Melody Time

Fantasia Jr., except a lot cornier. This animated feature presents another Disney anthology of mostly musical set pieces, but the song selections are generally not classical works, the animation tends to be more in line with the simplified, more stylized drawing that came into mode in the late 40s—to the detriment of the art—and the stories are loaded with plenty of hokum and old-fashioned ideas, with a certain amount of religiosity sprinkled in. (That may be three ways of saying the exact same thing.) In a society so insistently multicultural as we have today, a very cultural-ethnic-racial specific brand of mythmaking like this just wouldn't ever fly. Whether that’s a good thing or not depends, I suspect, strongly on your predisposition to root for one "team" versus another. From a pragmatic point of view, I doubt we’re really missing all that much without films like this, but I can’t dismiss out of hand the notion that a society with a dominant culture, one where everyone's all on board--even with some of the nonsense offered here--could at least move in the same direction. Most people seemed to like this stuff back in the day, and there is enough amusement here that some today would find it worth a look, but I suspect most modern audiences would find this flick's hit-and-miss nature reason enough to say no.