Movie Odyssey Retrospective
The copyright to J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan resides in an unexpected place. In 1929, Barrie donated the copyright to the Hospital for Sick Children in London (now the Great Ormond Street Hospital) – the copyright expired in 2007 but a United Kingdom law grants the hospital copyright control to all public performances and commercial publications of Peter Pan in the U.K. in perpetuity. In the mid-1930s, Walt Disney drew up Peter Pan to be one of the films following Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) if that production was successful. A success it was, and Walt soon learned that the Hospital for Sick Children was a tough negotiator. The hospital dangled the rights in a bidding war between rivals Walt Disney Productions (nowadays Walt Disney Animation Studios) and Fleischer Studios (affiliated with Paramount, best known for the Betty Boop, Popeye the Sailor, and Superman short film series). Disney outbid Fleischer for the Peter Pan rights and story work began in 1939 with the intention of releasing Peter Pan after Bambi (1942).
Yet, as was the case with numerous Disney productions released in the late 1940s and early 1950s, World War II intervened. The preliminary work for the film saw the studio’s priority shift to propaganda and low-budget package movies, slowing Peter Pan’s production to a crawl until 1949 (it was the only non-package Disney animated feature permitted to continue production by the studio’s lenders, Bank of America, through WWII). Compared to where the studio was in the late 1930s and early 1940s, Disney’s animators were a depleted bunch. The Disney animators’ strike and, despite unionization, numerous uncredited staffers leaving for television animation hampered the studio’s ability to innovate character designs, background, and other processes – as would be the case for the remainder of this decade. Even if he wanted to, Walt could no longer attend to his animation studio as studiously as he once did. His growing company required attention from multiple fronts: supervision of the newly-formed live-action studio in the U.K. while finishing The Story of Robin Hood and His Merrie Men (1952) and The Sword and the Rose (1953); the creation of a live-action outfit in Burbank beginning with 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954); finalizing plans for what would become Disneyland; exploring a potential foray into television; and the increasingly erratic behavior from their distributor RKO’s Howard Hughes (more on this later).
In the span of rewatching Disney’s animated features, no film in that canon overseen by Walt Disney himself falls harder from the heights of my childhood appreciation to my adult lens than Peter Pan. A passage of twenty years in one’s life makes a hell of a difference – removed from my childhood, I now realize the central conflict in Peter Pan is not between the title character and Captain Hook, but Wendy’s internal conflict over growing up (which the film bungles). There is, of course, wonderful animation within and excellent voice acting that has left a positive impression even from those now-foggily remembered days of my childhood. But the morals the film attempts to draw are constrained by the title character’s enormous ego and the petty, sexual rivalry between Wendy Darling, Tinkerbell, and even the mermaids. This is not even beginning to mention how the film treats its American Indian characters – a depiction that remains the most disrespectful in perhaps any Disney film (and yes, that includes films that today’s Walt Disney Company would rather shamelessly never distribute). Before proverbially burying Peter Pan, let us first sing its praises due.
Peter Pan would be a far less watchable film without Captain Hook. Deservedly Hans Conried’s (1953’s The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T, 1970’s The Phantom Tollbooth) best-known role, Conried worked on his character intermittently for almost two-and-a-half years. Like Bobby Driscoll as Peter Pan, Conried did not take much time to record his lines (his voice acting – in Peter Pan tradition he also voices Wendy’s father, George Darling – is some of the best in the entire Disney animated canon). But over those two-and-a-half years, Conried went through several stretches of a few days or a few weeks in Burbank to be the animators’ model for Hook. Why in the world did the studio ask for so much of Conried’s time for animation reference work? One can chalk this up for a few principal reasons: the exodus of animator talent to other studios in Hollywood during and after the war, professional rivalries and varying artistic visions amongst animators, and the authoritative void left by Walt as he concentrated on other projects. Walt, during the studio’s “Golden Age” (Snow White to 1942’s Bambi), was the one who provided guidance, made many of the final decisions, and could resolve disputes among the animators. With Frank Thomas (Pinocchio in 1940’s Pinocchio, Winnie the Pooh in the Pooh films) in charge of Captain Hook, Walt had little guidance for the veteran animator and could not figure out how to balance the comedic and violent sides of Hook.
Thomas’ Captain Hook takes a page from his design on the Queen of Hearts in Alice in Wonderland (1951) – heavily exaggerated comical bodily movement. But unlike the Queen of Hearts, Captain Hook is decidedly lanky, making him the sort of character we do not worry too much about when physically attacked. It matters not whether Hook is facing down Peter Pan or the very flexible jaw of a very hungry crocodile. Hook’s facial expressions – during his most dastardly moment, but especially when absolutely terrified – achieve a hilarity that computerized animation has been unable to replicate. This is all masterful work from Frank Thomas, and it pairs wonderfully with Hook’s comic foil and first mate, Smee (voiced by Bill Thompson and character design by Ollie Johnston). The contrast – physically, temperamentally – make this buccaneering odd couple a match made in Neverland. There is some stupendous slapstick animation in Hook and Smee’s interactions that contemporary animators should take note of.
