The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad (1949) - Two Classic Stories Paired with Classic Animation

 

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.

King Kong (1933) - A True Cinematic Landmark

Hey! This isn’t an animated movie, what gives? Well, I wanted to spend some time to talk about a side of animation that is often overlooked by animation reviewers, special effects. For the next four reviews, I am going to talk about movies that are most notable for their special effects, starting with the movie that quite possibly pioneered the entire special effects industry, the film that changed cinema as we know it, and without it, there would be no Jurassic Park, no Ray Harryhausen, probably not even computer effects as we know them. Today, I will be looking at 1933's King Kong.

Planning on making a picture, Carl Denham wants to shoot on a mysterious island, and brings along his crew, including the First Mate Jack Driscoll, and a struggling actress named Ann Darrow. While there, Ann is kidnapped and offered as a sacrifice to the mighty ape, Kong. The crew, mostly the first mate, rescue her and Carl has the idea to bring Kong back to New York as "The Eighth Wonder of the World". The plot moves along quite nicely, though it does take a little while to actually get to Kong. I feel like the slower pace is just a thing with older movies, but to be fair, it does build up to Kong quite nicely. The introduction of Kong was super cool, with the music and Kong ripping away at the trees. The plot does take a little bit to get going, but overall the plot is well done. They also place in a romance subplot, though it is kind of quick and rushed. Jack just kind of admits he likes Ann and that's really it. I did buy that they liked each other, but a little bit more time developing the relationship would have been nice. Then again, that also could have meant we'd take even longer to get to Kong, but I did enjoy spending time with the characters.

The characters were quite fun, Carl is great in a very blunt and somewhat blunt and direct kind of way. He’s a little like Scrooge McDuck in a sense, where you like him, but you’re also aware that he’s a bit of a cad and probably not the best guy to be around. Ann is also a nice character, she starts the adventure full of excitement and joy, and as the movie carries on, she becomes more afraid of the beasts around her, to the point that she is practically traumatized by the end. I also really like Kong, he has the curiosity and mannerisms of a young kid. He plays with the broken jaw of a dinosaur and peels away Anne’s clothes like she’s a Barbie doll, you can’t help but feel that Kong is just an oversized child at points, which of course makes us sympathize with him when he is taken from his home and shot down at the end. That being said, not all of the characters were great, Jack was a bit of a bland character, just a hard-ass with a soft spot, this could have also been why the romance angle was fairly weak. Then we get Charlie the cook and the Natives. To be fair, there are worse portrayals of Chinese and Black people in film, but this is definitely a 1930s production. So, viewer be warned.

One thing I really want to point out is the soundtrack by Max Steiner. The music in this movie is excellent, it hits the right tone of exciting and tense. I’m really hoping they put this soundtrack on vinyl or CD because it is fantastic. Perfectly fits the mood and compliments each scene it backs.

And of course, we have to talk about the special effects. These were groundbreaking effects for the time, and they have inspired so many animators and filmmakers. Peter Jackson, Ray Harryhausen, even Tomoyuki Tanaka who created Godzilla. These effects inspired so many big things, and in many respects they still hold up. The stop motion looks fluid and the little details they add make the puppets look so much more real. The ground moving under Kong as he falls down, and the wind blowing through his fur are just the perfect little touches. Plus, when they had to build a giant Kong model for close up shots, it looks fantastic, the model work for the head, hand and foot, looks fantastic great, it's kind of impressive to think they would build massive props like that back then. On top of that, the matte paintings were so good, I could barely tell they were there, and when they had a live actor in the background of a stop motion scene, the way they achieved the effect of having the actor move naturally was ingenious, projecting the frames onto a miniature while they animated everything around it. That being said, some of the rear projectioning has not held up well. The scene where the crew walk passed the dinosaur they just drugged and shot reminded me a bit of Blue’s Clues, with how Steve would just kind of faux-walk and the panning camera would make it look like he was moving. Still, that is to be expected with old effects, someday our insanely produced Marvel movies will not hold up to snuff, it is just how effects work, and that lesson can also be applied to video games, but now I’m getting ahead of myself. It's easy to think that it was only mind-blowing back in the 30s, but these effects are still pretty great. While it's true that this movie would have been even more mind-blowing back then, I'd argue that it's still kind of mind-blowing today.

Overall, a lot of people will say this is one of the greatest movies ever made, and quite frankly, I could not agree more. The movie was exciting and thrilling and when we think about the influence it had in our modern effects and how much of a cultural impact this movie had, I think King Kong is a movie that everyone needs to see, filmmakers, artists, animators, special effects crew, moviegoers in general. King Kong is one of the greatest movies ever made and I’m glad I decided to kick off this Special Effects Movie Marathon with it. Even if some of it has aged poorly, the stuff that has held up still holds up really well. If we think about all of the mind blowing movies that came out after it, Godzilla, Jurassic Park, Star Wars, Night at the Museum, all of them owe quite a bit to this movie. It pioneered special effects, it's a fantastic movie on it's own, quite frankly I don’t think I can recommend this movie enough.