The Reluctant Dragon

Back in the desperate days of the famous 1941 animators strike, Walt Disney put out this bowl of cinematic hash, in hopes of bringing in a bit of money to save the studio. I guess it did, since the studio stuck around (and is a going thing today), but the fact that Walt’s remaining crew could do no better than this shows how much impact the labor action had. Most of this movie consists of documentary footage of author Robert Benchley’s purported visit to the Disney studio to pitch Kenneth Grahame’s titular short story, in a series of hokum setups that run the viewer through the animation process. The individual production process scenes reveal numerous aspects of the cartoon assembly line, but show little about how the actions are done; mostly, the presentations give a superficial view of the workflow. What garnered more attention, for this viewer, was the revelation that Benchley was such a soft touch. Who knew? Maybe the most revealing item in this picture comes when Benchley finally meets up with Disney himself. Walt, who in today’s retrospect exists as man of middle age on the cusp of being senior citizen (Disney was 65 when he died), looks shockingly young here; he would have been 39 when the movie was filmed, but seems more youthful than that. It is a reminder of how often those who achieve greatness do so at a remarkably young age. As for the embedded cartoons, it is notable that while there is still some of the studio’s magic touch to be seen in some of the shorts, it is also notable that the cartoons show the beginnings of the deterioration of the studio’s animation quality that would become so glaring in later films. There is a Goofy short that shows some of the old style, but is also rather boring, too. The Baby Weems segment—a cartoon composed entirely of storyboard-style drawings—is clever enough, but is also purposely not high in artistry. Finally, the title piece, while somewhat amusing, is also a distinct step down towards more abstract (more cartoonish, you might say) artwork than the studio was producing even a year or two before. The final impression is one of a work that was jumbled together in haste, and that focus on alacrity over artistry hampered the creative process. As it is, this film survives as a snapshot of a moment in history when the most innovative studio in the animation business found itself in a state of flux, a disruption that had ripple affects that, in some ways, are still felt to this day. It’s one for the archive, for sure, a film that those with a nose for the turning points in history will want to examine and ponder, even if casual viewers can probably skip it in favor of more rewarding fare.