Welcome to my weekly discussion of the animated films of the Walt Disney Studio. I’m proceeding mostly chronologically. The title comes from a quote from Walt, “I never called my work an ‘art’ It’s part of show business, the business of building entertainment.”
Title: The Reluctant Dragon
Year: 1941
Source materials: based on the story by Kenneth Grahame
Budget: $600,000
Box office: $960,000
Plot: Robert Benchley is at home, considering selling the rights of The Reluctant Dragon to Walt Disney. Benchley’s wife finally convinces him, so they drive to the Walt Disney Studios. There, she leaves him at the studio gate while she goes shopping.
Benchley takes a tour of the studio where he encounters several Disney employees going about their day to day work, including:
- The life drawing classroom.
- A voice recording session featuring Clarence Nash 1 and Florence Gill. 2
- A foley session for a cartoon featuring Casey Junior from Dumbo.
- The camera room, featuring a demonstration of the multiplane camera. Donald Duck appears on the camera stand to help explain the mechanics of animation and animation photography.
- The ink-and-paint department.
- The maquette-making department.
- The storyboard department.
- The room of animators Ward Kimball, Fred Moore, and Norm Ferguson. He and the audience are also treated to a preview of a new Goofy cartoon, How to Ride a Horse, the first of the many how-to parodies in the Goofy series.
Finally, Benchley meets Walt Disney, who is in the studio projection room about to screen a newly completed film. The film they screen is a two-reel (twenty-minute) short based upon the very book Benchley wanted Walt to adapt, The Reluctant Dragon.
The cartoon starts with an introduction by the narrator of the story. One of the main characters, The Boy, who is reading a book about knights and bloodthirsty dragons, is introduced. His father comes rushing by, claiming to have seen a monster. The Boy reassures his father that it was only a dragon, to which the father panics and runs to the village in fear.
The Boy then goes to the Dragon’s lair, where he is confronted not by a ferocious beast, but a shy, poetry spouting creature. Though surprised at seeing what a nice creature the Dragon is, the Boy befriends him. When he arrives back at the village, the Boy discovers that Sir Giles the Dragon slayer has arrived. He runs to tell the Dragon that he should fight him, only to be left disappointed when the Dragon announces that he never fights. The Boy visits Sir Giles, and it is revealed that Sir Giles is an old man. The Boy tells Sir Giles that the Dragon will never fight and they decide to visit him.
Sir Giles and the Boy visit the Dragon while he is having a picnic. It turns out that Sir Giles also loves to make up poetry, so The Dragon and Sir Giles serenade each other. The Boy then asks if he could recite a poem of his own. From this, he uses his chance to get a word in edgewise to shout at them to arrange the fight. The Dragon leaves but is persuaded back out of his cave when he is flattered by Sir Giles. Sir Giles and the Dragon eventually decide to fight, but as Sir Giles and the Boy leave, the Dragon realizes in shock that he has accidentally agreed to a fight and tries to tell Sir Giles and the boy that he changed his mind, but they ignore him and the dragon mutters to himself why he cannot just keep his big mouth shut.
The next day, the villagers gather to watch the fight. Sir Giles arrives waiting for the Dragon. Inside his cave, the Dragon is too scared to fight and cannot breathe fire. The Boy calling the Dragon a “Punk Poet” leads to the Dragon getting angry and eventually spitting flames. The Dragon jumps for joy as he is now ferocious. The fight ensues, with Sir Giles chasing the Dragon around with his sword and into the cave, where they drink tea and make noises to make it seem they are fighting. Out in the open, they charge at each other, creating an enormous cloud. Inside they dance, and Sir Giles reveals that it is time for the Dragon to be slain, but only for pretend, to which the Dragon gets excited. Sir Giles places his lance under the Dragon’s arm, then the Dragon jumps out of the cloud and performs a dramatic death scene.
The story ends with the Dragon being accepted into society. The film closes on Benchley and his wife driving home. She teases him for failing to sell the movie and that by dilly-dallying, Benchley missed his chance to sell the rights, with Disney having already produced a film.
Background: In 1941, the Disney Studios faced two challenges. World War Two had stripped Disney of access to foreign markets, which resulted in losses for films like Pinocchioand Bambi. Disney was busy making films for the War Department. The other challenge was an animators’ strike that had half of his work force on the picket line. So during the war, Disney made films that were a collection of shorts.
Changes from the Source Material:In Grahame’s story the knight who “fights” the dragon is Saint George.
Cast:
Robert Benchley 3 is best known for being, well, Robert Benchley. He was a noted columnist for Vanity Fair and was a radio personality. He was a member of the Algonquin Round Table. 4 He appeared in a few films including Alfred Hitchcock’s The Foreign Correspondent. He won an Academy Award for the short film How to Sleep.
Availability: You can watch the entire film on YouTube if you don’t mind watching it very tiny. There are a few DVD releases. In 2002, the original full-length feature was released on DVD in its original theatrical form (with the live-action studio tours) as Walt Disney Treasures: Behind the Scenes at the Disney Studio. The “Reluctant Dragon” segment is the main attraction, along with three other cartoon shorts, on the Disney Animation Collection Volume 6. 5 In 2014, the full-length feature version of The Reluctant Dragon was released in HD as a bonus feature on The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad/Fun and Fancy Free Blu-ray set.
Legacy: The Reluctant Dragon and Sir Giles make various cameos in Who Framed Roger Rabbit.
My take: I think any fan of animation should check this out. I have always been interested in behind the scenes in movie making. I got a chance to see this film recently on TCM and I found things like the multi-plane camera fascinating. The shorts themselves are very much in the vein of the other compilation films Disney was putting out in that time. It feels very much like a Looney Tunes short. And how great is it to watch the Goofy short?
Next Week: Victory Through Air Power
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