MAKE MINE MUSIC (1946)
Article 5256 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 9-26-2016
Directed by Robert Cormack, Clyde Geronimi, Jack Kinney, Hamilton Luske, Joshua Meador
Featuring the voices of Nelson Eddy, Diane Shore, The Andrews Sisters
Country: USA
What it is: Musical hodgepodge

A variety of jazzy animated segments is shown.

During the late forties, Disney was a bit short of talent and resources, and got by by releasing movies that were largely ideas for shorts strung together. The end result here is something of a popular-music version of FANTASIA, though certainly it’s less ambitious. It’s something of a mixed bag; some of the more abstract mood shorts get lost in the mix, and others fall flat. There are definite highlights here, the most obvious being the last story, about an opera-singing whale who dreams of singing at the Met; he ends up being hunted by a musicologist who is convinced the whale has swallowed an opera singer. Nelson Eddy sings all of the parts in this one, and it’s quite memorable; I remember seeing this one when I was a kid. Of the rest, I was also very fond of the Andrews Sister number about two hats that fall in love, and I also like “All the Cats Join In”, an infectious sequence in which teenagers go to a dance that has such energy that the artists can just barely keep ahead of the action; a pencil is still drawing the action as it happens. When originally released on VHS, the opening segment, a rustic ballad about feuding hillbillies was omitted due to the gun violence, though I didn’t find the violence too upsetting; however, it is one of the weakest segments of the film.