“Make Mine Music” is a program of ten shorts designed by Walt Disney for eighty-three minutes of frothy entertainment, done in a boyish spirit that won’t sit well even with the cupids on theatre ceilings. There is no particular tie between the shorts, so that at their end you’ll probably wait around for a feature-length movie which you may or may not get, depending on your luck. Each cartoon is based on the very lightest type of music, the average weight being “Roll Along, Blue Bayou,” with background singing, recitation or playing by famous people like Nelson Eddy and Benny Goodman, some of whom have tied up most of their careers with music that was lighter than their talents warranted. Half of the cartoons are dreamy fantasies using tango rhythm, realistic subject matter like everglades, cranes, cirrus clouds, Ballet Russe dancers all looking extremely pallid; the pace throughout is sickly. The other acts are in Disney’s traditional comic style, somewhat less imaginative and carefree than his average.
In “Casey at the Bat” there is some wonderful satire on rattling the pitcher and peppering the ball around the infield; “Peter and the Wolf” has two animal characters with beautiful souls, one of which—a nervous bird—moves, thinks and feels in the highly integrated way of the best Disney animals; Disney’s skill with cutting and animation keeps the story of the Goodman “All the Cats Join In” moving at an inspired clip; every now and then there is a sequence like the drunken hillbilly’s take-off down a hill done with a whimsicality no other Hollywood cartoonists achieve. This Disney, though, is choked almost to death by a bad taste that combines callowness and syrupy sweetness.
The only act that halfway earns the title of fantasy—the one concerned with a whale shaped like a Hoover vacuum cleaner, who has a miraculous, three-register voice and a yen to sing at the Met—is constantly embarrassing, even in its funnier moments. When Willie is first spotted at sea sunning himself, singing “Short’nin’ Bread” to a school of porpoise, his hail-fellow-well-met voice is cute, but the singing, supplied by Nelson Eddy, is so unblushingly in the style of Nelson Eddy rather than as Willie might sing it that you feel (1) sorry for Willie, who loses his character as a whale, and (2) that Nelson Eddy is taking advantage of the occasion to show what a whale of a singer he is. The porpoise beat time in a good rocking rhythm, aping revival-meeting Negroes, but their manner makes you ill at ease because it is a white-man’s notion of the way Negroes act (just as the first cartoon is based solidly on a phony popular attitude about hillbillies). The shot of sea gulls idling at the top of the Met transfixed by Willie’s singing is inspired, but having the people underneath covering their heads with programs is a hoary, embarrassing gag. There are a thousand sticky moments in this short: Willie singing to a packed house of angels; the repeated views of the uvulas in Willie’s throat; Eddy’s eulogy about what a miracle Willie’s and/or Eddy’s voice is.
The color and drawing in “Make Mine Music,” as in all of the Disney cartoons, are in a bon-bon mode and will satisfy the people who do the printing on wedding cakes, those who invented Mother’s Day, the people who write their names with a flurry and end them with flounces and curlicues, those who design theatre interiors, think a James Hilton novel is the way life should be and sometimes is, and dream up the production numbers at the Music Hall. Typical examples of the Disney madness for lollypop color are the Easter-egg uniforms that the Mudville players wear in “Casey at the Bat,” the butterscotch backgrounds that are used in most of the shorts, the silvery cottage the last of the Coys and Martins call home, the chi-chi valentines that open each act—the Disney people instinctively turn everything to prettiness, whether or not the purpose is to make a gag on toughness. In lollypop art, forms are made large, full, ovular, as though they were particularly good to eat, and they are finished off so perfectly you feel you can pick them off the screen. To make such forms calls for an artist who is happy, optimistic and uncomplicated beyond belief. Disney drawing is always done with a smile, apes conventional notions of what a shaggy tree looks like, a curtained window, and is made up of one fancy-pants curve after another—even Mickey is a repetition of simple curves that could be produced only by the most blissful taste.
Disney lets himself go into syrupy art more in this movie than the people who select the serious art sold at Kress’s. The high moments for this come in “Ballade Ballet” when the two dancers, Lichine and Riabouchinskaya, make like a seesaw on each end of which sits a cupid, and the closing episode in which the cupids embrace, slowly writhe around, and finally come to rest in the shape of a heart.
May 27, 1946