After plunging under the sea with “The Little Mermaid,” exploring a whole new world with “Aladdin,” and going the distance with “Hercules,” will youngsters sit still for “Melody Time”?
This is not your children’s Disney. The studio’s 10th animated feature, released theatrically 50 years ago and on video Tuesday, is a sweet, old-fashioned delight and one of the few Disney animated films preschoolers can watch alone without danger of being traumatized. But older, more jaded youngsters attuned to the faster, hipper rhythms of the post-“Mermaid” era might balk at, in the words of the opening theme, hitching their wagons to a song.
Perhaps “Melody Time’s” greatest distinction is that it was, until now, one of the handful of Disney’s animated features yet to be released on videocassette. Several of its segments, most notably “Johnny Appleseed,” have been re-released as featurettes or, in the case of the charming “Once Upon a Wintertime,” have been included on other Disney video cartoon compilations.
“Melody Time” hails from an era when Disney Studios was marking time, its animators preoccupied with the war effort, making propaganda, training and goodwill films. Omnibus features, such as “Fun and Fancy Free” and “Make Mine Music” (which is still unavailable on video), were more economically viable for the studio, which was financially strapped.
A collection of songs, stories and pictorial reveries, “Melody Time” delivers on its promise of “rhythm and romance, reason and rhyme, something ridiculous, something sublime.” Among the segments that play best are “Bumble Boogie,” an “instrumental nightmare” scored to a jazzy rendition of Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Flight of the Bumblebee.”
The Andrews Sisters float the boat of “Little Toot,” a mischievous tiny tugboat that redeems itself during a storm. “Blame It on the Samba,” a whirlwind combination of animation and live action, reunites Donald Duck with his “Caballero” mate, Joe Carcioca.
“Pecos Bill,” which with “Johnny Appleseed” was Disney’s first foray into American folklore, is introduced by Roy Rogers (with a harmonious assist from the Sons of the Pioneers), who tells the tall tale of the cyclone-roping cowboy, his possessive horse Widowmaker, and Bill’s beloved Slue Foot Sue, who, we learn, is the reason coyotes howl at the moon.
Our vote for most-likely-to-be-fast-forwarded-through is “Trees,” a beautifully rendered but sappy rendition of Joyce Kilmer’s poem.
– Disney buffs also will cheer the first-ever video release of the 1985 sword-and-sorcery fantasy “The Black Cauldron,” which has the distinction of being the studio’s only animated feature to be rated PG. It received mixed reviews and was never widely re-released theatrically, but if the Internet is any indication, it enjoys a devoted following.
One of Disney’s most beloved animated features, “Lady and the Tramp,” unavailable for purchase for more than a decade, will be unleashed on video again in September in full frame and wide-screen editions, with “The Rescuers” to follow in November.
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“Melody Time” (star) (star) (star)
