beast in the “Human Again” scene from King Arthur to Romeo and Juliet just feels cheap and makes that part even more of a joke than it was before. In the film, “Something There” replaced “Human Again.”

Even the animation is better than in the Little Mermaid, and that is REALLY saying something. Glen Keane was the supervising animator for the Beast and everything he learned from animating Ariel, the Bear from the Fox and the Hound, and Professor Ratigan in the Great Mouse Detective is shown off in this film. The primal nature of the Beast is fully exploited in the beginning of the film with him moving exactly like an animal, but his movements become more human as he does until he finally becomes human (also unintentionally hilarious with the face he makes after he transforms) in one of the most powerful scenes since the Ave Maria segment of Fantasia.

The design of the Beast is very interesting as it is made up of a number of different animals. During development, a story team member named Chris Sanders (which is a name that will come up in a big way in the 2000’s) was asked to do a number of designs for what the Beast was to look like. He produced a number of versions based off of fish, insects, and even birds before creating something that resembled the final product. Glen Keane then took that design and refined it while studying animals at the zoo until we got the chimera we have now. The Beast is made up of a number of different animals. His face is made up of of the facial structure of a mandrill, the brow of a gorilla, the horns of a buffalo, the jaws, teeth, and mane of a lion, and the tusks of a boar. He has the body of a bear and the legs and tail of a wolf.

The film used CAPS to meld 2D and 3D together and it made the shots in the movie much more dramatic. A number of the backgrounds in the movie were made in 3D and that allowed the camera to move like it would in a live action film. It allowed it to move like it was on a dolly and made the ballroom scene even more powerful than it inherently was.

Beauty and the Beast was the first animated film to be nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture and the only until Up and Toy Story 3. It was also nominated for Best Original Score (which it won), had 3 separate nominations for Best Original Song (nominated for “Belle”, “Be Our Guest”, and won for “Beauty and the Beast”) and was nominated for Best Sound. The film even won a Golden Globe for Best Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy.

Beauty and the Beast is widely considered to be the best Disney film ever and for good reasons. The characters are amazingly created, the story is perfect, and the music is some of the best in film. The film went on to be the most financially successful film in Disney history and easily one of the most critically acclaimed and this would be a trend that would continue throughout the 90’s.

51 Days of Disney (Day 29): The Rescuers Down Under

After the success of the Great Mouse Detective in 1986, a number of animated films were put into production. Oliver and Company and the Little Mermaid have already been mentioned, but a third film was a sequel to the last big success the company had before the Little Mermaid, the Rescuers. This marks the second time a Disney film has ever gotten a sequel with a theatrical release and the first in around 50 years.

Cody is an adventurous young boy who is a friend to a great number of animals in the Australian Outback, so when his friends tell him that a golden eagle named Marahute was captured by a poacher, he springs into action to help her. After cutting her free, we are introduced to what this film is ultimately known for: the flying sequences. Marahute takes Cody to her nest and he finds out that she has some eggs. Shortly afterwards, Cody falls into a trap while saving a mouse and is captured by Percival C. McLeach (George C. Scott) and his pet goanna lizard, Joanna, due to Cody’s knowledge of the location of Marahute. The mouse that Cody saved alerts the Rescue Aid Society and the story really begins.

Bernard and Miss Bianca return from the original film (with their original voice actors in tow) and are given the task of rescuing Cody. Bernard tries to propose to Miss Bianca, but the mission gets in the way. They try to get Orville to fly them down under, but they find out that Albatross Airlines is under new management. Orville’s brother Wilbur (John Candy) is now in charge. After the long flight, they land in Australia and meet up with the agent there named Jake and Orville hurts his back in the landing. Jake appoints himself as their guide and instantly starts trying to put the moves on Miss Bianca, much to Bernard’s chagrin.

When Cody refuses to give McLeach the location of Marahute, he throws the boy into the holding cell for all of the animals that McLeach captured. They try to escape, but Joanna stops their attempt. Eventually they figure out a way to escape, but McLeach takes Cody away to find the eagle just as Bernard, Miss Bianca, and Jake arrive to break him out. McLeach appeals to Cody’s desire to help animals by saying that Marahute was shot, so Cody runs off to find the eggs and McLeach follows him. McLeach finally succeeds in getting catching the golden eagle (and Cody, Miss Bianca, and Jake in the process) and it’s up to Bernard to save them and stop McLeach.

Bob Newhart and Eva Gabor are just as good in their roles in this movie as they were in the Rescuers, and George C. Scott is fantastic as the villainous McLeach. Scott’s voice just gives McLeach that needed sense of maniacal glee that is needed to show that he really loves his job. The music is passably adventurous, but not terribly memorable. It is not an animated musical like the Little Mermaid, which leads some people to say that it is not part of the Disney Renaissance, but in terms of animation quality it should definitely be included.

