Fun and Fancy Free (1947)
Live Action Director: William Morgan
Starring: Edgar Bergen, Dinah Shore
The high class animated features of Walt Disney’s past
including Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,
Pinocchio, and even Fantasia appeared a great distance away
following the end of World War II and their 1947 release of Fun and Fancy Free. The late 1940s was a
period of economic recovery for Walt Disney and his animation studio, finding
small success in the releasing of “package films” to help rebuild the finances
and experience that would eventually lead to a second classic age of animated features
for Disney seen in the 1950s. For this, their forth package film, comes a
picture featuring two primary stories featuring celebrity narrators, as well as
appearances by some of the studio’s star characters in what amounts to be a
short feature film that barely holds together.
Fun and Fancy Free
is an animated package picture featuring two primary shorter stories, one a tale
of a circus bear who escapes captivity to live in the wild, and the second an
interpretation of “Jake and the Beanstalk” featuring the classic characters of
Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, and Goofy. Loosely bound together with Jiminy Cricket,
of Pinocchio fame, as a sort of
master ceremonies an animated character roaming in a live action world serves
to bridge between the halves of the film. The fist half of the picture shares
the tale of “Bongo,” a circus performing bear who dreams of living free of his
demeaning confinement, narrated by singer/performer Dinah Shore. In this
extended short all the characters are mute, leaving Ms. Shore’s narration key to
the storytelling, as Bongo escapes from his circus train enclosure only to
discover he is ill prepared to survive in the forest and must learn to fight
for his new love interest from a more beastly rival.
Later Jiminy finds his way to a child’s party where
ventriloquist Edgar Bergen shares the tale of “Mickey and the Beanstalk” to the
birthday girl, Luana Patten. Following closely to the classic “Jack and the
Beanstalk” story Mickey, Donald, and Goofy appear as poor, hungry farmers who
find themselves in a land above the clouds by way of a magical beanstalk. There
our heroes must rescue a singing golden harp from the clutches of an evil giant,
an act that would return prosperity their once prosperous valley. Throughout
the tale we cut intermittently back to Edgar Bergen and his two silly dummies conversing
showcasing the narrators talents as the short meanders to a conclusion. In a
anticlamtic fashion when our heroes escape the clutches of the villain, the
giant leaves the audience with one last joke by interrupting Mr. Bergan while
roaming through modern Hollywood.
Of the package features to this point Fun and Fancy Free feels to be the most disjointed. Saludos Amigos and The Three Caballeros served as travel logs and lightly educational studies
of international culture, while Make Mine
Music at least had a theme of music as a story telling element. Fun and Fancy Free however lacks a
coherent theme. With Jiminy Cricket the feature attempts to sew together the
idea living with fewer worries in carefree happiness, as the title insinuates.
However, the two main stories have nothing actually in common. The additions of
Dinah Shore and Edgar Bergen, although they are talent in their own rights,
appear tacked onto the short subjects to add additional appeal to the marquee
for the feature. In the end, the picture is fine for the showcase of the Walt
Disney animators, products that are slightly better than their common short
subjects, but far from their pre-war quality in style and substance. It was
still some of the best character animation of the time, but for a studio
capable of far more, it does feel like a cheap product to call a feature for
Walt Disney.
That feature was in fact not much more than a stop-gap, an
inexpensive utilization of material with intent to keep the animators practicing,
producing a relatively inexpensive feature to earn profits with intent reinvest
in later, more lavish features. Disney and his animators had considered a Jack
and the Beanstalk retelling featuring studio face Mickey Mouse since before
WWII, and after the financial shortcomings of Bambi and Fantasia the
framework for “Mickey and Beanstalk” was in production before the attack on
Pearl Harbor indefinitely put the film on hold. Around this same time an
adaption of Bongo, a short story by Sinclair Lewis, was considered as a
possible circus animal based follow up feature to the successful and relatively
inexpensive feature film Dumbo. As
American Armed Forces stationed themselves at the newly finished Disney studios
in Burbank, CA and the nation entered the war, Bongo too was put on hold in the
writing stages as Walt Disney became dedicated to the commissioned propaganda
and training films for the American war effort.
