Now, the first short that was eventually compiled into The Many Adventures actually postdates this one by a couple years, but on the whole the overall mastery of the new Xerox-based animation was pretty similar. Which makes sense, but… remember how I compared Pooh to Toy Story, in particular how making the story about toys in both used the limitations of the technology to their advantage? Yeah, not being able to do that is definitely a point of distraction in this movie. The way hair moves in particular, where chunks stay perfectly still while other bits flail wildly, kinda get the eyes to send the “whoa what’s up with this” signal for me.
Now, Sword in the Stone tries to get around this by not having too much in the way of regular people on screen (its predecessor, 101 Dalmatians, did the same, although I haven’t seen that in years to directly compare), and it mostly works. It also highlights the similarity with Pooh though, because despite by all indications being produced as a single film it certainly has the same story flow as shorts that were post-hoc stitched into a movie narrative. I gather this is somewhat an artifact of The Once and Future King, which it’s directly adapted from, but not entirely. There’s no real progression to the lessons Merlin is teaching Wart, just three repetitions of a basic theme of using brains over brawn. I guess you could sorta justify it as Merlin still trying to sell Wart on the entire idea of education by showing the value of thinking, but it’s still not really narratively satisfying.
And really that’s a good summary in general. If you break the film into roughly five different shorts (meeting Merlin in the woods, the fish short, the squirrel short, the wizard duel, and pulling the sword), they have their various strengths and are on the whole entertaining in one way or another. But unlike Pooh, the connective tissue or progression between them don’t really add anything to the final package. They also don’t hurt it mind, except in the very minor way of adding to the vague sense that the movie’s meandering along without a real point.
Basically it has the narrative of an Atelier game. Which I realize many of you have no idea what that means, but it’s so apt I feel obligated to make the comparison just so I don’t forget it later.
But let’s talk about the good stuff before we wrap up.
I think the squirrel segment is pretty great. The little animation touches of playing with the tails are nice, it’s just the right level of silly with the chasing, the peril feels a little less weird than having a five foot pike in a castle mote, you could probably write a thesis on how they managed to code the girl squirrel as attractive (and I’m sitting here a little annoyed I don’t know enough art to even scratch that topic honestly), and while fanfic as we understand it won’t exist for another 5 years or so after this came out, DAMN is the ending fanfic fuel.
I’m kinda surprised Madam Mim doesn’t have more of a following. Actually I’ve read that she’s huge in the Italian and Dutch Disney comics, which is completely unsurprising. Reading up on the movie for trivia and the like suggested people were really impressed with the designs in the wizard duel in general, and yeah even without the color coding it was always very obvious who each animal was. This is true of Wart as well, all of his transformations have his bedhead and scrawniness, but he has three set transformations, not half a dozen in a single sequence.
Rating- 6/10. Yeah I think that’s mostly it. I do really like a few things about it, it was a big favorite of mine growing up and I certainly was thinking of going to 7 after doing the plusses here, but yeah I don’t think that’s quite right either.
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