The Rescuers Down Under was the first Disney animated film to use the PIXAR developed CAPS (Computer Animation Production System) to digitally ink and paint the film. This gave the film a distintive look that had not been seen since 1959 in a Disney film. CAPS did away with the now outdated xerox method of inking and the Disney animated films were significantly better off for it. The black lines of the xerox method brought attention to the outline and made everything that was xeroxed look significantly more flat, but the coloured lines that CAPS provided gave the characters and backgrounds an added amount of depth on top of the inherent depth of the mutli-plane camera.

One other thing that should be noted is that because of the length of the film (it’s only around 70 minutes) it was bundled with the Prince and the Pauper starring Mickey Mouse to keep people from feeling cheated out of paying for a movie ticket for a film with a shorter length. What makes this interesting is that the 1983 theatrical reissue of the Rescuers was bundled with Mickey’s Christmas Carol. Disney is doing the same thing with Winnie the Pooh by bundling it with a short film called the Ballad of Nessie.

The Rescuers Down Under is more Rescuers. If that is something that interests you, definitely see it. It doesn’t use the same emotional appeals as the original Rescuers film, which unfortunately means that it is not nearly as emotionally charged, but it is still a very good animated film with amazing animation and flight sequences.

51 Days of Disney (Day 28): the Little Mermaid

Here we are, the point in which everything changed. Up until this point, Disney was trying to keep itself afloat against the new animation titan, Don Bluth Productions. Throughout the 80’s they had colossal successes with movies like the Secret of NIMH, An American Tale, and the Land Before Time. Disney tried to take some of what was done at the rival production studio and make their films darker, but it didn’t really work out too well. All of this was changed by a little mermaid.

Ariel (Jodi Benson, who also voiced all of the Barbies in Toy Story 2 and 3 and still voices Ariel to this day, she even re-recorded Ariel’s audio for World of Color and The Little Mermaid: Ariel’s Undersea Adventure) is the 16-year-old daughter of the king of the sea, King Triton, and she is completely bored with the ocean and wants to see the world above. She is so enamoured with the human world that she collects every knick-knack and bauble that she can find from sunken ships and takes them to her secret cave, but not until her seagull friend Scuttle (Buddy Hackett) can tell her (incorrectly) what it is and what it does. Her father wants for her to have nothing to do with the world above, so he puts is court musician, Sebastian, in charge of keeping an eye on her and out of trouble.

Shortly after Sebastian finds out about Ariel’s secret hideaway, she is attracted to the surface by the sight of fireworks and finds that they are being set off as part of a birthday celebration for Prince Eric. She falls in love with the young prince at first sight, but a sudden hurricane forces her to submerge once more and Eric’s ship is caught in the storm. He saves his dog, Max, from the sinking ship but is not able to save himself before it finally goes down. Ariel rescues him and decides that she will do whatever it takes to be part of his world. This decision is spied upon by Ursula the sea-which who is out to take revenge on King Triton for her banishment.

King Triton finds out about Ariel’s hoard and destroys it, which sends Ariel fleeing into the arms of the manipulative Ursula who transforms Ariel into a human in exchange for her voice, but in order to get her voice back and stay a human, Ariel has to kiss Eric by the sunset of the third day. Ariel accepts and is forced to quickly reach the surface or else drown. When she reaches the surface, she is quickly found by Eric and invited to stay at the castle when he finds out that she is now a mute. The next day, he takes Ariel on a tour and on a boat ride that takes a turn for the romantic when Sebastian gets involved. Ursula’s moray eel stooges Flotsam and Jetsam stop them from kissing by capsizing the boat, but Ursula realizes that if she wants to make sure that her evil plan works, that she will have to take matters into her own tentacles.

Fun fact: the Little Mermaid is exactly 10 days older than I am. Just thought I would share.

The Little Mermaid has some of the best animation ever in an animated film, the animation is fluid and detailed, making us really feel like the characters are real and actually moving in front of us as viewers. Glen Keane’s work on Ariel made him one of the top names in the animation business, and for very good reason. Every little nuance to Ariel’s character can be attributed to his work. What makes his animation even better is the fact that he managed to animate her hair to a point in which you actually feel like she is underwater. Ariel’s hair actually moves like real hair.

