La boîte à musique

Unable to initially return to making true animated features like "Pinocchio" and "Bambi" after the Second World War, Disney turned to making "package features". Like "Fantasia", these films strung together various shorts and featurettes into a feature-length anthology. Between their release in the 1940s and the DVD age, these films were rarely, if ever, shown in their entirety. Instead, the individual segments were re-released as stand-alone pieces, some of which became quite popular. It's understandable why this was done. Whereas the individual elements of "Fantasia" have a similar enough artistic vision to be kept intact as a single experience, the package features do seem like a line of random, individual shorts that have been strung together. As such, the films can seem quite uneven and somewhat unsatisfying collectively.

In particular, "Make Mine Music" stands out as being one of the most inconsistent package features. It consists of ten shorts, all relying heavily on music. Some of the shorts are fairly conventional, story-driven, while others are quite experimental. The real stand-out pieces are "Peter and the Wolf" (initially considered for a sequel/continuation of "Fantasia") and "The Whale Who Wanted to Sing at the Met". The stories are engaging, and they are absolutely charming, although "Peter and the Wolf" relies a bit too much on narration. It comes as no surprise that these two shorts became the film's most famous segments. Special mention should also be given to "Blue Bayou", which uses footage from a deleted segment of "Fantasia" that was to be set to Debussy's "Clair de Lune" (here, though, it's set to a love ballad).

Other segments, however, vary. "The Martins and the Coys", which was rather stupidly removed from the American DVD, is not bad but hardly memorable. "After You've Gone", an interlude featuring anthropomorphised musical instruments, means well but falls quite flat, ultimately appearing as not much more than filler. "All the Cats Join In" and "Without You" equally seem like experimental filler, yet both are more successful. "Casey at the Bat", on the other hand, contains too many self-indulgent gags and overly caricatured animation to be of any real artistic or entertainment merit, a fact not helped by Jerry Colona's obnoxious narration. The two other segments, "Johnny Fedora and Alice Bluebonnet" and "Two Silhouettes", are so cutesy that they become nothing but pieces of unadulterated kitsch.

Ultimately, the only people I would recommend "Make Mine Music" to would be the people who would only be interested in it - Disney fans and animation buffs. To everyone else, as with a good number of package films, it would probably be best seeing individual segments, which is how these films work best.