Disneyology

Not even this guy?

pixyland.org/peterpan/

I calls 'em like I sees 'em.  To be fair Peter Pan is better than the next Disney movie I'll be giving one star to, in retrospect I might have bumped it up to one and half.

The Sword in the Stone (1963)


Out of all the Disney movies from the studio’s “classic era” (which more or less comprises the movies released during Walt Disney’s lifetime) The Sword in the Stone is easily the one I know the least about. I definitely never saw it when I was younger and of all these movies it’s probably the one that had the least impact on pop culture. There have been other movies in this retrospective like Alice in Wonderland that I don’t have much of a memory of, but at least that’s based on a story that’s been adapted a million other times. I suppose you could say the same about The Sword in the Stone given that it’s based on Arthurian legend, but it’s based on a very narrow portion of the King Arthur story, a part that I’m not too familiar with. Specifically it’s based on a 1938 novel by T. H. White, which was the first part of his tetralogy called “The Once and Future King,” and focused entirely on King Arthur’s childhood leading up to his drawing of the titular sword from the stone. The movie actually made a lot of money when it first came out but it’s fallen out of favor for a reason: the movie is terrible. It’s not just bad by the standards of other Disney movies, it’s piss poor even when compared to your average animated movies from other studios.

The film opens with the “live action storybook” opening that was seen previously in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Cinderella, and Sleeping Beauty, seemingly to align it with those other fairy tale movies but it doesn’t really play out like any of them. There’s no princess for one thing, no romance, only barely a villain, and the structure is generally different. In fact this film’s structure really seems odd to me as its extremely episodic and largely plays out like an extended prologue (probably because it’s based on the first in a series of four novels). At the film’s center are three “lessons” that Merlin gives to Arthur in which the two of them turn into fish, squirrels, and finally birds and it isn’t really clear what he’s learning from any of them. Merlin constantly tells him to value brains over brawn but it’s harldy clear what being a fish has to do with that and the squirll bit is even more perplexing as the whole skit seems to mostly revolve around Arthur nearly getting raped by a lady squrill who has a Pepe Le Piu thing going on. In fact they never actually seem to get to the lesson in any of these sequences, Arthur just keeps almost getting killed in them before Merlin saves him. In fact Arthur does almost nothing for himself throughout the movie and none of his lessons actually comes to anything. It’s as if the movie The Karate Kid consisted almost entirely of Daniel waxing cars, never being told what that has to do with martial arts, and then having Mr. Miyagi fighting off the Cobra Kai for him at the end, and then maybe having a title card at the end saying that Daniel would one day become the next Bruce Lee or something. It’s the worst “heroes journey” story imaginable. I suppose you’re supposed to surmise given you existing knowledge of the King Arthur character that these lessons about becoming animals are really formative, but Merlin’s preachy credo of academic learning doesn’t exactly jive with what we know about Arthur, who is probably more associated with smiting people with Excalibur than he is with scholarly study.

From a production end this movie is also a pretty big fail. The animation in the movie is… it might be going to far to say it’s horrible because I’m sure there were other studios doing worse at this time, but it’s a far cry from the great looking stuff they did earlier. One Hundred and One Dalmatians sort of got away with this new Xerox look because it had a different setting than most of their previous movies and had kind of a unique style to it, but this movie invites comparisons to better looking movies like Snow White and Sleeping Beauty and woefully unimpressive when compared to both. This also marks the first movie with songs written by the Sherman Brothers, which I’m told is a big deal because they would write some pretty famous songs for Mary Poppins and The Jungle Book, but very little of their talent is apparent here because the music in this thing sucks. The most famous song is a bit of lyrical gibberish called "Higitus Figitus" which is a complete ripoff of the already lame "Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo." Finally I despised the movie’s sense of humor. Part of Merlin’s magic is that he knows about the future and about things that haven’t yet been discovered and brings this up in some of the most eye rolling fourth wall breaks you can imagine. I suppose in many ways he’s a precursor to the genie from Aladdin in this way but the dude doing the voice is no Robin Williams. This reaches its nadir in the last scene where Merlin shows up to Arthur’s coronation in Bermuda shorts and references that this all may one day become a movie. Eyeroll. There’s almost nothing about this movie I liked. It’s a failure creatively, narratively, artistically, and cinematically and Disney is right to want to downplay this in their history as much as possible.

* out of Five

Even as a kid I never liked Sword in the Stone.

I was all about Robin Hood, it was my first exposure to Peter Ustinov.

The Jungle Book can go fuck itself.

That second paragraph is poetry, man.

I can top that story. College. I go on a school trip to some national awards thing. We were nominated, didn't win, and spent a few days having fun in the city. One of the guys in our group was an awkward gamer and he almost never left the hotel. I think he brought his Playstation 2 and hooked it up to the room TV. Anyway, it's the day of the ceremony. We're all getting in the elevator to go to the banquet hall. It was in the hotel. It's a national thing, so the hotel is packed and the elevators are packed. So packed that the hot girl in our group, a Brazilian with a big ass, is standing only inches in front of him. And this motherfucker, who spent the whole fucking trip in the hotel, gets a boner and pokes her with it. You should have seen the expression on her face. Priceless.

Sometimes you don't have room to perform the tuck.

Couldn't he have just gone Buffalo Bill style and not have to use the belt at all?

You guys are acting like he didn't wanna poke her.



The most natural transition of all.