The film was originally going to be part of a package film in the 40’s in which all of the stories were to be based off of Hans Christian Anderson stories, but due to the budget setbacks the plan was scrapped. The Little Mermaid eventually poked her head out of the water again in 1985, but Eisner passed on the idea as it sounded too similar to the sequel to the live action hit Splash that was in production at the Company during that time period. Jeffery Katzenberg greenlit it as a possibile future feature the next day along with Oliver and Company. The film was shelved for a short period in the late 80’s as so that the animators could finish the absurdly amazing animation for Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (seriously, the animation took up the majority of the budget on that film) and Oliver and Company, but as soon as those films were completed everyone was right back to working on the Little Mermaid.

The arrival of songwriter Howard Ashman and composer Alan Menken completely changed the face of the film. They wanted the movie to have a format much more similar to a Broadway musical, which is what they usually wrote. This change forced the story team to work in a very different format then they were used to as Disney had never actually made an animated musical before this, they made animated films that just so happened to have music. This change made the story take on a much different tone and pacing that really worked out well for it. They even suggested that the plans for a British butler crab character named Clarence take on a more Jamaican feel to him.

Alan Menken’s score has to go down as one of the best scores out of any Disney film. It has all of the range of the story and masterfully portrays exactly the emotion that should be felt in the scene. Menken even used different instruments to represent different characters. Ariel is represented by the flute, King Triton is the french horn, Prince Eric is the oboe, and Ursula is represented by brass instruments. The score won an Academy Award, but Alan Menken’s score was only half of the winning combination. Howard Ashman’s songs took the already astounding score and catapulted it to a higher level of acclaim. “Part of Your World” became the theme of the movie, both as a song and as the central theme of the story. “Under the Sea” is a calypso fueled wonderland of visuals and sound, with interesting sights all over the screen and one of the catchiest songs to grace a Disney film since the Jungle Book. It even won the Academy Award for Best Original Song. “Les Poissons” is one of the funniest parts of a film that doesn’t have a shortage of funny moments and “Kiss the Girl” is just the first in a long line of fantastic love songs, but is easily one of the most fun.

The one song I want to talk about in more detail is the best song in the film, “Poor Unfortunate Souls.” This is Ursula’s song and definitely fits into my villain song theory. The song starts out subtly, but as it progresses gets larger and more furious as Ursula starts showing off more and more of her crazy side. It just gets bigger and bigger until it finally crescendos with Ursula at her absolute craziest point, with her hair flowing in every which direction and one of the most deranged looks in someones eyes that has ever been shown on screen. Ursula is just a fun villain. She’s an overweight drag queen looking woman (who was actually based off of a famous drag queen named Divine) who tries to pass herself off as being an elegant and gorgeous woman, but cannot hide the revenge-fueled monster that lives inside her half human, half octopus exterior. She ranks very highly on my list of Disney villains.

What I find so amazing about Ursula is that Pat Carroll was not the first choice for the voice of the character. Originally, Disney wanted Bea Arthur to voice the sea witch, but she turned the point down. Disney then went down the list and offered the role to a number of actresses including Roseanne Barr. They eventually settled on Elaine Stritch, but Menken felt like she didn’t have what was needed to truly bring out the lyrics he was writing for Ursula. Eventually Carroll was brought in, and I dont’ think anyone would want it any other way.

A topic that is going to keep coming up through the posts about the Disney Renaissance is the Broadway adaptation, for most of them I will make separate posts about the actual shows, but I am going to bring up the Broadway adaptation of the Little Mermaid here. This is the only one that I have not actually seen, but at the same time, I’m kind of glad that I have not seen it. The show changed around the second act of the film to a point in which it leave some major plot holes in the show and it somewhat ruins the experience. The original music for the show also is not nearly as good as the music for the other adaptations.

I said that I would mention this every time it comes up, so it has to be mentioned here. This is a Disney film where a hero/heroine actually kills the villain.

The Little Mermaid is a return to form for Walt Disney Feature Animation, it was emotional, funny, had an amazing soundtrack, and a fantastic story with lovable characters. It was the first major success the studio had since the Rescuers in 1977, the first princess film sincein 1959, and started a new golden age of  animation for Walt Disney Feature Animation.

51 Days of Disney (Day 27): Oliver and Company

The critical and financial success of the Great Mouse Detective saved Walt Disney Feature Animation from imminent ruin and that financial success would continue in Oliver and Company, but not necessarily the critical part.

Oliver is one of numerous kittens left on a street corner for adoption, but soon all of the other kittens have been taken away except for him. He eventually leaves the box and runs into Dodger (Billie Joel), a streetwise dog who helps him steal some hot dogs from a food cart but leaves Oliver high and dry after the job is done. Dodger quickly heads home to the rest of his crew: Ignacio Alonzo Julio Federico de Tito (Cheech Marin, Banzai in the Lion King and Ramone in Cars), Einstein, Francis, Rita, and their owner Fagin (Dom DeLuise) who has them all looking around the city for things to sell in order to pay his debt to a loan shark named Sykes.

