Fun and Fancy Free (1947)

Fun and Fancy Free (1947)

Cast: Edgar Bergen, Luana Patten; voices of Dinah Shore, Cliff Edwards, Billy Gilbert, Walt Disney, Clarence Nash, Pinto Colvig, Anita Gordon. Screenplay: Homer Brightman, Harry Reeves, Ted Sears, Lance Nolley, Eldon Dedini, Tom Oreb; "Bongo" based on a story by Sinclair Lewis. Production supervisor: Ben Sharpsteen. Film editing: Jack Bachom. Music: Eliot Daniel, Paul J. Smith, Oliver Wallace.

I was 7 years old when Fun and Fancy Free was released, just the right age to be enchanted by it and to beg my mother to buy the album of Bongo, which played in my mind's ear along with the film when I saw it again. Among other things, it set me on a long love of Dinah Shore, a now underrated singer. (If you don't think she was good, check out her holding her own with two of the greatest voices of the 20th century, Joan Sutherland and Ella Fitzgerald, in a performance of "Three Little Maids From School" on YouTube.) But now I can see that the film, which comprises two featurettes, Bongo and Mickey and the Beanstalk, is hardly prime Disney. Bongo, though charmingly narrated by Shore, is a sort of reworking of Dumbo (1941), about the liberation of a circus animal, and it gets a little dull when Bongo finds love in the form of the flirtatious Lulubelle, with the usual kitschy Valentine motifs Disney animators were so fond of. Mickey and the Beanstalk is better, with some witty animation when the beanstalk grows through the night, lifting the sleeping Mickey, Donald, and Goofy high into the air, dumping them from their beds but swiftly rescuing them. There's also some funny stuff when Goofy finds himself atop an enormous blob of gelatin on the giant's dining table, and Billy Gilbert does some great voice work as Willie the Giant. The section is framed by a live action sequence featuring a party thrown by Edgar Bergen, Charlie McCarthy, and Mortimer Snerd for the very young Luana Patten, who had just made her debut in Song of the South (1946) and would work for Disney till the onset of puberty. Jiminy Cricket serves as a kind of bridge between the live action and the cartoon, but only Charlie McCarthy's wisecracks add much to a fairly unnecessary frame story. Both of the featured stories had originally been planned for feature-length films, but had been shelved during the war and suffered cutbacks during the uncertainty about how the studio would fare in the postwar years.