In her final significant contribution to a Disney animated feature, Mary Blair (Alice in Wonderland provided the concept art that set the aesthetic direction for the whimsical, storybook backgrounds of Peter Pan (Blair did minor work on 1955’s Lady and the Tramp). One can also credit Blair for the initial groundwork for the film’s character designs and color direction. The color in Blair’s mostly acrylic and tempera concept paintings (some pastel work) frame the mood of each scene – whether it is the mystical blues of the Darling children’s (eldest son John Darling voiced by Paul Collins, younger song Michael by Tommy Luske) London flight and the space surrounding Neverland at night or the purple dusk prior to a critical confrontation between Peter and Hook. And most of the colors she employed in her carried over to the final product. Often, one will hear Blair’s work described as “childlike”. I never quite liked that term, as it sounds dismissive and implies the films she worked on are purely for children. Blair was a consummate artist, a practitioner of modernism who fit her works to the narratives she was presented with. Following her resignation from Disney’s studio after Peter Pan, Blair took to freelance graphic design, but returned to the Disney fold to design “It’s a Small World” for the 1964 New York World’s Fair (the attraction moved to Disneyland following the fair’s conclusion) and various other murals at Disneyland and the other Disney parks. Blair worked on one final film – as color designer on Warner Bros.’ musical How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying (1967).
Peter Pan also marks the final time all of Disney’s Nine Old Men would work together. That select cadre – Les Clark, Marc Davis, Ollie Johnston, Milt Kahl, Ward Kimball, Eric Larson, John Lounsbery, Wolfgang Reitherman, and Frank Thomas – had all worked, in some capacity, on Disney animated shorts in the 1920s and/or ‘30s and on the animated features from Snow White onward. These nine were Disney’s most crucial (and among the longest-serving) animators. With Peter Pan complete, it would be Ward Kimball leaving Disney’s animated feature unit for some of its short films and its burgeoning television crew.
For Peter Pan, Kimball’s primary work on the film was on the Indian Chief. This now brings us to the numerous aspects where Peter Pan fails as a motion picture. Indeed, this is also a problem in Barrie’s works – these crude American Indian caricatures cannot be cut out of the original stage play and text without enormous alterations to the plot. Unfortunately, in this case, Disney’s Peter Pan hews closer to its source material than any other Disney animated feature before it. It results in arguably the most outlandishly racist depictions of any characters in any Disney movie (and to think some folks believe Dumbo’s crows to be the bottom of the barrel). The people that originally make up what Barrie described as the “piccaninny warriors” were supposed to be a catch-all for Aboriginal peoples in Australia and the indigenous peoples of the Americas.
But in this Disney adaptation, the animators based their stereotypical conceptions squarely on American Indians. For any parent or guardian reading this, this reviewer urges you to not let more impressionable children watch these scenes without a conversation addressing how overtly racist they are. Culminating in the repugnant “What Makes the Red Man Red?” (like all songs in this film, music by Sammy Fain and lyrics by Sammy Cahn), the Neverland tribe’s depiction hinges on this war dance – “noble savages” hellbent on a scalping. In song and dance, their broken English miraculously fades away as the film reduces their language to gibberish (“Why does he ask you, ‘How’?” and “When did he first say, “Ugh’?”). Not only is this tribe presented as violent savages, but sexist savages too as evidenced by Wendy’s exclusion from the song due to the “Indian Squaw” (June Foray far from her finest hour) character’s intervention.
Even more apparent to my older eyes nowadays is how stuffed Peter Pan is with sexist behavior. Written and adapted by men in the middle of the twentieth century, one might not expect, by default, an interesting or fair portrayal of women and girls in a film. But even in male-dominated Hollywood, one could find numerous examples of motion pictures of women playing fascinating characters – whether meek, hardy, or somewhere in between (see: almost any drama starring Bette Davis, Olivia de Havilland, Barbara Stanwyck, or others during this timeframe). From the opening scenes, the plot shoehorns Wendy as a motherly figure and imagines nothing else for her. Certainly, this is another limitation from Barrie’s works, but Peter Pan’s intentions when he technically abducts Wendy and the other Darling children are to secure a mother figure for the Lost Boys. Peter himself is dismissive of Wendy’s concerns (“Girls talk too much!”) and consistently pits Wendy’s budding sexuality against Tinkerbell’s (and, for several minutes, the homicide-curious mermaids). All of this might fly over the heads of younger children, but the film’s sexual jealousies are too obvious for people of a certain age to miss. Not that this Wendy Darling is complaining about her treatment. Despite Peter Pan’s lack of discipline and courtesy, she brushes off the behavior as childlike playfulness. Freud would have a field day with these characters.
Any sense of character of growth for Wendy is for naught thanks to her father’s final decision at the end of the film – affixing the ribbon on a turd sandwich of a screenplay. Even held in comparison against other Disney animated features in the decade to follow, Peter Pan’s thematic development is a disaster. This is a low the studio will not reach for another decade.
