Back when Disney mattered: The first major films

 



Lately, the Walt Disney company has been hitting the skids in many, many major ways: stock-price declines, dismal box-office, theme-park attractions getting bad reviews.  The masses are taking flight from the Disney brand -- and so are the best creatives.  It looks like a certain tepid semi-success called Encanto* will be the last artistically respectable product this company will come up with.

But a lot of real art has come out of Burbank over many years of hard work and passionate storytelling (including the straight-played parts of Encanto).  To wit, starting with the movies Uncle Walt trotted out between 1937 and 1940: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Pinocchio, and Fantasia.  

Here is one from Snow White, and another from the same film.

This is when Pinocchio tries to save Geppetto, and when he sees Candlewick turn into a donkey, much to our hero's horror.

And the Fox, the Cat and the Coachman prove to be as dark a set of villains as any we see in R-rated horror productions.

And as for Fantasia, I think the Toccata and Fugue in D Minor speaks for the whole movie. The pictorial elements here are actually from some of the great schools of modern art in that era.

*Actually, it managed $256,786,742 worldwide and $96,000,000 in the U.S. in 2021-2022, and won accolades from many critics; even so, in today's money and other terms, it made only a modest splash; these days, the company treats it as something of a family embarrassment. 

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