Disney has a lot of animated movies and shorts out there.  The first volume of Animation Monday is going to focus on the films relased by Walt Disney Animation Studios.  By the time, I’ve gone through all of them, there will be 56 films in total.  Currently, there are 54 films but Zootopia and Moana will release during the series.  I went into a random number generator to determine the order that I will review the films.  There are some great runs of Disney movies and some dry spells and I wanted to break those up.  I will attempt to watch the films before review but some of the films are hard to find even on the Disney Movies Anywhere app.  Today, we start with the 8th movie released by Walt Disney Animation Studios.

The first movie up for review is Make Mine Music!  This movie is not really a movie.  It is a compilation of 10 short films.  The film was released on April 20, 1946 in New York City and nationwide on August 15, 1946.  The reason is was not a full movie but 10 shorter films pulled together was World War 2.  Almost all of the animation staff was drafted in the war resulting in a lot of unfinished ideas floating around the animation studios.  Walt Disney had to do something to keep the studio breathing during the war so he put together these 10 short films  and released them as one movie.  The 10 short films created a movie a little over and hour-long (76 minutes).  But it created a revenue stream to help keep the studio going until the animators returned from the war to create new feature-length films.

The film featured music from some of the best acts of the era like Benny Goodman, whose music was heard in the short All the Cats Join In and Dinah Shore, who sang the background music in Two Silhouettes.  The Andrews Sisters provided the music for the Johnnie Fedora and Alice Bluebonnet short.

The most popular short of the film was Peter and The Wolf.  The Disney short put the Russian story of Peter and The Wolf onto the big screen.  It tells the story of Peter who encounters a wolf in the forest.  Peter saves his pet duck from the wolf and then saves the wolf from hunters.

The other popular short was the telling of Casey at the Bat by Jerry Colonna.

Can I find references to this movie in the Disney Parks: References to this movie and the related shorts are difficult to find in the parks.  Originally, I thought that “The Wolf” from Peter and the Wolf was the wolf who appeared on rare characters days in the parks.  But that is the Big Bad Wolf from the The Little Pigs.

The only reference I can find is Casey’s Corner Hot Dog Stand on Main Street U.S.A. inside Walt Disney World’s Magic Kingdom.

That’s all we have for the first installment of Animation Monday.  My sources for my research of the movie were the Make Mine Music and Peter and Wolf Wikipedia pages.  Selected shorts from this movie can be found on YouTube.  The full movie is very rare and difficult to find.

Thanks for reading!