Production
In 1938 shortly after the release of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, James Bodrero and Campbell Grant pitched to Walt Disney the idea of making a feature film of Kenneth Grahame's 1908 children's book The Wind in the Willows. Bodrero and Grant felt that Wind in the Willows with its anthropomorphised animals, could only be produced using animation. Disney was skeptical however and felt it would be "corny" however acquired the rights in June that year. The film was intended to be a single narrative feature film with the title of the same name.
By early 1941 a basic script was complete. Along with a song written by the late Frank Churchill called "We're Merrily On Our Way". Although it was intended to be low budget film (much like Dumbo), Disney hired many animators from the prestigious Bambi (which was nearly complete) and production began in May that year. Within six months 33 minutes of the film had been animated. However the studio's ability to produce full-length feature films had been drastically diminished, because World War II had drafted many of their animators into the military and had cut off their foreign release market. Thus, in October 1941, Disney put the production of Wind in the Willows on hold.
Then in December 1941, the United States became embroiled in the war after Pearl Harbor was attacked. The US government then asked the Disney studio to produce several propaganda films to help rally support for the war effort. During this time, much of Disney's feature output was made up of so-called "package films". Beginning with Saludos Amigos in 1942, Disney ceased making feature films with a single narrative due to the higher costs of such films, as well as the drain on the studio's resources caused by the war.
Walt Disney and his artists felt that the animation of the cartoony anthropomorphized animals in Wind in the Willows was far below the standards of a Disney animated feature. They then decided that Wind in the Willows would be better off being part of a package film.
Walt Disney started up production again in 1945. Many scenes in Wind in the Willows such as Toad buying several cars before his allowance is cut off, Rat and Mole visiting McBadger in a Sanatorium, Toad making an elaborate escape from his bedroom and Toad tricking a washer woman into escaping from prison had not yet been animated. Therefore, in order to condense the story for the package film, Disney cut these scenes and completed the remaining animation.
Under the title Three Fabulous Characters they tried to pair it up with Mickey and the Beanstalk and The Gremlins. However, after The Gremlins failed to materialize the title was changed to Two Fabulous Characters. Then Mickey and the Beanstalk was cut from Fabulous Characters in favour of pairing it with Bongo under the title Fun and Fancy Free which was eventually released in 1947.
Meanwhile, in December 1946, Disney started production on an new animated feature film, an adaptation of Washington Irving's The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. However, the filmmakers found that the running time for The Legend of Sleepy Hollow was not long enough to be a feature film and was more suited to be a package film.
Finally, in 1947, Walt Disney decided to pair The Wind in the Willows with The Legend of Sleepy Hollow under the new working title The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad. Well-known celebrities Basil Rathbone and Bing Crosby were cast as narrators in order to provide mass audience appeal.
The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad was the last of the "package" films, and Disney returned to single-narrative features with 1950's Cinderella, and Disney would continue, despite the package feature, to produce independent shorts on a regular basis until the mid-1950s.
Read more about this topic: The Adventures Of Ichabod And Mr. Toad
Famous quotes containing the word production:
“An art whose limits depend on a moving image, mass audience, and industrial production is bound to differ from an art whose limits depend on language, a limited audience, and individual creation. In short, the filmed novel, in spite of certain resemblances, will inevitably become a different artistic entity from the novel on which it is based.”
—George Bluestone, U.S. educator, critic. “The Limits of the Novel and the Limits of the Film,” Novels Into Film, Johns Hopkins Press (1957)
“Just as modern mass production requires the standardization of commodities, so the social process requires standardization of man, and this standardization is called equality.”
—Erich Fromm (1900–1980)
“From the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”
—Charles Darwin (1809–1882)