Animation Station: Should I Have Blogged About The Reluctant Dragon?

This is one of those ideas that I described as Blog Posts That Were Not to Be, one I’ve now decided should be, so a faithful reader of The Adaptation Station.com already knows the gist of it. I even practically reused a footnote. If you’re not interested in a more detailed version, I understand if you don’t want to read this. If you are interested in a more detailed version, great! After this, I’m going to do one more of those ideas as a full post and that’ll be it. My apologies to those who wanted more.

A long time ago I did a series of posts about animated Disney movies that consist of a series of shorts strung together. I dubbed them Disney anim-anthology movies. After I’d concluded the series, it occurred to me that I had left out a movie that fit that description quite well: The Reluctant Dragon (1941.) I justified the omission to myself on the grounds that (a) nobody besides myself seemed to be really loving the anim-anthology series and it was better that it ended when it did and (b) The Reluctant Dragon is more of a live action movie that contains animation. But it occurred to me not so long ago that if live action footage disqualifies a movie from being animated, my series on Disney’s anim-anthologies shouldn’t have included the Fantasia films, Saludos Amigos, The Three Caballeros or Fun and Fancy Free.^[1]This goes beyond anim-anthologies and to animated Disney movies in general. The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh begins with a live action sequence, and I’ve heard that even the storybook … Continue reading Still, I maintain that The Reluctant Dragon shouldn’t really count as an animated feature and I’m going to write about it the same way I wrote about Disney’s anim-anthologies to prove that it isn’t one of them.

Does that make sense?

No? Oh well. Here we go anyway.

Despite the title only a small portion of The Reluctant Dragon is based on the short story by Kenneth Grahame of Wind in the Willows fame. Most of it is a behind the scenes look at Walt Disney’s animation studio. I’m not sure if I’d call it a documentary posing as a movie or a movie posing as a documentary. (A docu-movie?) It actually reminds me of the fluffy behind the scenes promotional material you might see for a new Disney movie on the Disney Channel except a bit more adult oriented.^[2]The film gives no indication of the bitter animators’ strike that was happening at Disney around this time. I know what you’re thinking. Hollywood giving a sanitized portrayal of something? … Continue reading

The Reluctant Dragon begins with humorist Robert Benchley’s shrewish wife (Nina Bryant)^[3]She’s his shrewish wife in the movie, I mean, not in real life. reading a copy of Grahame’s book which her nephew has left behind at her house. She insists that her husband pitch the story to Walt Disney as an animated feature. Despite his protests^[4]This movie could have more accurately been titled The Reluctant Benchley, but I guess that would have been confusing., she dumps him at the studio to give the pitch while she goes shopping. Benchley is given a pass and a young guide named Humphrey (Buddy Pepper) who is supposed to take him to Walt Disney, but Benchley slips away from him to check out the art studio. Amusingly, he’s clearly hoping to get a look at a nude female model but all he finds is an elephant.

The Disney artists explain that they’re studying the real thing in order to properly caricature it, presumably for Dumbo. None of them are at all annoyed by this random guy^[5]None of them mention if they recognize him as a celebrity. interrupting their work. This is a recurring thing throughout the movie. The people at Disney are delighted to explain the process of whatever they’re doing to Benchley-though they do have some laughs at his expense. When Benchley starts going on about the supposed stupidity of elephants, one of the artists draws a caricature of him as one. This is another recurring theme in the movie. Throughout it, Disney artists keep making caricatures of Robert Benchley and giving them to him. By the end, he’s loaded down with the things.

Benchley wanders into a recording studio and witnesses the vocal work for a cartoon short being performed. The way the movie sets this up is quite funny. Opera is being played by an orchestra. Benchley sees a distinguished looking woman walk into the studio and is told by the man sitting next to him that she’s Florence Gill. “I heard her sing Margarita at the Metropolitan,” says Benchley, trying to sound knowledgeable. Then instead of singing, Gill starts making chicken noises in time to the music. She’s the voice of obscure Disney character Clara Cluck. The seemingly ordinary man next to Benchley gets up and performs with her by quacking and squawking. He’s Clarence Nash, the voice of Donald Duck. After the recording, Nash gives Benchley tips on how to do the duck voice.

Humphrey the studio guide finds Benchley and takes him back into custody. As he leads him across the studio lot, he reads boring trivia out of a notebook while Benchley ignores him and practices his Donald impression. This time, he gets carried away by the sound effects department and observes how they make the sounds for a scene of Casey Junior, the train engine from Dumbo. The scene we see isn’t from that movie though and seems to have been made specifically for The Reluctant Dragon. That’s kind of cool.

Avoiding Humphrey, Benchley ducks into the camera room. Up until now, the movie has been in black and white but here it switches to technicolor ala The Wizard of Oz. I love how Benchley curiously examines his undershirt to see its color.

He sees a demonstration of how the multiplane camera gives depth to animated backgrounds, using one that I believe is from Bambi.

