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.