Review of Make Mine Music (1946) by Edith N — 04 Oct 2008

I'd give it another point if they'd left in "The Martins and the Coys," the original opening sequence to this film. However, it has been edited out of the US editions because of violence. Now, I remember seeing it when I was a kid; I don't remember it being anything more extreme than a lot of other cartoon violence. But Disney seems to have gotten squeamish about its past, despite the current violence in films such as [i]Treasure Planet[/i], arguably much scarier. (After all, the animation is more realistic, and the kid being threatened is much closer in age to the kids who would be watching the movie.) I mean, they left in Tetti Tatti harpooning Willie the Whale, which is not only kind of scary but [i]tragic[/i], you know?

There is no plot to [i]Make Mine Music[/i]. It is a collection of musical shorts not unlike [i]Fantasia[/i], though for the most part, it's modern music in [i]MMM[/i], even including the delightful "Peter and the Wolf," apparently Walt's own favourite from this movie. There's a couple of Benny Goodman sequences, for example--I prefer "All the Cats Join In"--and the Andrews Sisters do a love story between two hats. ("Johnnie Fedora and Alice Blue Bonnet." Really.) There is the ever-delightful Jerry Colonna (the March Hare) reciting "Casey at the Bat." There are several so-so numbers. And, of course, there is the "opera pathetique," as it's labelled, with the talented Nelson Eddy providing all the voices for "The Whale Who Wanted to Sing at the Met.".

I have a personal fondness, as mentioned, for "All the Cats Join In," but I think the best of the lot is "The Whale Who Wanted to Sing at the Met." First, one must admire the amazing talent of Nelson Eddy in this one. He had to produce voices in the full vocal spectrum, for starters. After all, Willy himself can sing in three voices. Further, Eddy also provided the voices for several female characters, including a Wagnerian soprano. I don't know about the seals and seagulls and things, of course, but there are a number of voices in the segment that don't even sound like they're by the same person. If I were rating this one section of the film alone, I think I would be forced to give it a nine or so, possibly even a ten. However, for every "Whale," there's a "Two Silhouettes," a mediocre animated work showing what might be, in person, a pretty decent dance number.

I think, however, that the other one most people old enough to remember seeing this when the Disney Channel played it a lot (rant taken as read at this point) is "Peter and the Wolf," which is a beloved but actually pretty lousy adaptation of Prokofiev's Soviet children's work of 1936. After all, the animators not only changed a lot of the basics of the story--in the original, Peter was not necessarily looking for the wolf when he ran into it, for example--but changes the ending to make it more palatable for American children. If it hadn't, I suppose it, too, would have been expurgated, Walt's favourite or no. Or perhaps violence to cartoon [i]animals[/i] is preferable to violence to cartoon [i]people[/i]. Hard to say, really--but remember poor Willy.

There are several Disney films along these lines, all released around the same time--World War II, in fact, when animators were busy with war work of one kind of another. We'll get to the others at some point, I'm sure. They're not the best Disney movies, even of their type, but I have old and fond memories of them, as I'm sure a lot of people my age do. And would even if the fine folks at Disney hadn't cannibalized them for specials for something like thirty years.