Man With A Movie List

Director: Ben Sharpsteen Year: 1941 Run-time: 1 hr 4 min - This is an anomaly in Disney's early catalog (Fantasia excepted) for being a film in which plot is almost secondary. In fact, the plot doesn't do much to sell the film, but the high quality of the animation really makes it up for it. In fact, if it wasn't for the blatant racist elements (much more so than Pinocchio), this might have ranked up there with Fantasia as my favorite early Disney film. That said, those elements are pretty hard to ignore, considering they make up so much of the short run-time of the film.

Director: Ben Sharpsteen and others Year: 1940 Run-time: 2 hr 6 min - It's hard to know what to say about Fantasia , which has been a staple for me and my wife since early childhood, except to say that it holds up. On my most recent viewing, I found the tempos and arrangements a bit slow and dull, respectively, but the animation astounding. Sorcerer's Apprentice  is overrated, the last three pieces are all astoundingly weird and awesome (including Night on Bald Mountain , which has already had an animated accompaniment on this list that's much more avant-garde). It made me realize how much I miss plot-less and sensory experiences in animated film. I love Studio Ghibli and Pixar and have been watching many of their films since they appeared on HBO Max, but those films usually have strong plots to keep kids engaged (kids have different attention-based needs I suppose).

Directors: Ben Sharpsteen and Hamilton Luske Year: 1940 Run-time: 1 hr 28 min - I find Pinocchio  to be alternately tragic and vaudevillian. As a morality tale, it's oppressive, with the protagonist falling headlong into all sorts of terrible vices from the get-go. (The famous lie-detecting nose bit is actually the most understated.) As a piece of Disney animation, it's chock full of wonderful details and expressions in just about every character. Certainly the lead character himself moves like no other cartoon before or since, but Jiminy Cricket also has a strange dance-like gait as well that makes this film entrancing to watch. - As a landmark in Disney's pivot towards serious, emotional feature films, it's probably more of a landmark than the pretty but asinine Snow White , but it's not even close to my favorite animated films.

Director: Ben Sharpsteen Year: 1938 Run-time: 8 min - Mickey's Trailer  is the first Disney film on the list - it came out a year after Snow White.  It's also the first color film on the list, premiering eight days before The Adventures of Robin Hood .  It's a fun trifle, not really holding a candle to the sheer trippiness of the earlier Betty Boop shorts, but it has a number of fun sight gags and Looney Tunes-esque shenanigans. - After Snow White, Disney films would move away from rotoscoping, and given Disney's dominance of the animation landscape and how we talk about it, rotoscoping would soon come to be associated with "laziness" on the animator's part.  Not to besmirch traditional hand-drawn animation, but rotoscoping can be amazing (Betty Boop is evidence of that).  I'm beginning to wonder if Disney was just eager to separate itself from the work that Max Fleischer was doing (and perhaps even the association with black jazz performers like...