The next day, Fagin takes the animals out into the city to get some money and in a plan gone wrong, Oliver ends up being taken home by a girl named Jenny. She lives with a dog named Georgette (Bette Midler) who is none too keen about the new addition to the family and desperately tries to get rid of him, but finally succeeds when Dodger and the gang break in to the house to get him back. Fagin decides that he’s going to use the fact that Oliver now has an owner in order to settle his debt via ranson, but has a change of heart when he realizes that his owner is a little girl. Sykes ends up kidnapping Jenny and closing Fagin’s account in the process. It’s up to Fagin’s group to save her and get her home safely.

The story is disjointed, with the movie not really functioning as a whole but rather as individual episodes in a story. It is occasionally heartwarming, but over all the film just seems like it’s missing some intangible element that would make it something really special. This is incredibly disappointing, as it’s based off of Charles Dicken’s immortal story Oliver Twist. The story should have been better than it was, but part of the problem that the story suffers from is the idea that dogs would be able to get money from people to help pay off Fagin’s debt. If they were humans, they could at least pickpocket people, but because they’re dogs you really have to wonder how they are supposed to help.

The animation for Oliver and Company can best be described as stiff. Dodger is always talking about rhythm, but for all that talk there really isn’t much of one. Everything is cold and calculated, with the characters moving like they’re robots. Nothing really flows. On top of that, the backgrounds look… off. Especially the shots of New York City as a whole. The backgrounds are very fuzzy and look like bad watercolour paintings. Ultimately, the animation looks like it was done by another studio, it just doesn’t look like something that came out of Disney. It even has some of the xerox line problems from the 60’s.

On top of the poor animation, the music isn’t very good. The score is passable and all of the songs except for “Why Should I Worry” are completely forgettable at best. “Perfect Isn’t Easy” and “Streets of Gold” are down right bad. Even the voice acting is somewhat lacking. Dodger, Oliver, Jenny, Sykes, Tito, and Fagin are all acted fairly well, but most of the other voices are just mediocre. Georgette is by far the worst and it makes her come off as being more annoying than was probably (hopefully) intended.

Oliver and Company is not necessarily bad, but it is definitely one of the weakest Disney films that has been released and definitely the worst of the dark period of the 80’s. The lack of warmth in the movie just makes the whole thing not work. Somehow, for all of it’s flaws, Oliver and Company was very financially successful, but luckily for the studio, the next movie in the Disney Animated Canon would change everything for the better.

51 Days of Disney (Day 26): The Great Mouse Detective

The year is 1986 and the now renamed Walt Disney Company has been both saved and possibly ruined. Michael Eisner came in and said that if there isn’t some sort of change that allows the animated features to become financially successful again after the commercial failure of the Black Cauldron, the animation studio would be shut down and the studio built on animation would just create live action films and programs for the newly created Disney Channel.

In comes the smartest mouse ever to live, and I’m not talking about Mickey. Basil of Baker Street is the animal kingdom’s equivalent of Sherlock Holmes, and he is tasked to find the inventor father, Hiram Flaversham (Uncle Scrooge himself, Alan Young), of the young Olivia. The year is 1897, and Dr. David Q. Dawson finds the young Olivia and brings her to the resident of the eccentric Basil in order to get his help in finding her father. Basil deduces that the man behind the kidnapping is the criminal mastermind, Professor Ratigan (Vincent Price).

Ratigan is forcing Hiram to build him a robot to replace the Mouse Queen and make Ratigan into the King. He threatens to hurt Olivia if the robot isn’t completed on time. Basil decides to use his friend, and Sherlock Holmes’ pet, Toby to help find Ratigan. Toby leads them to a human toy shop where Fidget, Ratigan’s crippled bat henchman, is collecting items for the evil plot, including Olivia. Basil and Dawson deduce the location of Ratigan’s lair, only to be caught in an elaborate death trap. Ratigan springs his evil plot and it’s up to Basil, Dawson, and Olivia to stop him.

The Great Mouse Detective harkens back more to the style of the 60’s Disney films rather than the Rescuers or the 40’s ones. The tone is distinctly more light-hearted, but there is still some very dramatic moments and even some scary ones. Basil’s eccentricities are mostly played for laughs, but it doesn’t make him a weaker character. He his fully able to handle the numerous situations that are presented to him logically and even manages to make everything look easy. Some things do really fluster him, and that brings out his anger, but he is quick to realize that getting angry is not going to help anything. Dawson is mostly a sympathetic character, there to ground the general oddness of Basil and also to assist him.

