1973 animated children's comedy, dir. Wolfgang Reitherman;
IMDb /
allmovie. They
sing and dance in the forest…
Yes, all right, I shouldn't expect much. Not only is it Disney,
it's Disney shortly after Walt died; and it does break from convention
by making all of its characters anthropomorphic animals rather than
formulaically adding animal sidekicks to stories of humans.
(Reitherman had also directed The Aristocats a few years earlier,
but I think this is the first Disney with no humans in it.) I know
people who love it, so I thought I'd include it in my overview.
But the structure and pacing are bizarre. All right, there are two big
action sequences, the archery tournament and the robbery of the
castle; but nothing leads from one scene to the next, and most of them
could be shuffled into a different order without materially affecting
the plot. Here's a funny thing, ha ha, now on to the next one. Little
John is basically Baloo from the Disney Jungle Book, only in
costume; and there's a family of rabbits presumably as audience
identification for the littles, but this means that they dilute the
known cast even further. Strangest of all, most of the musical
numbers – of course it has some – are jammed together into one
sequence.
There are some fine voices, but the animation looks cheap for 1973 –
closer to the contemporary Hanna-Barbera than to Disney's standard
much of the time, perhaps because large parts of it were retraced via
a rotoscope-like process from earlier Disney footage then put over new
backgrounds – and the whole thing ends up feeling uninspired to me.
Yes, you have this character trait, and you will show it to us again
and again, and apparently this is funny. (Regular readers know that I
have no sense of humour; but in many comedies I manage to find things
to laugh at even so.)
Compared with other Disney releases, one can see both why it was a
relative failure and why people like it in retrospect. This hero,
unlike the various Princes Charming, has some personality; he gets his
hands dirty. People who wanted another Disney just like the last one
didn't get it; there's a spark of originality here that hasn't quite
been ground out yet. But only a spark.
If you saw this as a kid and still love it, great! But otherwise I
can't really recommend seeking it out.
I talk about this film further on
Ribbon of Memes.
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