A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Friday, January 17, 2020

The Sword in the Stone (Wolfgang Reitherman, 1963)


Cast: voices of Sebastian Cabot, Karl Swenson, Rickie Sorenson, Junius Matthews, Ginny Tyler, Martha Wentworth, Norman Alden, Alan Napier, Richard Reitherman, Robert Reitherman. Screenplay: Bill Peet, based on a novel by T.H. White. Art direction: Ken Anderson. Film editing: Donald Halliday. Music: George Bruns.

The last animated feature supervised by Walt Disney, The Sword in the Stone is often considered a kind of landmark in the eclipse of Disney animation from which the studio didn't recover until the late 1980s. The first novel in T.H. White's Arthurian tetralogy The Once and Future King, The Sword in the Stone had been a Disney property since 1939. The success of the Lerner and Loewe musical Camelot, based on the final two books of White's quartet, may have helped spur the studio to revive the project, but the result is rather unsatisfactory. There are some bright moments, particularly the shape-shifting duel between Merlin and Madam Mim, but the film has nowhere to go after the climax when Wart pulls the sword from the stone and becomes King Arthur, so the plot feels unshaped and unfinished.
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