5 JULY 1946, Page 11

THE CINEMA

" Make Mine Music." At the New Gallery and the Tivoli.

WALT DISNEY has, I think, suffered from being almost consistently overpraised. The word genius has been too frequently bestowed on this man whose amazing flair for combining movement, music and colour has resulted in so many amusing short cartoons and a few longer ones of which a certain sentimental charm has been the mainstay. The word genius sits heavily upon the living, however, well it may become the dead. It suggests that a man's work should be judged by the highest standards ; weighed and assessed with great deliberation. A Hogarth, a Daumier or a Goya might well be bowed beneath such an epithet. Poor Walt is definitely squashed. Remove the burden and he springs up again as a superb craftsman capable of giving us great pleasure, a technician who is for ever seeking new forms, a story-teller of no mean invention. In Make Mine Music we have Disney the popular entertainer, the showman with a drum and a bag of tricks. He gives us ten items in this cartoon revue, and of them six are good and four bad. A high average at the present moment. Something old and something new, something borrowed and something blue is a good recipe for revues as well as weddings. The something new in this film is the successful presentation of the ballad Casey at the Bat. This is a popular development of a technique of presentation he has been playing around with for a long time, and, although the baseball points escaped me entirely, I found the robust approach a great change. New, too, were the churning backgrounds for the unsuccessful episode of the two hats and the breath-taking skill and speed of the animation for the tune After You've Gone, which was admirably played by Benny Goodman. From the early Out of the Inkwell cartoons he has borrowed the idea of the pencil which sketches in the props, and used it with great success in All the Cats foin In. The old was well represented by the two items Peter and the Wolf and The Whale Who Wanted to Sing at the Met. These are excellent Disney, picture and sound-track swinging along to build up two more of his animal stories for our great delight. The scenes where the whale sings at the Metropolitan Opera House are Disney at his most fantastic and, except for the silly Tristran episode, at his most inventive. These items made me forget the something blue, which was just as well, because they are Disney at his most tasteless and insipid. He shows in this film that he is not afraid of being influenced by other people's work, and this may well give a new impetus to a talent which was becoming more notable for ingenuity than for anything else. There was a hint of the strip cartoon, an echo of Len Lye, a trace of the more subtle Surrealist painters, a flavour of the Rabelaisian French cartoonist Dubout. If he can assimilate such influences he may well come out of his rather small world of farmyard and fantasy to enter a new and more important sphere. If you have never thought Disney to be any better than he actually is, do not hope for anything quite as good as the Rite of Spring episode in Fantasia or expect the verve of the classic Donald Duck cartoons, you will be entertained by Make Mine Music. And even if you may sometimes wonder what happened to the early Disney of the black and white cartoons, 'you can at least be sure that he is not going to spring on you anything as awful as his pictorial version of the Beethoven Sixth Symphony or any of his beastly babies, either