The real reason to watch this movie is Vincent Price’s portrayal of Professor Ratigan. The consistent deranged look of happiness on his face is brilliantly portrayed and the character is fantastically animated. He desperately tries to be regal and dignified, which is perfectly shown in his flowing and exaggerated movements. His ticks are just so perfect and overdramatic. He is the kind of character that is surprisingly hard to do well, Ratigan is the Snidely Whiplash, moustache-twirling, James Bond-esque super villain. He even has an obscenely complicated death machine and insists on leaving Basil to die without waiting about to see the machine succeed at it’s simple goal. Vincent Price’s voice just works so perfectly with the character that it is surprising to find out that he was not the original choice for the role.

Even the music is back at a previous level. The score by Henry Mancini is big and boisterous which heavily reflects the larger than life characters. The main theme is obscenely catchy and something that will easily get stuck in your head. Even the songs are at a higher level, this movie follows the general rule of Disney movies in that the best song in the movie is almost always the villain song, this time that best song is “The World’s Most Villainous Mind.” The song reflects the egocentric nature of Ratigan and is a just plain fun song.

Luckily for the newly rechristened Walt Disney Feature Animation and the field of animation as a whole, the Great Mouse Detective was a critical and financial success (but not nearly on the same level of commercial success as Disney’s last mouse starring feature, the Rescuers), receiving generally good reviews and made back it’s 14 million dollar budget and then some. The film took in around 25 million dollars at the box office and not only saved Disney animation, but also set the stage for the upcoming Disney Renaissance.

51 Days of Disney (Day 25): the Black Cauldron

The creation of Don Bluth Productions by the disgruntled ex-Disney animator, Don Bluth, made Walt Disney Productions start to not be nearly as culturally relevant as it was in previous years. The films that Don Bluth was putting out were dark and edgy. They were films for a new audience and a new time, so Disney tried to copy what was being put out at the rival studio and what we got was the Black Cauldron.

Taran is an assistant pigkeeper to the enchanter Dallben, but he wants to be a famous warrior more than anything. He is confused and laments the fact that he has to wait on a pig hand-and-foot, but little does he know that the pig, Hen Wen, has the power to see the future. Dallben finds out by using Hen Wen’s power that the evil Horned King (John “England Prevails” Hurt) knows about the pig’s power and wants to use it to find the titular Black Cauldron in order to obtain the power to raise an army of the dead. Dallben sends Taran to hide Hen Wen in a cottage on the other side of the forest in order to keep her safe. In the forest, Taran encounters a strange creature named Gurgi shortly after losing track of Hen Wen.

The Horned King’s dragons capture Hen Wen and Taran sneaks into the Horned King’s castle to get her back. Along the way, he rescues Princess Eilonwy and a middle-aged bard named Fflewddur Fflam (Nigel Hawethorne, who also voiced Professor Porter in Tarzan). After the three escape the Horned King’s castle and reunite with Gurgi, they meet a number of mythological creatures such as witches, fair folk, and zombies, all while moving towards stopping the Horned King’s reign of evil.

The Black Cauldron was one of the first animated Disney films since Sleeping Beauty to have a widescreen aspect ratio. It was also the first animated film ever to have a PG rating due to it’s dark and violent nature. Unfortunately, the darkness and violence came with a price, the characters are decidingly one-sided and what humour is in the film just comes off as being annoying rather than funny. Seriously, Gurgi needed to toned down because his character really grated on my nerves. It made me not really feel the emotion that you are supposed to feel at the end of his personal storyline. The story is good, but it bears very little resemblance to the original source material, it never reaches the depth of the books and the story is incredibly over simplified. That being said, the story is still interesting, it just would have been better if they had more time to tell it.

One thing that the movie really has going for it is that the animation is fantastic. It had a budget of 25 million dollars and it really shows. The animation is fluid and expressive and Disney even tried out some CG animation to create the Baubles and the titular Black Cauldron. The CG looks very good as it’s used sparingly and actually used smartly. It’s the rotoscoped smoke and fire effects that don’t hold up nearly as well. Unfortunately for the Black Cauldron, it was not able to make back it’s obscenely large budget and the result was not a good one for the Studio during those dark times.

During the production of this film, some serious changes were going on at the Disney Studios. The studio never quite recovered from the death of Walt in 1966 and the death of Roy in 1971, Card Walker, Roy Miller, and Don Tatum were put in charge. Unfortunately for the trio, the studio didn’t have many successes under their reign. Throughout this period, EPCOT Center and Tokyo Disneyland were opened and the Disney Channel was launched. These ventures kept Walt Disney Productions from going completely under, but that ended up not being the least of their problems.

