So along with Mary Poppins The Sword in the Stone is also celebrating its 50th anniversary this year. I must confess I have never really got on with the T. H. White version of the Arthurian story. I remember having to force myself to read it when I directed Camelot once. Of the three novels in the series, Sword in the Stone is perhaps the best, and given that Camelot (Lerner and Loewe) had hit Broadway just before this film was made it is hardly surprising that Disney made the film. This is the penultimate Disney headed cartoon (the last was Jungle Book) and both were scored by the Sherman Brothers. This is not from their top draw, and really the songs resemble extended character introductions rather than musical items. Where Poppins is a success is because it is to all intents and purposes a broadway musical, Sword in the Stone doesnt hit that mark. There is an enchanted sugar bowl with attitude (Beauty and the Beast springs to mind) and there is yet another spell song - which is fun, but not exceptional. The animation is somewhere between the scale of Sleeping Beauty and the black outline style of Aristocats. It is not great animation, but nor is it bad, it feels like a rather expensive TV Christmas special. The subject just calls for something more magical than it gets, this feels like Disney slumming it. The plot seems a little rushed and really the story is about Merlin teaching Arthur rather than being about Arthurs realisation that he is the king of England. Interesting to note that the original opening (one of the documentaries on the disc) was to my mind a better piece of plotting. But I sense it would have created a more serious cartoon, and I am not sure that is what T H White would have wanted, so I suspect we went instead for the rather pantoesque Mad Madam Mim. She is more akin to the Cheshire cat and queen of hearts, than the Arthurian legend. Still the film is fun, the boy character (whose voice seems to be breaking in some scenes and not in others) is affable and Merlin suitably whacky. Archimedes the talking owl, is beautifully done, and long suffering almost of Gromit proportions, but not quite. The adventures as Arthur turns into a fish, a squirrel and a bird are all charming and here the animation becomes something more interesting, the Merlin and Arthur characters are still evident, but of course have different personas. The amorous squirrel was lovely, but did smack of Peppe Le Pew. It certainly isnt a classic Disney, but is a classic story and reasonably well told. Oddly I found myself connecting most with the story when Arthur placed his hands on the sword in the stone and a shaft of light bathed the scene - there was the magic, but just not enough of it and it felt like the scene was stuck in hurriedly to make sense of the film title. This magical contact with destiny is where I think the heart of a true Disney story lay, what we got was a lot of distractions in the form of some rather crass jokes about TV v. Cinema. Seen it, enjoyed it, dont need to rush out to see it again.
Posted on: Tue, 03 Dec 2013 18:44:24 +0000
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