Pinocchio (1940)

I used to think Pinocchio was kind of creepy and weird. I still kinda feel that way. After all, this movie has not one, but three disturbing villains: Strombolli, the Coachman, and Monstro.  To enjoy this movie, you have to wrap your head around the idea of a living wooden boy who can spin his body around while his head stays stationary like something out of a horror movie.  He makes Honest John and Gideon, the talking fox and his bipedal cat companion, seem normal by comparison.  Pinocchio himself is humorously clueless and gullible, with a shorter attention span than Gepetto's goldfish, Cleo, making the audience as exasperated as Jiminy Crickett as he epically fails to teach Pinocchio any life lessons.  It's really Jiminy, our two-legged insectoid narrator, who steals the show with his songs, flirtations with wooden toys, and numerous asides.  The Blue Fairy is just deus ex machina. The plot goes as such: Blue Fairy brings Pinocchio to life, Pinocchio gets in trouble, Blue Fairy helps, Pinocchio needs info, Blue Fairy helps, Pinocchio dies, Blue Fairy helps. Actually, one of my favorite characters this time around was Figaro, the feisty kitten who may only say, "Mrrrrrrrrow?" with his mouth, but says so much more with his expressions.  Interesting characters, but built upon a very strange premise.

Art: beautiful backgrounds, smooth animation
Comedy: laughable ignorance (of Pinocchio), Jiminy flirting with toys, boys being boys, slapstick of Honest John and Gideon
Mood: cautionary, frightening at times, both light and dark moments
Music: some catchy ("Give a Little Whistle" and "Hi-Diddle-Dee Dee"), others memorable, beautiful ("When You Wish Upon a Star")

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937)

What's nice about this movie is that it's simple and it's classic.  It also has a stylistic simplicity compared to later works, emphasized by the use of rotoscoping (tracing live footage frames) for the Prince and Snow White.  Simple doesn't mean all happy, though; the anthropomorphic forest used to scare me as a child. The witch queen is jealousy and vanity exaggerated to the point of pure evil, making for an all-right villain, but very one-dimensional. Her minions are... a crow and a mirror? Kinda sad. Only the huntsman and Grumpy show any character growth, and the huntsman only appears for half a minute, max. Basically there's a lot of silliness between a sweet young innocent princess who loves to laugh and the titular seven dwarfs, bookended by the quest of a romantic prince and the queen's plots to kill the girl.  I mean, the ending features text that skips over months of story, only to reintroduce a "hero" we know virtually nothing about to save the day. Still, for all its simplicity, expect to tear up when Grumpy does; I always do. Not my favorite, but one I enjoyed as a child and still enjoy today.

Art: some rotoscoping, anthropomorphic forest
Comedy: lots of slapstick, fumbling over words, and animals doing cute things
Mood: mostly cheerful, with a few frightening and sad moments
Music: warbly soprano, memorable romantic and fun songs

It was fun to note that the dwarfs like to use the expression "Jiminy crickets!" which leads us to the next film, Pinocchio (1940).

Upcoming Disney Series

After working eight months at EPCOT, I got this crazy idea to watch all of the Disney animated movies in the order they were released, so I looked up the list on Wikipedia and saw that there are (yikes!) fifty-two titles from the Walt Disney Animation Studios, not counting all of the sequels and Pixar movies and whatnot. So I took out all of the 3D-animated ones and all of the ones that are actually collections of shorts strung-together, and these are the thirty-seven titles I have decided to watch:

1. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937)
   
2. Pinocchio (1940)
   
3. Dumbo (1941)
   
4. Bambi (1942)
   
5. Cinderella (1950)
   
6. Alice in Wonderland (1951)
   
7. Peter Pan (1953)
   
8. Lady and the Tramp (1955)
9. Sleeping Beauty (1959)
10. 101 Dalmatians (1961)
11. The Sword in the Stone (1963)
12. The Jungle Book (1967)
13. The Aristocats (1970)
14. Robin Hood (1973)
15. The Rescuers (1977)
16. The Fox and the Hound (1981)
17. The Black Cauldron (1985)
18. The Great Mouse Detective (1986)
19. Oliver & Company (1988)
20. The Little Mermaid (1989)
21. The Rescuers Down Under (1990)
22. Beauty and the Beast (1991)
23. Aladdin (1992)
24. The Lion King (1994)
25. Pocahontas (1995)
26. The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996)
27. Hercules (1997)
28. Mulan (1998)
    
29. Tarzan (1999)
    
30. The Emperor's New Groove (2000)
    
31. Atlantis: The Lost Empire (2001)
32. Lilo & Stitch (2002)
    
33. Treasure Planet (2002)
    
34. Brother Bear (2003)
    
35. Home on the Range (2004)
    
36. The Princess and the Frog (2009)
    
37. Winnie the Pooh (2011)

Here goes!