Saul Steinberg, the CEO of Reliance Insurance Company, tried a hostile takeover of Walt Disney Productions in an attempt to sell off all of it’s assets and make a pretty penny off of the venture. The Studio was able to successfully fight off Steinberg through some White Knight investors and the studio lived to fight another day. Shortly after this attempt to kill it, the wounded company took in some new brains to lead it: Michael Eisner and Frank Wells. The dynamic duo eventually brought the Studio to financial success (only to ruin it again a few years later).

This movie had so much going for it. It was dark and forbidding, based off of a fantastic series of books, and was a fantasy. It had a great number of things that should have made me like it, but the static characters, the oversimplified story, and merely passable music made the Black Cauldron one of the weaker films in the Disney Canon. It did give us one of the most genuinely terrifying villains to come out of Disney, though.

51 Days of Disney (Day 24): The Fox and the Hound

If you are reading this on the day it is released, I am currently on a plane flying to California. Don’t worry, the posts will continue on schedule, and there will be a major amount of Disneyland content coming in future weeks.

After the critical and commercial success of the Rescuers in 1977, Disney is looking for another movie to continue this recent high point, but unfortunately for them, it is just that: a high point. It’s all downhill from here for a number of years.

The Fox and the Hound opens with a mother fox being chased by hunting dogs while carrying her infant child. She is shot and killed, but the baby is found by Big Mama (an owl, voiced by Pearl Bailey) and her friends, Boomer (a woodpecker, Paul Winchell) and Dinky (a finch, Dinky Bakalyan) who help the baby get found by Widow Tweed (Jeanette Nolan) and she adopts him and names him Tod (Kieth Mitchell as a child, Mickey Rooney as an adult).

At the same time, a hunter by the name of Amos Slade (Jack Albertson) adopts a coonhound named Copper (Corey Feldman, Kurt Russel (which made me imagine MacReady incinerating the Thing as a dog when I found that out)) to assist his old hunting dog, Cheif (Pat Buttram).

Tod and Copper eventually meet due to mutual boredom and become fast friends. What follows is a Romeo and Juliet-esque bromance. Amos eventually finds out about Tod coming onto his land and chases the fox with the intent of killing him. Widow Tweed stops him from doing so, but Amos tells her that if he catches Tod on his land again that he will finish the job. Big Mama warns Tod about the dangers of being too close to a hunting dog when you’re a fox, but he wants nothing to do with what she says. That day, Amos, Chief, and Copper leave for a hunting trip that will last until the following Spring.

Spring arrives and Tod and Copper are fully grown and Tod goes over to see his friend, but Copper realizes that they can’t be friends anymore because he’s a hunting dog and Tod is a fox. Tod is seen by Chief and the three of them chase Tod off of Amos’ land, but Copper lets Tod go that one time, Chief is not so forgiving, though. He ends up chasing Tod up onto some train tracks and gets knocked off, breaking his leg in the process. Copper swears revenge on his once friend. Widow Tweed is forced to take Tod far away to a nature reserve and leave him there as so that Amos won’t end up killing him.

After a hard first night in the woods, Tod is introduced to a female fox named Vixie (Sandy Duncan) via Big Mama. He falls in love at first sight. Eventually, Amos goes onto the nature reserve to get Tod and Copper is 100% behind him. This leads to the most climactic scene in the entire film.

One of my problems with the movie is that I just do not care about the subplot about Boomer and Dinky trying to catch the caterpillar. They devote a large portion of the film to this subplot and it just isn’t interesting. It’s funny on occasion, but it just goes on for way too long and takes up way too much screen time.

The music is largely forgettable. There is a score done by Buddy Baker that fits the subject matter and location of the movie well, but there just isn’t anything particularly special about the score. Even the songs aren’t fantastic. The best one is “When You’re the Best of Friends” and in the grand scheme of Disney music, it just isn’t anywhere near the top or even the middle. It’s not bad, it’s just very average, which is sometimes worse than being outright bad.

The effect of the multiplane camera was drastically scaled back in the Fox and the Hound in order to cut animation costs, and it really shows. The backgrounds look exceptionally flat and there just isn’t any depth. This is most prevalent in the bear fight scene near the end of the movie. So many people have told me that they were terrified of that scene, but I’ve never quite understood why. There isn’t as much of a fear that Tod is actually going to fall to his death because the fall just doesn’t look that far. It saddens me to say these things about this scene, especially because it was partially animated by a young John Lasseter. The animation is great, but the lack of the budget cuts would have made the scene and the rest of the movie as a whole look significantly better. Feature length animation is not something that can be easily done on a budget and still have it look good.

