The Disney Discussion - Melody Time

Over the course of the year, we'll be spending our Wednesdays with Walt, having a discussion about each of Disney's animated films...

Movie #10 of The Disney Discussion

Melody Time (1948)

Featuring the singing and vocal talents of Roy Rogers (and Trigger, "The Smartest Horse in the Movies"), Dennis Day, The Andrews Sisters, Fred Waring and his Pennsylvanians, Freddy Martin, Ethel Smith, Frances Langford, and Buddy Clark as the Master of Ceremonies

Directed by Jack Kinney, Cylde Geronimi, Hamilton Luske, and Wilfred Jackson; Ben Sharpsteen (production supervisor)

Summary (in 150 words or less):

Yet another package film featuring seven shorts connected to each other only in the concept that they all contain music (all but one with lyrics).  An unseen narrator (who is initially presented as a talking mask of sorts) bridges the gap between each piece with rhyming prose as a paintbrush draws abstract designs of the short we are about to see.

Let the Discussion Begin...

Melody Time is the Walt Disney Company's tenth full-length animated feature film and was released on May 27, 1948.

With World War II over, Walt Disney was ready to move onto full-length stories again, but the company still needed time to get Cinderella completed, hence yet another "package film" being unleashed on the public.  Similar in tone to Make Mine Music, Melody Time fit the bill.

The film was only moderately successful and was not greeted kindly by reviewers.  Melody Time was not nominated for any Oscars.

Continuing on with the Disney Discussion trend for the package films, we're abandoning the focus on "The Characters" and instead will look at and briefly discuss each individual short.

Our first short is Once Upon a Wintertime, featuring Frances Langford crooning the title song about two lovers enjoying each other's company in the cool season.  What begins as a rather standard (and boring) cartoon about a young couple (and their bunny counterparts as seen above) shifts rather surprisingly at the halfway point into something some might even call morbid.  When the female wanders past a "Thin Ice" sign, things take a turn for the worse as the ice breaks around her and she starts to get perilously close to a towering waterfall.  The toon ends in a way that I found unique (meaning that her beau doesn't necessarily come to her rescue), but cute and fitting for this initially idyllic scene.  The animation style here is reminiscent of Americana art to me (but, to be honest, I'm not an art guy so I may have that totally wrong).

With a jazzed up, sped up version of "Flight of the Bumblebee," Freddy Martin and his Orchestra provide the music for Bumble Boogie, the second short in Melody Time.  In a rather surreal scene, a bee tries to navigate his way through a musical landscape where piano keys take on the shapes of flowers and caterpillars as they attempt to capture the little creature.  The animation is in that "Pink Elephants on Parade"-style in Dumbo, but doesn't ever reach that "What in the heck is going on"-type level.  That isn't a negative by any means as Bumble Boogie doesn't overstay its welcome in the slightest providing a great blending of music and animation.

The third short on Melody Time's bill is Johnny Appleseed and it's the piece I was most familiar with in this collection.  Telling the story of the folk legend titular character (based on a real guy), narrator Dennis Day provides all the voices and sings all the songs in this seventeen minute-long short.  With the original song "The Lord Is Good to Me" repeated in many variations throughout the cartoon, the Christian values that shaped the real Johnny Appleseed (real name: John Chapman) are not pushed by the wayside at all which is rather refreshing and helps to create a layered portrayal in this otherwise rote short.

Criticism has been sent Little Toot's way because of its basicness, but this fourth cartoon doesn't attempt to be anything other than cute and it absolutely succeeds in that task.  The short reminds me of the stories of Bill Peet, an author whom I grew up reading as a young kid and, upon internet research for this discussion, just now discovered worked for Walt Disney as a storywriter for twenty-seven years.  Peet was around the studio at the time Melody Time was created so who knows if he had a hand in this simplistic short about a little tugboat who is banished from the shipyard after he causes a major accident only to save the day when a storm threatens a large ship out at sea.  With the story lively sung to us by The Andrews Sisters (returning to the Disney realm after the enjoyable Johnny Fedora and Alice Blue Bonnet in Make Mine Music), Little Toot doesn't reinvent the wheel, but it's a wonderfully enjoyable short that appeals to the kid in all of us.