Then he sees a demonstration of animation photography and learns about how drawings are made to look like they’re moving, using a scene of Donald Duck who seems to come to life and interact with Benchley.

Humphrey’s voice is heard over the PA system, telling Benchley to come to Walt Disney’s office. Benchley still wants to escape from Humphrey though and… I’m not sure why. He’s annoying but not that annoying. Yet not only Benchley but everyone at the studio seems to hold Humphrey in contempt, given how they’re all happy to help Benchley hide from him. A woman named Doris (Frances Gifford) takes him to the Ink and Paint Department to do so. We get a montage of how the paint is made set to the tune of Heigh Ho from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

Benchley also sees the models of the characters that the maquette department makes for the animators to study.

Next, Benchley’s wanderings take him to a room where a bunch of story artists, who are working on pitch for Baby Weems, a cartoon short about a baby boy, are studying a real one.^[6]The baby model is Jim Luske, son of Hamilton Luske, who directed many classic works of Disney animation. They explain to Benchley how storyboards work and give him the pitch. At first, this is just shown as the camera panning across the images as the story artist (Alan Ladd) narrates. Then the images are shot more like a movie and become gradually more animated though the segment never becomes entirely so. This corresponds to how one’s imagination slowly but surely takes over during a pitch meeting with storyboards. Well, I assume that’s what happens anyway. No one ever pitches storyboards to me. Anyway, it’s an interesting visual style and even if Baby Weems, which is about a genius infant who becomes a celebrity, much to his parents’ dismay, had been normally animated, it still would have been the most memorable part of the movie.

Having learned all the work that goes into pitching a story, Benchley is even more loath to go through with his wife’s idea. But the path away from Humphrey leads him into a room where animators are working. For once in The Reluctant Dragon, they’re real animators (Ward Kimball, Norm Ferguson and Fred Moore) who worked at the Disney company. Benchley sees some drawings they’ve done of Donald Duck versions of famous paintings.

Then they show him a preview of the Goofy cartoon on which they’re working, How to Ride a Horse. The jokes in it about Goofy being klutzy don’t do much for me but I really enjoy the ones about the horse being mad and deliberately sabotaging him.

After How to Ride a Horse, Humphrey catches Benchley imitating Pluto^[7]Don’t ask. and takes him to meet Walt Disney (played by himself) in a screening room. Before Benchley can share his idea, the short being screened starts and it’s…The Reluctant Dragon. The titular beast (voiced by Barnett Parker) is a cheerfully effete fellow who’d rather picnic and write poetry than pillage the countryside.

Fortunately for him, Sir Giles (Claud Allister), the knight summoned to slay him, is just as genial and pacific. The knight and the dragon come up with a way to satisfy public expectations of them without anyone getting hurt.

The Reluctant Dragon is a fairly fun cartoon. A lot of your enjoyment may depend on your tolerance for Parker’s vocal performance. Me, I’d probably find it unbearably annoying if the short were any longer but it’s amusing in small doses. I’ve got to say though the character designs and backgrounds all look very bland. In fact, that’s true of this movie’s animated segments in general. The most visually impressive one is Baby Weems and that’s mostly just storyboards! I was planning to write that if I were to rank The Reluctant Dragon among Disney’s anim-anthologies, I’d put it below Fun and Fancy Free and The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad but above Make Mine Music and Melody Time. That was mainly because Baby Weems is funnier than the funniest short in Melody Time^[8]I’d consider that to be Pecos Bill by the way. and The Reluctant Dragon as a whole is more consistently engaging than Make Mine Music with none of that anim-anthology’s weird pacing issues. Yet I hesitate in that judgement now because when Make Mine Music and Melody Time are at their most beautiful, they’re far more visually appealing than anything in The Reluctant Dragon.^[9]Also, Peter and the Wolf, my favorite part of Make Mine Music, might be better than Baby Weems.

But I don’t really think The Reluctant Dragon should be ranked among Disney’s anim-anthology movies despite it being in the same spirit or a similar one anyway. It’s really a live action movie with animation, not an animated movie with live action and I’m not just saying that because the live action footage takes up more of the runtime than the animated footage.^[10]I’m pretty sure it does anyway. I haven’t actually done the math. In the other animated Disney movies that contain live action footage I’ve mentioned, there’s a feeling that the live action stuff exists to prop up the animation. In The Reluctant Dragon, the animated shorts exist to demonstrate what they’re talking about in the live action parts. Don’t take that to mean I dislike the movie. Mind you, I’m not sure to whom I could recommend it. Most of the information on how animation is done is readily available on the internet nowadays. The 40s-style humor of the live action parts probably doesn’t appeal much to modern audiences and none of the individual cartoons, not even Baby Weems, is a comedic masterpiece. But I enjoy humor from many different decades including the 1940s and I found every one of the individual cartoons to be OK at the least and often funnier than that. Even the Casey Junior scene entertained me. If The Reluctant Dragon sounds interesting to you, I hope you enjoy it too.