"You see, Willie's singing was a miracle, and people aren't used to miracles." - Narrator, The Whale Who Wanted to Sing at the Met
Initial thoughts before viewing: Never heard of it, never seen it. This is, after all, a big part of why I'm doing this challenge: to fill in the gaps of my Disney knowledge and finally get around to watching all the features I had never seen before.
This movie is NOT available on Disney+ (much to my annoyance), so I watched it segment by segment on YouTube. I couldn't find a definitive reason online as to why Make Mine Music is not on Disney+, but according to the movie's Disney Wiki page, "the film's limited appearance on home media format makes it the rarest in home video availability of all the animated films in the Disney Animated Canon." 😕
Make Mine Music has a run time of about 76 minutes and is billed as "a musical fantasy in ten parts." If you've never seen this movie (which I'm betting is 99.9% of you), here is a link to the movie's Disney Wiki page where you can read the entire plot summary.
This movie is weird, guys. It's the first of the Wartime Era features that I can unequivocally say is bad. It's a jumbled mess of segments and stories, and they vary greatly in tone, style, and craftsmanship.
Tex Avery-style animation:
You know the classic Looney Tunes cartoons with exaggerated movements and screwball style animation? That's all done in what's called Tex Avery style animation, and it's known as the anti-Disney. So why oh WHY do so many of the segments in Make Mine Music have this style of animation?! No bueno.
Super strange themes:
A pair of anthropomorphic hats. Fighting hillbillies. A ballad of lost love. A rotoscoped silhouetted ballet. A singing whale that gets harpooned and DIES. These are just a taste of the odd subjects in Make Mine Music. None of them are charming, and none of them are particularly memorable (for the right reasons, anyway). They're plain weird.
I'm guessing that Make Mine Music is not readily available for viewing to the public because there is no demand to see it. It has no memorable original characters, nor does it feature any already established Disney characters like Donald Duck or Goofy to make audiences feel familiar or comfortable.
In short: It's a odd little hodgepodge of a feature, clearly comprised of leftover ideas and limited resources -- and it's not good.
My Rating: 2/10
Next up, Fun and Fancy Free!
My Rating Scale/System:
10 - Masterpiece / Award Worthy 🤩
9 - Almost perfect / Exceptional 🥰
8 - Great / Well-crafted 😁
7 - Good / Noteworthy 😊
6 - Above average / Memorable 🙂
5 - Solidly average 😐
4 - Mixed feelings / Mediocre 😕
3 - Uninteresting / Struggle bus 🥱
2 - Barely watchable 😡
1 - Failure / Why is this a thing? 💩