It was decisions like this that forced Don Bluth to leave the studio, stating that Disney animation was “stale.” Bluth ended up taking 17% of the animators at the studio along with him and created his own studio, Don Bluth Productions, which kept the animation industry alive and kicking in the 80’s but fell into relative obscurity and even notoriety in the 90’s when the Disney Renaissance was going strong. The sudden lack of animators pushed the release date of the Fox and the Hound back from late 1980 to mid 1981 as so that they could hire more artists to finish the film.

The Fox and the Hound is decidingly average. It’s better than some of the other Disney films in the 80’s, but is not exactly the best way to start out a decade. The story is good, but the subplot is unneeded fluff and some aspects of the animation and music is fairly mediocre.

51 Days of Disney (Day 23): The Rescuers

The Disney Studios released two animated films in 1977, the first was of course the package film, the Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh. The second was a film based off of a series of novels written by Margery Sharp, most of which came from two books, Miss Bianca and the one that the name of the film is taken from, the Rescuers.

The story begins with an unknown little girl throwing out a message in a bottle with a simple message on it: help. We then shift to the United Nations Building in New York City and the Rescue Aid Society that is run by mice in the basement of the building. Bernard (Bob Newhart, who I recognize most as being Papa Elf from Elf) is a janitor working for the Society who Miss Bianca (Eva Gabor), an agent at the society, chooses to go on the mission with her to help the little girl. The two travel to the Morningside Orphanage that the help note was originally intended to be sent to. We find out from a cat named Rufus (John McIntire) that the girl’s name is Penny and that she was kidnapped by a woman named Madame Medusa (Geraldine Paige) and Mr. Snoops (Joe Flynn). The two are using Penny to look for a diamond called the Devil’s Eye in a place ominously called Devil’s Bayou.

Bernard and Miss Bianca get a ride to the bayou on Albatross Airlines with their captain, Orville (Jim Jordon), in a very contrary decision to Bernard’s insistence to take the train. We find out that Penny has run away from her captors, but Madame Medusa sent out her pet alligators, Brutus and Nero, to find her. Medusa and Snoops reveal that the reason that they kidnapped Penny is because the Devil’s Eye is in the bottom of a hole that only she is small enough to get in and out of. The mice find Penny and figure out a plan to capture the alligators and finally escape from the clutches of Madame Medusa and Snoops.

The introduction was a very interesting choice as to what they did with it. The pastel drawings are gorgeous to look at, but one really has to wonder why the decision was made to do it like this. It was probably done to keep the budget down, as this film had a budget of only around 1.2 million dollars. To put that in perspective, Alice in Wonderland cost around 3 million and One Hundred and One Dalmatians cost 4 million. What is amazing about this opening credit sequence is how suspenseful it is, part of the reason for this is definitely part-in-parcel to the use of the fantastic song “The Journey (Who Will Rescue Me).” This also marked the first time that the opening credit sequence was actually part of the story, as it was the prologue.

The role of Madame Medusa was originally going to be played by Cruella De Vil, but the idea was scrapped as at this point in time, the Disney Studios were not interested in making sequels at that point and time. A number of similarities can still be noticed between the two characters such as the fact that both of them are terrible drivers and both have similar character ticks such as their anger problems and forcefulness. This was the last animation role for Milt Khal, and he wanted to go out on a high note. He ended up doing all of the animation for Madame Medusa, which unsurprisingly enough was one of his best pieces.

A number of soon to be big name animators started animating on this movie. Animators like Don Bluth, Andy Gaskill, Ron Clements, and last but certainly not least, Glen Keane. Most of these names will be coming up in the future, so you should commit them to memory. The animation was back at the same quality as it was in the 60’s and the xerox method was refined enough at this point to make the lines smaller and some even had colour besides the standard xerox black. The sketchiness was also tamed very well, which made the Rescuers look like it was made in the 60’s along with classics like the Sword in the Stone and the Jungle Book.

Even the story was reminiscent of a previous time. In the more recent years, Disney had been focusing more on comedy than on writing a heartfelt and dramatic story. It harkened back to the days of Pinocchio, Dumbo, and Bambi with a more mature story that had more dire subject matter. This change in tone along with the higher quality animation led the Rescuers to be the largest critical and commercial success since the death of Walt Disney, but the Disney Studios would not have a success like this again until 1989.

51 Days of Disney (Day 22): The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh

Robin Hood left a very bad taste in my mouth, so I need something to restore my faith in Disney. Luckily for me, Disney actually released two animated films in 1977, both of which are good and one that never fails to make me smile. This is very good for me, because what you couldn’t obviously see from my review yesterday is that I was literally screaming at the screen yesterday while watching some of the offending scenes in Robin Hood yesterday. I needed a Disney film that would not make me burst a blood vessel.

