Make Mine Music – another of the “package” films that Disney were specialising in during the 1940s – does for contemporary 40s popular music what Fantasia (1940) did for classical. It’s a series of animated vignettes illustrating a handful of songs, featuring some of the most popular acts of the day. Very hit and miss, it’s still a huge step up from the South America duo of Saludos Amigos (1943) and The Three Caballeros (1944), boasting gorgeous visuals and much more fluid and impressive animation.

The version doing the rounds today is missing the opening segment, The Martins and the Coys, in which radio vocal group The King’s Men tell the story of a feud between two mountain families. The piece was later removed on orders of Disney’s executives who objected to the comical gunplay depicted, feeling that it was no longer appropriate. Strangely they had no such qualms about the non-comic wielding of a shotgun that turns up in the later Peter and the Wolf section…

Today, the film starts with Blue Lagoon, a somewhat maudlin close harmony piece that’s set to stunning animation, but which is a bit too soporific to really be memorable. It becomes clear very quickly that, for modern audiences, the pre-rock and roll songs are going to be the weakest link and this may be one explanation for why Make Mine Music is the only Disney animated feature not available, as of Summer 2021, on the company’s streaming service Disney+

All the Cats Join In is an altogether more spirited affair, a vibrant and atypical that has real energy, thanks not only to the innovative animation (which has the illusion of being drawn as we watch) but by the lively song by Benny Goodman and His Orchestra and vocal group The Pied Pipers. The brash, very un-Disney like animation (the designs recall the characters in the Archie comics more than the traditional Disney types we’d become used to) perfectly captures the energy of that emerging demographic – still to be named – the teenager. Some very mild female nudity managed to sneak through in 1946 but is missing in most current prints.

Without You, sung by Andy Russell, is again very maudlin and ultimately forgettable, and Casey at the Bat, is a recitation of a baseball poem by Ernest Thayer, performed by Jerry Colonna, apparently well known in the States but less so in non-baseball-playing countries. Which of course makes it hard for the uninitiated to care very much about it (it’s not particularly well done in any case), though it was popular enough for Disney to make a short sequel, Casey Bats Again, in 1954.

Two Silhouettes is a very brief and unremarkable piece featuring rotoscoped ballet dancers, David Lichine and Tania Riabouchinskaya, performing to a song by Dinah Shore which is over almost as soon as it begins, before we move on to one of the film’s two big set pieces. Peter and the Wolf features the only classical piece featured in Make Mine Music, set to Sergei Prokofiev’s marvellous 1936 “symphonic fairy tale for children.” It opens with the unmistakable voice of Sterling Holloway setting the scene by explaining about the use of different instruments to represent different animals. The story is familiar – young Russian boy Peter ventures into the forest, armed with a gun, in search of a wolf, accompanied by his animal and bird friends. Along with the final segment, the other showstopper, Peter and the Wolf features the most traditional animation though the wolf itself is a particularly nasty creation – not quite as scary as the witch in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) perhaps but not far off.

Two more disposable vignettes follow, After You’ve Gone, again accompanied by the music of Benny Goodman, this time with his Goodman Quartet and Johnny Fedora and Alice Bluebonnet with the Andrews Sisters singing the story of two hats that fall in love. And then finally we’re into the film’s most memorable pieces, The Whale Who Wanted to Sing at the Met, the bittersweet tale of Willie the singing sperm whale and his dreams of performing opera with Nelson Eddy providing Willie’s singing voice. The story involves impresario Tetti-Tatti who becomes convinced that Willie must have swallowed an opera singer and sets out to rescue him with tragic results.

Inevitably, Make Mine Music is a mixed bag – the improvement in quality all round from the South American adventures is noticeable from the outset and Disney’s animation hadn’t looked this good for some years. It’s a gorgeous looking film and even its least impressive sections remain extremely easy on the eye. It may not scale the artistic heights achieved by Fantasia, nor does it particularly bring anything new to the table but as a reaffirmation of just how good Disney could be, it hits the spot. Disney themselves liked the formula enough for them to take it for a spin again – twice in fact with Fun and Fancy Free (1947) and Melody Time (1948). Disney released the individual stories from Make Mine Music as separate short films over the next few years and they soon became staples in the company’s television programmes.

Disney seemed to have got their mojo back. It would still be a few more years before they’d really hit their stride with a sting of unalloyed classics that would run for decades from 1950 and there were still a few less than memorable films to come. But Make Mine Music showed that Disney was far from a spent force, still the pre-eminent providers of quality animation, made at a time when the company – and the world – was still taking stock after World War II. During the war, many Disney animators had been drafted and those left behind were pressed into service making propaganda and training shorts for the armed services and government. Thus, the package films were born, ones that could be shot quickly and with minimal crew. Make Mine Music was the best so far, although none of them have really stood the test of time terribly well.

For their next feature, Disney would push the limits of their live action and animation technique that they’d trialled in Saludos Amigos and The Three Caballeros and much earlier still in their short Alice films. Unfortunately, the result would prove to be just about the most contentious film ever to sport the Disney name…