Make Mine Music (1946)
Directors: Jack Kinney, Clyde Geronimi, Hamilton Luske,
Joshua Meador, Robert Cormack
With the end of World War II Walt Disney Studios begins the
recovery process from the loss of artists, monetary means, and the practice of
higher quality storytelling with a handful of package feature films. The first
would be Make Mine Music, a
collection of original short subjects tied together with the theme of being
told with music. The feature proves to be one Disney’s most forgotten works,
with only a few short subjects finding any kind of life afterwards, separated
from the collective film.
Make Mine Music is
a package animated feature film with a collection of musically driven short
subjects featuring comedic and artistic pieces, with music performed by notable
stars of the day. The shorts feature both known works and newly formed works as
each individual number tells a tale or love, beauty, or just comedy. Among the
tales featured are: an amusing of a Hatfeld-McCoy style feud with a bit of Romeo
and Juliet mix in with a twist ending, a stylized look at teens swinging in to
the local malt shop played to the music of Benny Goodman’s band, a few artistic
or abstract pieces that feature music of love or beauty, and a tale of two hats
in love sung by The Andrew Sisters. The most memorable pieces include a comedic
telling of “Casey at the Bat” by Jerry Colonna, a visualized adaptation of
“Peter and the Wolf” based on the 1936 music and narrated by Sterling Holloway,
and the finale, “The Whale Who Wanted to Sing at the Met,” about the most
unlikely gifted creature ever to be discovered.
The film is a fine combination of short subjects that are of
good quality, but would fail to impress audiences looking for the standards set
by Walt Disney features a decade prior. With a couple of strong segments with
its share of easily forgettable ones, the film fails as a collective feature
when compared to the overall body of Walt Disney animated features as it lacks
the timelessness and repeat enjoyability other Disney films have.
No major Hollywood studio was effected by World War II like
Walt Disney Studios. Outside of producing military training films and
propaganda shorts on shoestring government budgets, Disney animators leaving
the studio, and the loss of income from Disney had lived off shorts about
Mickey, Donald, and Goofy line of picture. In order to keep his studio in practice all
Disney could do was commission relatively low cost subjects that played to the
audience looking for simple cartoon fun, with only a hint of the extremely high
standards Walt kept for his products. With only a loose theme of music Make Mine Music caters to the simple
joys of cartoon comedy with select, short artful subjects mixed in. Unlike the Fantasia of only a few years prior, this
arrangement of shorts appears hastily pasted together with a minimal budget,
unlike the theater experience Fantasia
was supposed to be. However, Fantasia
was a box office failure. Disney was not making that mistake again.
Here with Make Mine
Music, Disney was looking for a simple way to make some money, appealing to
the audiences that still looked to Disney’s unique take on animation that stood
above all other studios. The feature was low class for Disney standards, but
was meant to be a place holder while the studio rediscovered its footing in the
period following the war before investing in larger, more timeless features
seen in the days of Snow White and the
Seven Dwarfs and Pinocchio.
While the segments “Blue Bayou,” “Two Silhouettes,”and “After
You’ve Gone” have hints of low budget Fantasia qualities to it, these portions
fall rather flat with audiences. “Blue Bayou” in fact was left over animation
for a Fantasia segment featuring the
music Clair de Lune that was dropped, and replaced by the song that shares its
title with in this segment. These more impressionistic pieces would be far
overshadowed by the more brightly colored and story based shorts that accompany
them, most notably “Casey at the Bat” and “Peter and the Wolf.”
To aid in the film’s appeal Disney utilized some namely
musical figures. With the talents of The King’s Man, The Andrews Sisters, the
Ken Darby Singers, Benny Goodman’s band, Dinah Shore, and singer/actor Nelson
Eddy, the film features a wide array of established talents with varying
styles. “Casey at the Bat,” the most non-musical subject features character
actor and familiar Disney voice talent Jerry Colonna to voice the famed Ernest
Thayer poem. favored voice performer Sterling Holloway narrates the tale of
“Peter and the Wolf,” the 1936 Sergei Prokofiev composition that used
instruments to portray characters. Nelson Eddy’s work on “The Whale Who Wanted
to Sing at the Met” would prove to be the most work for any performer in the
feature as he sang, narrated, and voiced every character in the short to
manifest his range in talents.
Make Mine Music
would do what the studio intended it to do, turning a good profit, but tended
to not see re releases, a favored Disney tick to continue to bank on their work.
We also so a hint of the Disney Company’s self-censorship in the history of the
picture as in video releases see the segment “The Martins and the Coys” removed
for its careless gun-play and stereotypical look at deep Southern men as
hillbillies drunk on moonshine and quick to fire rifles.
Make Mine Music as
well as its other package features are all but forgotten in the lineage of
animated features by the Disney studios. Those short subjects that are best
remembered are so due to Disney replaying them in their television shows or on
video releases apart from the feature film.
In a way the film was a success. It made money, and a decent
profit at that, while keeping the animators working on things other than Mickey
Mouse, Donald Duck, or Goofy cartoons. This was a difficult period for Walt
Disney and his studio as they relied of lesser quality work to make the money
for hopefully better products in the future. Meanwhile Walt was beginning to
find the business of an animation studio kept him from being as creative as he
truly wanted to be. Starting in 1946 with Make
Mine Music through 1949, the artistic vision that brought the masterpiece Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was
lacking, but it still produced memorable moments while building to a coming
rebirth of grand Disney animated feature films..jpg)
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