The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh is actually a package film and each of the three segments were released separately as shorts before they were combined into the film. Winnie the Pooh and the Hunny Tree (1966) is about Pooh (Sterling Halloway), a bear of very little brains, trying to steal some honey from some bees, but constantly fails at it. Just about every venture he sets off upon ends up failing, even getting honey from his friend Rabbit (Junius Matthews), because hunny sounds like bunny, when he overeats and gets stuck in Rabbit’s front door and has to starve off some weight. Christopher Robin, Eeyore the heavily depressed donkey (Ralph Wright), Kanga (Barbara Luddy) and Roo (who is my personal favourite character in Winnie the Pooh besides Owl), and Owl (Hal Smith, who replaced Pinto Colvig as Goofy and eventually Sterling Halloway as Winnie the Pooh, and voiced Flintheart Glomgold and Gyro Gearloose in Duck Tales, and Phillipe in Beauty and the Beast) all help Rabbit get Pooh out of his front door

In Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day (1968), a number of extreme weather patterns hit the Hundred Acre Wood, starting with some strong winds that end up knocking over Owl’s house. Eeyore then decides that he is going to find a new house for Owl. That night, Pooh gets a visit from Tigger (Paul Winchell) who tells him about Heffalumps and Woozles and their hunny stealing antics. What follows is a “Pink Elephants on Parade” style freak-out session, and boy is it weird and a little freaky. Eventually, the Hundred Acre Wood completely floods and Pooh and Piglet are caught in the current.

Winnie the Pooh and Tigger Too (1974) is all about Rabbit trying to “get the bounce out of Tigger” in order to keep him from constantly ruining Rabbit’s vegetable patch.

The score this time around is done by Buddy Baker  and the songs were done by the Sherman Brothers, the songs were very obviously written first and the score follows the tone of the songs very well. The score is light, happy, memorable, and fits the movie exceptionally well. It’s hard to pick out just one song that really stands out as even though you only hear each of the songs once, you will hear the score for that song in different segments of the film. Pooh’s “I’m Just a Little Black Rain Cloud” can be heard as a song in Winnie the Pooh and the Honey Tree and as a score in Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day, the song “The Most Wonderful Thing about Tiggers” is heard in both Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day and in Winnie the Pooh and Tigger Too and can be heard as score in the latter, and the song “Winnie the Pooh” can be heard as a score throughout.

The most amusing aspect about this movie, and what made all of the subsequent entries in the Winnie the Pooh franchise, is the use of the book. The three stories are, of course, based off of stories from Winnie-the-Pooh by A. A. Milne and the Disney Studios made a stylistic choice to frame all of the stories as though they are literally being read out of a book. The book is shown and the narrator and characters interact with the pages and the words in the book. For instance, when the very blustery day turns into a very rainy day, the rain water actually starts to make the words run off the page. Characters literally jump from page to page, and Tigger almost jumps clear out of the book. The inclusion of little flourishes like this makes the movie stand out a lot more and makes it significantly more memorable.

Pooh has a very large presence in the parks. Pooh, Piglet, Tigger, and Eeyore are all very common walk-around characters, and even Rabbit and Kanga and Roo have had been walk-around characters in the past. There was a problem with Pooh replacing the superior versions of attractions in the past though. At Walt Disney World, Pooh replaced Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride, which at the Magic Kingdom actually had two different tracks opposed to Disneyland’s singular track. It essentially made it two different rides. I eventually got over the loss of Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride as the Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh in Florida is a fantastic dark ride. The Imagineers even managed to incorporate the book into the attraction in a similar way as what the animators did in the film.

The Disneyland version is a completely other matter. It’s awful, simply awful. It replaced the Country Bear Jamboree, which was better at Disneyland as it had two theatres, and once again, I would have been fine with it if it was the Walt Disney World version but it isn’t. At the Magic Kingdom, the attraction is located in Fantasyland, but at Disneyland, Pooh moved into Critter Country. The Imagineers felt like they had to tweak the ride to fit into the northwestern United States setting (despite the fact that Splash Mountain takes place in the southern United States, but I’m not even going to bother with that) so the setting of the ride was changed from England to some random forest. Christopher Robin was cut from the attraction to reflect the location change and because the attraction was in Critter Country, there goes the fantastical book.

Tokyo Disneyland has a third different version of the attraction, this time called Pooh’s Hunny Hunt. This one uses a completely different ride system from the American attractions, it uses a ride system that doesn’t have a track which allows the hunny pot ride vehicles to move around show scenes without being “guided” by a track. The show scenes are also much more detailed and have better audio-animatronics.

Over all, the Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh is a much better film than Robin Hood and even the Aristocats.