Tempering these failures, if just a bit, are two memorable songs at the top of the film and parts of the score. Played over the opening titles, “The Second Star to the Right” is the best song that Fain and Cahn wrote for Peter Pan. As the song most quoted by Oliver Wallace’s (Dumbo, 1963’s The Incredible Journey) incidental score, it also samples a bit of what will become Peter Pan’s theme. Making its most prominent appearance in the cue “On the Rooftop” (at 0:16), Peter Pan’s three-note motif and further development begins with a spry flute before being traded by various orchestra sections up into the film’s climax – an explosion of heroic brass as he defeats Hook for the final time. The other songwriting success is the iconic “You Can Fly, You Can Fly, You Can Fly!”. Accompanied by some stellar flight animation direction from Eric Larson, the lyrical arrangement between altos/sopranos and basses/tenors makes the song a rousing triumph. Wallace’s score keeps the song an outlier, as he rarely integrates the Fain/Cahn soundtrack into his compositions. As Peter Pan is not a film with wall-to-wall music like earlier Disney animated features like Bambi, Wallace has only so much time to develop his motifs. The waltz that begins “Mermaid Lagoon” begins wondrously, but other motifs interrupt its flow and any further progression. Not to say this is poor work from Wallace, but he is capable of far better than his work in Peter Pan.
Critical and popular reception of Peter Pan helped Walt Disney to forget the lukewarm reactions to and the production headache of Alice in Wonderland two years earlier. Walt seemed happy to help with promotion, appearing not only at the American premiere, but also the London and Mexico City premieres (the former while spending the summer in Europe supposedly supervising the company’s London live-action studio productions). He even appeared at the 1953 Cannes Film Festival, where Peter Pan became the first Disney film (animated or live-action) to compete for the top prize – at that time, the Grand Prix, as the Palme d’Or would replace it in 1955. In addition to representing his studio and team of animators at Cannes, Walt would be presented the French Legion of Honour – the French government’s highest honor for both civilians and military.
All this fêting could not hide troubles the studio was having with its distributor, RKO. Walt Disney Studios would not achieve major studio status until the late 1980s, but held a distinction in Hollywood as one of the most important independent production companies in town. Beginning with Snow White, Disney depended upon RKO to distribute its films across North America. The relationship between the two studios for the next few decades was professional, and notably hands-off from RKO. This stability became a thing of the past when eccentric business tycoon Howard Hughes bought RKO – which just sacked director Edard Dmytryk and producer Adrian Scott due to their refusal to cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) – in May 1948. Within a few weeks, Hughes fired ¾ of all RKO employees, trashed projects in the pipeline, and became known for excessive supervision on all in-house productions. RKO’s typical release schedule of thirty films a year dwindled to roughly ten a year – pivoting the studio towards more expensive productions (of which many were flops).
Disney’s clashes with Howard Hughes began with the short film Seal Island (1948), the first of what became the studio’s True-Life Adventures series of nature documentaries. Hughes refused to distribute the film nationally, believing that it was not commercially viable. For its Los Angeles and New York City release to qualify Seal Island for the Academy Awards, Walt Disney Studios distributed the film by themselves. Only after winning the Oscar for Best Short Subject (Two-Reel) did Hughes relent on Seal Island’s national distribution. Continuous clashes with RKO over the True-Life Adventures series through the late 1940s and early 1950s led Walt Disney – believing that RKO under Hughes’ leadership was circling the drain – to dissolve his studio’s relationship with RKO and form Buena Vista Pictures. Created shortly after Peter Pan’s release, Buena Vista was a fully-owned subsidiary of Walt Disney Productions that would distribute all of Disney’s movies henceforth. Hughes sold RKO in 1955, but the studio – the most unstable of the major Hollywood studios at this point – never recovered from his erratic mismanagement and ceased operations in 1959.
In numerous ways, Peter Pan was the last of its kind in the Disney animated canon. Already handling the television, theme park, and live-action filmmaking sides of his business, Walt’s supervision over his animated studio would only continue to hasten. The artistic sensibilities that had once defined the likes of Snow White, Pinocchio, and Bambi were never to return. The artistic shortcuts and narrative weaknesses of the animated features released up to Walt’s death were just beginning to appear. This diagnosis is not to say Walt’s namesake animation studio would never crank out something rivaling the Golden Age Disney films while he was alive, but that achieving such a feat would become much less likely beginning with the studio’s decisions made during and immediately after Peter Pan.
^ Based on my personal imdb rating. My interpretation of that ratings system can be found in the “Ratings system” page on my blog (as of July 1, 2020, tumblr is not permitting certain posts with links to appear on tag pages, so I cannot provide the URL).
For more of my reviews tagged “My Movie Odyssey”, check out the tag of the same name on my blog.
This is the twenty-second Movie Odyssey Retrospective. Movie Odyssey Retrospectives are reviews on films I had seen in their entirety before this blog’s creation or films I failed to give a full-length write-up to following the blog’s creation. Previous Retrospectives include Alice in Wonderland (1951), Godzilla (1954), and The Wizard of Oz (1939).
