I'm gonna level with you guys here, I kind of chose this movie last minute. I wanted something properly in keeping with the month of Spooky that is October, and I had some good choices. That being said, my September was pretty full on a personal level, so I didn't really have much time to sit and ruminate on one movie. So, as I usually do when I don't have anything planned, I rummage through Disney's package films. You know, I should be a bit more nostalgic for these, since I grew up with Melody Time and The Three Caballeros and my first movie review on this blog was Fun and Fancy Free, heck one of my favourite Disney movies, The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh, is a package film. Honestly, I think I look at a lot of these movies as more a fascinating relic. A moment when Disney, and by and large the entire United States, were struggling. The Great Depression, followed by the second world war meant that many studios did not have the money, material, nor staff that they could put towards anything really major, which meant that Disney had to rely on making short films and packaging them together in one movie to make a feature. The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad is often cited as the best of the package films of this era, and mostly for one segment, but we'll get there when we get there. Well, let's see how it holds up.
The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad, easily on the longest tiles of any movie in the Disney Animated Canon, tells two short versions of iconic literary characters, Ichabod Crane of Washington Irving's The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, and J. Thaddeus Toad of Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Like I do with most other Package films, I'm gonna go over each segment individually, I do this because, there is no real point to doing them both together as if they're one movie. They are two different stories, so I'm going talk about them as two different stories. I've never read either story originally, but I am vaguely familiar with them both, Tim Burton's 1999 film version of Sleepy Hollow is one of my favourite movies, and I've heard about Wind in the Willows before, though this will be my first real exposure to that story.
The movie's first story is The Wind in the Willows, following the story of Mr. Toad as he becomes obsessed with Motorcars and gets accused of stealing one. I must say, this is a really cute story, Mr. Toad and his friends are charming characters, and I did quite enjoy seeing them go through this ordeal. It can be a bit weird that Toad can somehow manage to disguise himself convincingly as an old woman, but this is a world where toads and rats and moles and badgers and horses can talk, so I can suspend my disbelief a bit further here. I really do have to make a special mention of the soundtrack for this story, it perfectly captured the energy and mood of the scenes, when the scene was quiet and tense, the score matched it. When the scene was chaotic and frantic, the score matched it. Honestly, I'm kind of sad that this short doesn't get as much attention as the Sleepy Hollow segment, I think The Wind in the Willows was a really excellent segment, and it's a shame that the only recognition this segment gets is for the dark ride at Disneyland. Though weasels have appeared in other Disney properties, you can just as easily associate them with Mickey and Friends instead of Mr. Toad.
A lot of people will mostly recognize this movie for the Sleepy Hollow segment, it's pretty much a staple of Halloween. It is a good story, and I really love Ichabod's design, scrawny and lanky, very unassuming looking. I didn't get as much into this story as the last one, mostly because this segment was just really goofy, like almost Looney Tunes level of goofy. The first half of it has a lot of cartoonish slapstick and shenanigans, which is fine, this is a cartoon, and it offers a nice contrast with the second half, or it would if it also wasn't full of similar antics. After Brom Bones tells the story of the Headless Horseman, and another creepy forest scene, the actual chase with the Horseman is a lot sillier than people have said. Everyone brings up how this scene was super scary to them as kids, and it's still one of the best scary moments from classic Disney, and my biggest thought was, replace Ichabod with Bugs Bunny or Daffy Duck and not a whole lot really changes. I don't want to say that this story was bad, it was still pleasant, but I think I preferred The Wind in the Willows.
Both stories are narrated, with The Wind in the Willows being narrated by Basil Rathbone, and Sleepy Hollow being narrated by Bing Crosby. I liked Basil Rathbone's narration quite a lot, British accents are typically used to add some kind of dignity or grandiosity to a story, but they don't forget that this is a children's story, and I think Basil meets in the middle very well. I can definitely get into Bing Crosby as the narrator for Sleepy Hollow, he definitely has that odd voice that does lend itself to something a bit darker, which is probably why I prefer his version of "Do You Here What I Hear?", since that is also a dark song. I think they mostly went with Big Crosby because they wanted to make some musical numbers, and Bing Crosby was one of the most popular singers at the time. I guess I would have preferred someone with a more sinister voice for this story, but Vincent Price wouldn't be a horror icon until the late 50s, so this is probably a hindsight criticism.
Honestly, this is another case where I'd rather watch both shorts separately, but to be fair to the movie, they do work together. I could imagine this being a series where Disney animators take a classic story and tell a condensed version through animation and a famous celebrity narrating. I think this film works predominately because both shorts are well done. It isn't that much different from Fun and Fancy Free, with the exception that the framing device can still work if you separate these shorts, which I think adds to them. I think all in all, you're probably better off watching both shorts as separate shorts, especially if you only want to watch one for Christmas and the other for Halloween, but if you do have an hour to kill, I mean, it's a lot better than Fun and Fancy Free, small victory, but a victory none the less. I think I can give this movie a solid recommendation, both shorts are worth watching and the convenience of them being together does help if you want to cross out two short films from your list. I don't think I'll personally come back to this one very often, but I may watch the shorts every now and again.
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