Wow, the last post was delayed by 3 days and I opened with an apology and explanation, I’m not quite sure what I can offer for the 6 month gap. Though we are returning with a slight whimper (as will become apparent) I must nonetheless thank Ian for keeping me honest and reminding me to continue. Please continue to use shame to keep me going!
The next short is “Blue Bayou”. As I did once for “Mickey Mouse on Ice” I’m just going to put my notes unedited here:
I miss Fantasia
The lyrics are such nonsense that I’ve had to look them up because I assumed I’d missed something, AND LOOK UP BAYOU because I assumed it had a meaning other than what I knew: it doesn’t…
So… that was just a Blue Bayou at night and then some storks or something (the wiki informs me they’re Egrets) met up and flew off? That was the whole short?
Hope that peek behind the
curtain is entertaining and shows how deeply boring this short was.
Following that snooze-fest is “All the Cats Join In”, the second short to be censored, although in this case it was only one shot that was redrawn. This was actually quite entertaining and is set to some upbeat jazz music. The plot itself is fairly simple, a boy drives to pick up friends and take them to a dance party at what appears to be a milkbar. Incidentally it is in a scene where we see one of the girls getting ready that we see the back of the side of a breast for a brief moment. Apparently this was so scandalous that it was redrawn for home release around the 2000s. The conceit of this short is that there is a pencil appearing and drawing in elements and interacting with the characters the whole way through. It draws the front of the boys car which then races off away from it, so it creates a traffic light and used the stop to draw the back of the car. The gags are mostly funny intentionally and it adds a real energy to the piece that was surprisingly infectious. There were a few jokes that were slightly cringy in 2025, but none that are bad enough to describe. Overall a good short.
“Without You” is so close to being as good as the best of Fantasia with its abstract imagery and sceneries smoothly transitioning into each other. If only it wasn’t a song with (English) lyrics and the animation was weirdly literal to those lyrics. On top of this, the imagery is so successful at conveying the loneliness the lyrics are singing about, that the presence of a vocalist actually makes it feel less lonely. A strange thematic own goal that I’m not confident anyone else will agree with. Ah well. It still takes the dubious crown of being the third best short in Make Mine Music.
“Casey at the Bat” starts so strongly with gorgeous oil painting still shots establishing the scene of a baseball game. We fade into a more traditionally animated story of an overconfident batsman who strikes out instead of saving his team. The two best jokes in this were the pitcher and catcher’s fingers contorting themselves to communicate, and the ball dancing on its own to avoid Casey’s bat at the end. Otherwise a pretty middling quality short with an extremely interesting start.
“Two Silhouettes” has a male and female ballet dancer performing a relatively simple duet, with abstract animation setting the scene around them. The catch is that the “two silhouettes” are matted out live action footage superimposed on the animation. The effect is a touch entrancing and the highest praise I can give it is that were it in Fantasia I’d think it was inoffensively mid-range. Here it remains middle of the pack, but solidly in the upper half.
“Peter and the Wolf” is another that is impossible not to compare unfavourably to Fantasia, and again it’s not the animation holding it back. As in the original composition by Prokofiev each character is represented by a different instrument and there is a narrator, but here the animation is already serving the purpose of narration. The narration in the end only serves to make the piece weaker as the delivery by Sterling Holloway and the writing just can’t compete with the power of the music combined with the animation. I feel like this is a lesson that Disney should have learned in Fantasia but perhaps the Peter and the Wolf story was too recent or the commercial failure of that film made Disney skittish to not have a narrator. Whatever the reason the simple story is made worse by over explanation.
Continuing the theme of comparison to Fantasia is “After You’ve Gone”, a lyricless jazz quartet has the instruments parade around to the music in an abstract and smoothly animated piece that is on the level of the “Toccata and Fugue in D Minor” from Fantasia. A stunning piece that almost made watching this film worth it.
Beginning the downward slide to the end of the package is “Johnnie Fedora and Alice Bluebonnet”, the story of a fedora and a bluebonnet that fall in love in the window of their store, are bought by separate owners, then finally find themselves reunited on the top of two horses. If it were 60 seconds it might be a touching short, but it drags on for far too long.
Finally “The Whale Who Wanted to Sing at the Met” is so dull that I barely took any notes. The whale is able to sing in three voices and once and uses that to fantasise about performing in the Met. In this fantasy the whale is able to stand on its fins and takes up the entire stage. This short is bizarre and honestly not that engaging. Anytime an animated short has me thinking about the realities of physics it has probably failed in the task of being entertaining and creative already. Unfortunately, while this package does have several truly great shorts, without the linking narrative of Saludos Amigos or the high concept of Fantasia it really fails to find a way to tie them together and makes for a viewing experience that is significantly less than the sum of its parts. I would not recommend doing the digging it takes to find a way to view the uncensored versions of this, or to view it at all.
Thankfully Fun and Fancy Free only has two segments, unfortunately it is not able to make either of them shine. The framing device of this film is Jiminy Cricket, seemingly just drifting around, coming across a dour doll and a “droopy bear” and deciding to play a record with the story of the circus bear “Bongo” on it. The story begins with showing how Bongo is a skilled and beloved acrobatic bear in the circus, but as soon as he leaves the stage he is chained and treated roughly (note: not cruelly, just cleaned by others and bailed up into a bed). He longs to be free and to roam
the wild, and eventually is desperate enough to escape. He wanders through the woods and eventually lackadaisically strolls with a coterie of woodland creatures accompanying him. When night falls he is disturbed by bugs and wind, then frightened off by rain and wolves. He realises that the woods aren’t as easy to survive as expected when he struggles to catch a fish to eat the next morning. He finds and falls in love with a lady bear, but insults her when he fails to realise that
After this Jiminy Cricket sees an invitation to a party across the road and secretly gatecrashes Edgar Bergen, who I assume was a celebrity ventriloquist at the time of release, entertaining a girl with his puppets. Bergen begins to tell a version of the Jack and the Beanstalk story starring Goofy, Donald, and Mickey. In this the valley was prosperous due to a harp but is sent into famine when a “shadow” steals it. In desperation Mickey trades their cow for “magic beans” which carry them and their house into the clouds. The find the giant’s castle and the magic harp and have to outwit the giant. Eventually they bring it back and the giant falls to its seeming death. One of the puppets is upset about the death of the giant and they console him that the giant never existed outside of his imagination. Then the giant lifts the roof off the live action house and asks if any of them have seen Mickey before proceeding to search through Hollywood. This summary leaves out the constant annoying interjections from the puppets and low energy songs.
Overall both these films were a slog to watch, despite some highs. I was having to note the few times I even smirked at the jokes as they were so poor, and the pacing was abysmal, especially in Fun and Fancy Free. It is obvious that many of the shorts were either left over from Fantasia or were ideas that didn’t have enough for a feature treatment. In both cases a lack of overarching connectivity also harmed the ability for the movies to say something overall. I am hopeful that the final two package films will be more interesting, at least in the animation, but what these made me long for was a return to traditional storytelling.
One more post before we are able to jump into Disney’s golden age.