Melody Time (1948)
Disney Animated Classic Number 10
Starring: Roy Rogers, Dennis Day, Frances Langford, The Andrews Sisters, Fred Waring and the Pennsylvanians, The Dinning Sisters, Buddy Clark, Ethel Smith, Bob Nolan, Bobby Driscoll, Luana Patten, Dallas McKennon & Trigger- the Smartest Horse in the Movies!
Directed by: Jack Kinney, Clyde Geronimi, Hamilton Luske & Wilfred Jackson
Rating: ★½
Melody Timeis the fifth anthology package film made during the 1940s because of budget restraints and the Second World War, but to be honest I’m getting rather sick of them.
Sure Saludos Amigos and The Three Caballeros were good, but at least they were a mix of stories and musical numbers, whereas Melody Time is, as the title suggests, more or less various animations set to songs or instrumentals. And when someone does speak, the entire thing is in rhyming verse. It’s pretty dull, tedious viewing, and even though it has a short running time of an hour and twenty five minutes, it felt an awful lot longer than that.
Melody Time opens with the title song, explaining that it is time to swing along to a ‘happy land of sound where love is the thing’. In order to experience this, we are meant to ‘give our heart a chance to join in and sing’. I’m not quite sure what a song called Melody Time has to do with love and romance, but apparently it does. It also gets stuck in your head. And while we are on the subject of heads, the animation begins with a sentient paintbrush painting a floating face- who turns out to be the narrator- and three other floating ‘theatre mask’ faces (who are his backing singers). These creepy disconnected heads act as segues between the beginning and end of each specific section, by introducing each animation.
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| Scary masks sing at us... |
The film is in seven distinct segments, so because of this, I will write about them all in order. I'll try to get through them all as quickly as possible...
Once Upon A Wintertime
This is a Christmas themed short in which a man teaches a woman how to ice skate. Two rabbits join in on the fun as Frances Langford sings the song over the top. What starts out as cute and romantic soon ends in disaster as the ice breaks, leaving the woman and female rabbit in peril, as the slab they are standing on gushes towards a waterfall. Squirrels, bluebirds and horses work together to rescue the helpless damsels in distress, but the men are the ones who are rewarded with kisses. This cartoon is short, sweet and festive, works well at being romantic, and the animation is beautiful.
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| Once Upon A Wintertime is by far and away the best animation in the whole movie... |
If only the film ended here. I would have been happy, and would have rewarded the film with a high star rating. Unfortunately, there was still one hour and twenty minutes of the movie left.
And you have to trust me when I say that nothing else in the entire movie is as interesting as this first segment.
And you have to trust me when I say that nothing else in the entire movie is as interesting as this first segment.
Bumble Boogie
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| That poor Bumblebee... |
Freddy Martin and his orchestra decided to write a piece of music based on Rimsky-Korsakov’s Flight of the Bumblebee, and Disney chose to animate it. A bumblebee tries to escape a literal instrumental nightmare as musical instrument-looking flowers and a piano cobra try to kill him. That’s all that happens. It’s a bit psychedelic, but it is also a bit boring. This segment was originally cut from Fantasia. I can see why.
The Legend of Johnny Appleseed
This part goes on for way too long, but is quite interesting. It is based on a real person who, as the narrator describes, was the ‘mightiest of all men’. Johnny Appleseed (Day) was a pioneer/settler who wears a pot on his head and walks around America planting apple trees and befriending animals, including a skunk with a Mohican. He is encouraged to do this by his guardian angel (McKennon), who sings a song about how amazingly fabulous apples are. Johnny himself looks like a grown up version of Pinocchio, which is incredibly disturbing, but also eye opening. I always wondered what he would look like as an adult.
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| Johnny Appleseed really loves apples... |
The moral of the story is that Johnny Appleseed helped encourage settlers to build homes next to where he planted apples- so essentially he is responsible for deforesting America and destroying his beloved animals’ habitats. They don’t mention anything about killing Native Americans, but there are some ‘red skins’ shown dancing alongside the pioneers because according to Disney they were good friends…
Denial is a powerful disease.
Denial is a powerful disease.
In the end, after we are repeatedly told that apples are the best thing in the entire universe, Johnny falls asleep under a tree and dies. His spirit is then escorted to Heaven by his guardian angel, and it is revealed that clouds are supposedly apple trees in bloom, and that is how you know that Johnny is happy up there. It’s a bit odd, but I respect the fact that they tried to throw some spiritual themes into the mix.
Little Toot
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| Little Toot is a nicely designed character |
The Andrews Sisters sing a song about a hyperactive inattentive anthropomorphic tugboat whose bad behaviour results in the deaths of hundreds, possibly thousands, of innocent residents of New York City, because he crashes an ocean liner into several skyscrapers. For disgracing his father’s name, and as punishment for the manslaughter, Little Toot is then taken out to the middle of the Atlantic and left to die. Luckily for him, a storm hits and he manages to rescue a cruise ship, so he is welcomed back into the NYC tugboat community since everyone now hails him as being a hero.
