Despite its reputation for taking disturbing stories like
“The Little Mermaid” and “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” and cutesifying
them for toddler consumers, Disney has produced some of the scariest sequences
in children’s cinema. Millions of kids remember the wicked queen from Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, the demon
from Fantasia, or Dumbo’s nightmare
hallucination giving them their first serious scare at the movies.
Such moments have always been my favorites in Disney films,
which is why my favorite of all the studio’s cartoons is the relatively
underrated The Adventures of Ichabod and
Mr. Toad. Disney’s short adaptation of Washington Irving’s “The Legend of
Sleepy Hollow” brings that story’s climactic chase between a cowardly
schoolteacher and a headless horseman to life with punishing intensity. The
horseman’s first appearance on screen with a blaze of crazed cackling, stinging
music, and a zoom that forces the viewer into his saddle is as scary a shot as
you’ll see in any film for young or old viewers. The subtle, windy, Halloween
night atmosphere that precedes it builds to that horror magically.
Most viewers come away from The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad remembering the chase scene
above all else. The film has a lot more going for it than that, particularly
some surprisingly memorable songs sung by Bing Crosby (“The Headless Horseman”
song is a Halloween carol that should have been), and even more surprising
considering Disney’s overstated reputation for diluting the classics, an
incredible degree of faithfulness to the original story. Crosby’s narration
even reuses a good deal of Irving’s text. And let’s not short change the other
terrific animated short that comprises The
Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad. Based on Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows, Mr. Toad’s wild
adventure enjoys the same painterly animation and extra-relish narration (Basil
Rathbone, to compliment a very British fairy tale) as “Ichabod”. The segment’s
Christmas setting makes the package great to split up and savor on our two most
popular national holidays.
A less beloved package film is 1947’s Fun and Fancy Free. An adaptation of Sinclair Lewis’s “Little Bear
Bongo”, in which a circus bear escapes to the wild where he falls in love, is
less eventful and artfully illustrated than the usual Disney cartoon. But that’s
why your remote control has a “next” button. The following cartoon short, “Mickey
and the Beanstalk”, is a big improvement with more atmospheric animation and some
of the old Disney spookiness back in the mix (in one delightfully demented passage,
Donald Duck tries to axe-murder a cow!). The cross-talking narration by too-precious
child actress Luana Patten, puppeteer Edger Bergen, and his wooden charges is
kind of annoying, though, as are the spell-breaking live-action interludes in
which they appear.
Disney’s new blu-ray edition of The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad is available solo and as a
package with Fun and Fancy Free. Ichabod is a startling upgrade from the
previous DVD edition, which suffered from washed-out color and an almost
constant invasion of white specks. The blu-ray intensifies color, wipes out the
vast majority of those specks, and maintains a healthy grain. The animated segments
of Fun and Fancy free are less textural
but still perfectly presentable. The live-action bit, however, suffers from so
much heavy-handed noise reduction it almost looks animated too.
The one big gap on the new edition is the lack of “Lonesome
Ghosts”. This 1937 short in which Mickey, Donald, and Goofy play amateur
ghostbusters against a quartet of spooks was the highlight bonus feature of the
2000 Ichabod and Toad DVD. It’s a
shame “Lonesome Ghosts” could not have received a similar hi-def buffing for
the new blu-ray (a few other minor extras aimed at very young viewers didn’t make
the transition either). In its place is an admittedly substantial bonus feature
film with material based in part on another Kenneth Grahame story. The Reluctant Dragon is generally more
concerned with showing off Disney’s new Burbank studio than spinning cartoon yarns,
but the live action backstage tour hops with cornball nostalgic fun (and looks a
lot better in hi-def than Fun and Fancy
Free). Because it shares DNA with “Mr. Toad”—and because the two films were
released as a Grahame-centric package in 1955—The Reluctant Dragon is a most appropriate bonus feature for this
blu-ray. I just wish Disney could have made room for the mere eight-minutes of “Lonesome
Ghosts” too. Nevertheless, the new edition of The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad is well worth checking out
for its vastly superior picture quality.
