FUN AND FANCY FREE
A film review by Andrew Hicks
Copyright 1997 Andrew Hicks / Fatboy Productions
(1947) ** (out of four)
Disney has nearly exhausted its library of classic films. There aren't too many more old cartoon movies they can mass- market as Masterpieces You Have To Own Or Your Kids Will Never Forgive You. I think they may have finally reached the bottom of the barrel with FUN AND FANCY FREE, now being blitz advertised as a fiftieth anniversary fully-restored classic, the only feature length Disney movie featuring Mickey, Goofy, Donald Duck and Jiminy Cricket. Don't believe it -- this one sucks. Disney doesn't always have a Midas touch.
FUN AND FANCY FREE is the weakest animated film they've released on video yet, a collection of four almost equally- weak elements. We'll start with the prologue. Old Jiminy, brought in for no better purpose than to cash in on name recognition from PINOCCHIO, hops around an empty room, singing a song about how happy he is. The feeling isn't contagious as he talks straight to us and then pops out a record called "Bongo, a musical story by Dinah Shore." We yell to the screen, begging him not to put it on, but of course he does and we have to watch the first half-hour cartoon.
It's "Bongo," the story of a circus bear who is oppressed by his master and has no friends until he finds out he can fly with the help of a magic feather... well, no, it's not a complete DUMBO ripoff, because Bongo's instrument of redemption is his imagination. He dreams of freedom, of the day when he'll star in an original cartoon, and suddenly his cage is open. He wanders out into the open, eager to be one with nature, but this domesticated circus bear is terrorized by thunder, wild animals and the like.
Redemption is nigh for young Bongo, though, the same redemption dealt his rhyming-name counterpart Pongo from ONE HUNDRED AND ONE DALMATIONS -- he meets a woman. Bongo falls in love, as do all cartoon animals sooner or later, and in the predictable fashion, must fight off a bigger, jealous rival. But in the end happiness triumphs, and we get a failed song-and-dance number about how bears display their love by smacking their partners. Bears and Ike Turner.
Dinah Shore is narrating the whole time, by the way, in the same fashion as Bing Crosby's "Legend of Sleepy Hollow." That was one of the cardinal sins Disney perpetrated in the late '40s and early '50s, hinging on certain pop stars as the lone vocal contributors in animated featurettes of 30 minutes or less. It takes away the timeless quality; I mean, if Disney commissioned the Spice Girls to narrate and perform in a cartoon retelling of some classic story, where would that leave viewers watching 50 years down the road?
The same problem is inherent to "Mickey and the Beanstalk," which I remembered as being really entertaining. It wasn't, and we can thank Edgar Bergen for that. After Jiminy puts the "Bongo" record away, he heads across the way to Bergan's party, where Bergan entertains two ventriloquist's dummies and a little girl in pajamas who looks like she really, _really_ wants to go to sleep. Soon, so do we. Believe me, this is one party that could definitely use some booze.
He begins telling them the story of "Mickey and the Beanstalk," where three poor farmers (Mickey, Donald and Goofy) are at the end of their rope, with no food but one slice of bread and a kidney bean. I remembered fondly the scene with Mickey slicing the bean into almost-transparent slices, with Donald finally snapping and making a sandwich out of two plates and a glass, with Mickey selling their cow for some magic beans and Donald getting even madder and throwing the beans into a hole in the floor.
I remembered the beanstalk growing through the night, taking the sleeping farmers with them to the clouds, where the giant lives. I remembered all the rest of it, with the giant capturing them and locking them in a box with the singing harp (Dinah Shore again, damn the luck). What I didn't remember was that Bergan and his wise-cracking ventriloquists intruded into the story every few seconds with comments of their own. Maybe the version of "Mickey and the Beanstalk" I saw all those years ago had those exchanges wisely edited out.
Without the constant intrusions by Bergan and his party goers, the last 30 minutes of FUN AND FANCY FREE would be very entertaining, even if the giant is so cartoonishly dumb that he's annoying. With all that narration, though, we're constantly reminded we're watching a cartoon. The appeal of the good Disney films is that we can enter this animated world and feel a part of it. Bergan distances us from the magical world by reducing it to a bedtime tale, and consequently destroys what would have been the only good thing about FUN AND FANCY FREE. "Bongo" would have sucked no matter what. This is no masterpiece.
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