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| Little Toot's 'accident'... Looks bad doesn't it? |
The moral of the story here is that you can be forgiven for killing innocent civilians- as long as you rescue other innocent civilians. Little Toot himself reminded me a lot of Pedro the Plane from Saludos Amigos, as he is cute and well designed, even if he does have a pig face and is a manic murderer. There are some terrifying buoys that lunge at Little Toot, but overall, this is a fairly interesting section that doesn’t feel like it goes on forever. Unlike:
Trees
Yes. Trees. Fred Waring and the Pennsylvanians sing a poem about trees. So in a movie that has already preached to us about the wonderment of apples, we are then treated to another segment celebrating vegetation. A tribute to trees. Seriously. I like trees as much as anyone else, but watching an homage to them doesn’t fill me with a sense of appreciation. The animation is pretty amazing, but because it is of a tree, it isn’t exactly stimulating.
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| Trees are just wonderful, aren't they? |
There is also another fairly spiritual conclusion to this one, as the poem ends by saying that: ‘poems are made by fools like me, but only God can make a tree’. My thoughts exactly.
Blame It on the Samba
Our very good friends, Mr Donald Duck and Mr José Carioca make another appearance, this time with the Aracuan Bird, a fictional bird first introduced in The Three Caballeros. They dance together on an organ after being mixed in a cocktail shaker and poured into a giant tumbler. The polka that they dance to is okay, and as bubbles fly around everywhere a real life organist (Smith) accompanies the samba-ing birds.
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| Donald and José certainly know how to have a good time together... |
Another tribute to Brazilian culture, the live action and animation works a whole lot better this time round, and looks much cleaner and smoother.
Pecos Bill
This is the part that stars Roy Rogers and Trigger- the Smartest Horse in the Movies. Now I don’t know who Roy Rogers is, but he is the person who narrates the story about Pecos Bill, with the help of Trigger- a freaky horse who ironically out-acts every single human being that appears with him in this section- including Roy Rogers.
The little girl (Patten) from Fun and Fancy Free, who obviously avoided being killed by either Willie the Giant or one of the frisky ventriloquist dummies, shows that she is a real glutton for punishment, as she is now hanging around a group of singing cowboys and an evil horse. First she has her birthday party alone with an elderly man and his ventriloquist dummies, now she thinks it is acceptable to hang around a campfire with a cowboy who describes a woman as ‘a true thoroughbred, fresh as dew on a prairie rose’. Will she ever learn?
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| Slue Foot Sue- fresh as dew on a prairie rose apparently |
Anyway, the first song, about how tumbleweeds chase each other through the sand dunes at night, is ironically incredibly boring. But slowly, surely, we are introduced to Pecos Bill, who instantly sucks on a coyote’s teet, smooches a horse on the lips and then becomes a cowboy. Are there other requirements of being a cowboy that I don’t know about?
Pecos Bill, along with his tongue kissing stallion aptly named Widowmaker, yodels, steals rain clouds, chases cyclones, attacks cattle rustlers, hunts ‘red skins’ (WARNING: second racist reference in a Disney movie) and basically single handedly creates every single Texas landmark. This is the point when we realise that this section of the film is actually an ode to Texas, and Pecos Bill is clearly symbolic. Of what I’m not entirely sure.
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| Pecos Bill can do just about anything... |
After doing all of this, Pecos Bill, meets Slue Foot Sue and falls in love with her at first sight, mainly because she is riding on a giant catfish, which is clearly meant to represent her riding something else. They quickly get engaged, but on their wedding day Widowmaker throws Sue off of him and onto the ground, but because she is wearing such a huge bustle she bounces so hard that she flies into outer space and lands on the moon. Not a nice way to go.
We then discover that the reason why coyotes howl at the moon is because Bill reverts back to his feral state and constantly howls every night for the woman he loves.
And on that rather depressing note, the film quickly and abruptly ends. And I was very glad that it was finally all over.
So in conclusion, after a rather rambling review, Melody Timehas some astounding animation, but because it visualises a terrible mix of songs, poems and instrumentals, the film fails to be engaging. I like the fact they added something a bit deeper to some of the segments, but sadly feel that the film didn’t need to be made. It is terrible and just doesn’t stick together, so it comes across as a disorganised hodgepodge of random short films that were shoved together and don’t belong in the same anthology.
Reminds me of Fun and Fancy Free.
Reminds me of Fun and Fancy Free.
On the plus side, I did learn how superbly wonderful apples are, and that trees are equally as amazing. There just aren’t enough films that celebrate the inherent glory of apples and trees.
Perhaps it’s time they made more..
Or perhaps not.
Perhaps it’s time they made more..
Or perhaps not.
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