"The Martins and the Coys" segment of Make Mine Music is a hillbilly ballad of rivalry. All images © Disney. All rights reserved.

As our century -- the century of the cinema -- slides inexorably to its close, it becomes easier to assess the output of Walt Disney's films, and indeed time is already laying its hand on the more recent films that began with the studio's renaissance in the late 1980s. The golden age of Disney is acknowledged as that period of the shorts in the Thirties culminating in the production of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) and continuing until the economic inflation and collapse of the studio in the early Forties. Then came what I call the forgotten years, the period of the war and post-war years into which the package film Make Mine Music (1946) falls. This was followed by the silver age, a reinstatement of full length feature films based on European folk tales or classics beginning with Cinderella (1950) and concluding with The Jungle Book (1967), released a few months after Disney's death. The limbo years that followed, or the bronze age as it might be called, produced films of uneven quality and uncertain purpose, though The Rescuers (1977) stands out as exceptional. Then came the renaissance of 1984 under the new management of Eisner, Katzenberg and Wells, with hugely successful films -- economically at least -- in what perhaps may be styled the iron age. These films deserve a reassessment, but it is too soon for me to make such a heady venture into the New Disney. I prefer my Disney matured, and yes, experimental, for the Disney films from the earliest days up until Walt Disney's death are nothing if not endeavors to extend the boundaries of animation, and Make Mine Music falls almost exactly in the middle of Disney's animation career. It is a film which I hope to demonstrate is full of experiment, endeavor and courageous inventiveness with an undercurrent of melancholy and awareness of loss that is new in Disney. It is the abrasive juxtaposition of opposites which makes the film difficult for New Disney to come to terms with, to cash in on or relate to for commercial exploitation. It doesn't fit current Disney obsessions with the purchasing power of nostalgia tied to childhood.

The Amazing Forties
Looking back at the end of the golden age and the eight years that followed in the Forties, it seems to me astonishing that in one decade the Disney Studio should have moved from Pinocchio and Fantasia in 1940, through Dumbo and The Reluctant Dragon (1941) on to Bambi (1942), with a huge output of training and propaganda films including the brilliant shorts Education for Death and Der Fuhrer's Face in 1943. (1) In the same year both Victory Through Air Power and the first of the Latin American features, Saludos Amigos, were released. In the following year we saw the extraordinary The Three Caballeros, which was anarchic, hectic and made up of a wide variety of stories and ideas. Of course, Fantasia itself was made up of sections, so Make Mine Music follows on from an experimental, diverse tradition begun several years before. Song of the South was also released in 1946. The dismal Fun and Fancy Free (1947) preceded the enchanting Melody Time (1948), and one of Disney's most underrated films So Dear To My Heart (1949) was followed in the same year by The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr Toad. The decade ended with publicity for the forthcoming Cinderella of 1950. If we except the creative Thirties, is there any other decade that produced such extraordinary variety of both content and quality? Even the hyperactive Nineties, unless two more features are released before the millennium, will not be able to beat the fourteen features released in the Forties.