The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad 1949
I have been on a Disney kick the last couple of years, joining the Disney Movie Club, getting Disney Movie Reward points, and redeeming the digital copies of the movies I buy to have a pretty good online library. I do not intend to buy all of the main Disney animated movies (the “canon"), but I want to get the best ones. There are over 50 movies which I ranked by averaging scores I found online. Some of the worst rated movies are the compilation movies of the 1940’s when Disney would put together some shorter animated movies to make a feature release. However, the highest rated of those is usually The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad an unfortunate pairing of “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and a short about Mr. Toad from “The Wind in the Willows.” Still, it ranks up around No. 30 on the list, putting it in company of some movies I have liked like Bolt, Hercules, Lilo and Stitch and The Emperor’s New Groove. Those aren’t Disney’s top tier, but they are good movies that I am happy to own. So this movie showed up on DMR available for 900 points and it includes a digital copy of the movie (I try to avoid buying Blu-rays that don’t include a digital copy). Once I got enough points, I went ahead and got it (and it arrived with a slipcover which is a nice bonus).
Even combining the two shorts and adding a little bit of introduction and bridge, the whole movie is just over an hour (with almost no bonus features on the Blu-ray) and each featurette is about 30 minutes. The only thing I knew about the Mr. Toad story was Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride from Disneyworld as a kid (they closed that ride almost 20 years ago) so I thought that might be a climax of the movie, but instead the ride comes at the beginning and most of the story is about Mr. Toad’s self-destructive manias causing him to lose his fortune while his friends try to help him out. It’s actually pretty good with a lot of action and some good side characters, though Mr. Toad is not particularly sympathetic.
The second part is not as good. It is “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” a short story that I remember leaving me less than impressed. The headless horseman is great, but the story of Ichabod Crane really isn’t. The whole thing is told in narration (by Bing Crosby, not as big a draw anymore, but he does fine) which means the characters are mostly acting out what is being narrated, which is weak. And the story is mostly about Ichabod himself, showing him as kind of a jerk and eventually having him as a rival with a manlier man for the hand of a rich guy’s daughter. The headless horseman stuff doesn’t come in until the last five or ten minutes and has nothing to do with the rest of the story, except that it happens to Ichabod. And while it is a horror story and seems to end with Ichabod dead or disappearing forever (only his hat is found), I think to soften it they say that maybe he just moved to a different village. So you have this lame story about Ichabod, with a well drawn headless horseman sequence, and an unresolved ending. And there is a lame song. So that didn’t really work for me.
Written: 19 Nov 2017
Owned on: Blu-ray, DVD, Digital