Make Mine Music
Make Mine Music is an animated feature produced by Walt Disney and released to theatres by RKO Radio Pictures on April 20, 1946. It is the eighth animated feature in the Disney animated features canon.
During the Second World War, much of Walt Disney's staff was drafted into the army, and those that remained were called upon by the U.S. government to make training and propaganda films. As a result, the studio was littered with unfinished story ideas. In order to keep the feature film division alive during this difficult time, the studio released four package films including this one, made up of various unrelated segments set to music.
This particular film has ten such segments:
- The Martins and the Coys featured popular radio vocal group, The King's Men, singing the story of a Hatfields and McCoys-style feud in the mountains broken up when two young people from each side fall in love. This segment was later cut from the film's video release due to comic gunplay.
- Blue Bayou used animation, originally intended for Fantasia using the song Clair de Lune, which went on to inspire the name of a restaurant at New Orleans Square in Disneyland.
- All the Cats Join In is one of two segments to which Benny Goodman contributed. An innovative shot in which a pencil draws the action as it is happening, and in which 1940s teens are swept away by popular music.
- Without You is a ballad of lost love, sung by Andy Russell.
- Casey At the Bat featured Jerry Colonna, reciting the famous poem about the arrogant ballplayer whose cockiness was his undoing.
- Two Silhouettes featured two live-action ballet dancers, David Lichine and Tania Riabouchinskaya, moving in silhouette as Dinah Shore sings the title song. Animated backgrounds and characters add to the magic.
- Peter and the Wolf is perhaps the only segment to have any lasting cultural impact. Sterling Holloway narrates this adaptation of Prokofiev's composition about a little boy who goes out hunting for a mean old wolf, with each of the characters being thematically represented by a member of an orchestra (violins, flute, etc.).
- After You've Gone again featured Benny Goodman and his orchestra as four anthropomorphic instruments paraded through a musical playground.
- Johnny Fedora and Alice Blue Bonnett told the beautifully comic story of two hats who fall in love in a department store window. When Alice is sold, Johnny devotes himself to finding her again. The Andrews Sisters provide the vocals.
- The Whale Who Wanted To Sing At the Met was the bittersweet finale about a Sperm Whale with incredible musical talent and his dreams of singing Grand Opera. But short-sighted impressario, Tetti-Tatti, believes that the whale has simply swallowed an opera singer, and chases him with a harpoon. The film features radio star Nelson Eddy as all the voices.
Entertaining critique on Make Mine Music (you will be leaving this site)
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