Certainly the most esoteric of Melody Time's segments, Trees is an animated re-telling of the poem "Trees" by Joyce Kilmer.  Maybe Kilmer's poem was simply about trees, but here I have to think the animators felt it was about something more -- and that something more was religion.  With some unusual, though beautiful, transitions and lovely animation and colors, Trees is the most Fantasia-like and most "adult" of any of the shorts in this collection (and admittedly doesn't really fit in with everything else).

The winner of "Worst Short in Melody Time" goes to Blame It on the Samba which brings back Donald Duck, José Carioca, and the Aracuan Bird from The Three Caballeros in a seemingly rejected segment from that film.  This is completely a retread of the final scene of Caballeros in which psychedelic colors paint a Dali-esque melange of nuttiness (ie. the crazy singing lips above).  Considering the fact that Caballeros was not a success at the box office, the inclusion of a similarly themed short here is rather surprising.

The longest segment of Melody Time is its final piece -- Pecos Bill.  Here, rather than introduce the piece with a paint brush (as all the others were as described in the summary above), we have a live action Roy Rogers and his horse trigger speak a few sentences about the folk legend Pecos Bill.  This odd opening shifts to animation rather quickly as Rogers and a folk country band sing us the titular character's tale from childhood (where he was raised by coyotes) to his marriage to Slue Foot Sue later in life.  Certainly told for laughs, the very episodic tale -- Bill creates the Rio Grande, Bill slays the Indians, Bill ends a drought by roping thunderclouds -- overstays its welcome by a bit and I found the whole short lacking the heart that the tale almost was begging to have imparted upon it.  

The Music

Even in the lesser segments, Melody Time has some solid music which I really won't detail as I've discussed it all above. 

My Favorite Scene

Choosing a favorite scene in Melody Time is actually a bit tough as, overall, I liked many of the segments here, but didn't love any of them.  If I had to choose a favorite, I'd probably go with Bumble Boogie as I found the surreal animation coupled with the quick jazzy music a nice combination.

Random Thoughts

• Editing for PC-ness is so entirely random.  They've digitally deleted the cigarette from Pecos Bill's mouth and deleted an entire scene involving him chasing down a tornado because of the cigarette, but they leave in the scene about "a tribe of painted Indians" doing a war dance.  "Pecos started shooting up their little game.  He gave those Redskins such a shakeup that they jumped out of their make-up and that's the way the Painted Desert got its name."  Really?  Personally, there's no need for deletion of anything, but the arbitrary nature of it all is just silly.
• Little Toot is like an early test version of Cars.
• With the explicit Christian overtones in Johnny Appleseed coupled with the implied Christian undertones in Trees (as seen below), with the exception of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Melody Time may be the most overtly Christian animated movie the Disney company has produced.

Final Analysis

(Does It Belong in the Revered Disney Pantheon and How Does It Stack Up to Past Films?)

Although Melody Time is actually probably the most consistent of the package films we've seen thus far (seeing as how no short proves to be a disappointment), there isn't really any particular short that stands out and wows me (like two or three in the similarly themed Make Mine Music).  However, there is something to be said for the fact that everything presented here works for the most part.  The lack of lulls is absolutely a tick in the plus column.  Still, you can see that the Disney animators and storytellers were starting to run out of ideas when it came to feature-worthy shorts (as evidenced in the recycling of Donald Duck and Jose Carioca in the samba scene).  Despite any positives I can throw the film's way, the fact still remains that this is a "package film" that doesn't tell any semblance of a story and for that reason alone, I can't rate it any higher than I have below nor can I say that it belongs in the Disney Pantheon.

The RyMickey Rating: C

Join us next Wednesday for The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad, the eleventh film in The Disney Discussion.