Following the war Disney began to reestablish themselves
into feature animated films by copying a semi-successful package style first
practiced with their Good Neighbor projects, Saludos Amigos and The Three
Caballeros when they released Make Mine Music in 1946 which was especially
various original short subjects edited together under a theme. For “Mickey and
the Beanstalk,” much of the animation was completed before the war, but
revealed to be lacking the means to make it a feature film. Initially plans had
“Mickey and Beanstalk” paired with an approximately equal in length adaption of
“The Wind and the Willows,” but plans changed and it was combined with “Bongo”
which saw a somewhat rushed production since it needed no recorded dialogue for
animation.
The talents Dinah Shore and Edgar Bergen were made to add
box office appeal, as well as flesh out the film’s relatively short running
time in order to make the film suitable as a feature film. The 30 year-old
Shore was a famed singer of the day whose talents had led to brief appearance
in a handful of motion pictures and various radio and musical concerts. Here
she serves as an unseen narrator delivering the tale of Bongo via a story record
album Jiminy Cricket is listening to, which allows Ms. Shore’s expressive tones
and beautiful singing voice to tie together the silly story of a bear out of
his element. Edgar Bergen, however, received significant screen time as
narrator while also performing with his ventriloquist dummies. Famed for his
radio shows and various appearance in many motion pictures Bergen is clearly
very comfortable in front of a camera, albeit his time on screen does get in
the way of the far more interesting “Mickey and the Beanstalk.” His performance
is amusing, but ultimate unnecessary, lacking relevance and energy to help save
the picture.
For the first time in a Walt Disney feature film the animated
character voice talents receive on screen screen credit as Pinto Culvig, Clarence
Nash, and Cliff Edwards, voices of Goody, Donald Duck, and Jiminy Cricket
appear in the opening credits. Walt Disney reprises his voice work as Mickey
Mouse, a task he had been performing since Miskey first spoke in 1928. This
would be the final time Walt would do the voice work for his animated alter ego
on a regular basis, passing the work along to sound effects artist Jimmy
MacDonald. Walt would only return to voice Mickey again during the run of the
popular children’s program “The Mickey Mouse Club”, as an act of love for the
show’s material during a very busy period during the mid-1950s.
Just as abrupt as the movie begins the feature ends, leaving
a feeling of a rushed, unpolished film by Disney standards. The picture,
released in September 1947, did generally well with audiences, but suffered
once again from the critical let down of not meeting the high level of quality
some hoped Disney would have returned to after the war. In time the two halves
of the film would be better known as separate pieces airing on Disney television
programming.
Of the film’s two halves “Mickey and the Beanstalk” is
probably the more famous of the two as it features the studio’s biggest star alongside
of his perhaps more famous friends Donald Duck and Goofy. The short edits out
Edgar Bergen’s live action segments, and most of his narration, leaving in only
what was necessary which leaves moments of lengthy, awkward silence and odds
cuts and dissolves. However, many may not notice as baby boomers and later
generations would grow up with this edited version as their definitive version
of the cartoon.
Like Make Mine Music,
and Melody Time, Fun and Fancy Free would become a feature many Disney fans may have
never known about as the shorts were known better in pieces then in their
feature forms. Fun and Fancy Free
suffers more from package style than its brothers as the most disjointed of the
package film run. The Adventure of
Ichabod and Mr. Toad two years later would be similarly assembled as two
shorts butted up as one feature film, but its loose tie as literary works would
play better as a theme. Fun and Fancy
Free is interesting to view purely to observe how the shorts where
originally released, but the divorce of the two shorts stands better alone than
that lacking product this feature delivered to audiences.
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