Melody Time 1948
Mixed into the canon of Disney animated features that started with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in 1939, are a number of package films that take several shorter cartoons and combine them to get to feature length. Made with lower budgets during the 1940’s, most of these are ranked near the bottom, so I have never made a point of buying these and they weren’t easy to find since they were not popular. But with the Disney+ streaming service, now they are all available. Fantasia sort of falls into that mix since it is a number of shorts combined, but they are fairly cohesive since they are all set to classical music with no dialogue except to introduce each piece. Melody Time is similar in that each piece is mostly set to music, but some have more than one song, plus more talking, and seem more like cartoons with songs. One of the best of the group is “Flight of the Bumblebee” with a jazzed up version of Rachmaninoff’s classic piece set to some very good somewhat abstract animation. Most of the others tell a fairly straightforward story. Instead of classical music, these are set to “popular music” but most of these songs couldn’t have been that popular and other than Blue Shadows on the Trail and Blame It on the Samba, I hadn’t heard of these and most aren’t that good. Some of them have live action footage that seems out of place, though I guess it is kind of neat to see Roy Rogers, Trigger, and the Sons of Pioneers. They are okay for kids, but even kids would get bored with some of it. So it is a mixed bag and certainly not Disney’s best work. It is hard to be too negative about any of it since they are harmless enough, but B- seems a little too high, so I am giving it a C+.
Written: 18 Jan 2020