Although the Second World War was now over, Walt Disney was still reluctant to resume production on full length feature films and was relying instead on the “package films,” essentially animated anthologies. For 1947’s Fun and Fancy Free, he combined two shorter films that had been around the studio in various stages of development for some while. Both Bongo and Mickey and the Beanstalk were originally intended to be standalone features but never got that far.

It begins with Jiminy Cricket (voiced by Cliff Edwards) singing one of the film’s many undistinguished songs, I’m a Happy Go Lucky Fellow which was originally written for Jiminy to sing in Pinocchio (1940) but was cut out. The first half of the film, Bongo, is the weakest, a bit of a tired old retread of Dumbo (1941) to start with – the film was suggested as a sequel to that film early in its production – which is brought to animated life while Jiminy listens to a record of Dinah Shore telling the story. Bongo is a bear raised in captivity in a circus and who longs for the wide-open spaces. One day he escapes and after a difficult first night in the wild – he’s not used to the sounds, sights and presumably smells that greet him – his luck starts to change when he meets a young female bear, Lulubelle. After a misunderstanding, Lulubelle is whisked away by the bullying older bear Lumpjaw and the smitten Bongo has to pluck up the courage to win her back.

A brief live action interlude leads us into the second story, Mickey and the Beanstalk, a retelling of the story of Jack, is magic beans and his trip to the home of a giant who lives somewhere in the sky. Here, Mickey (Walt Disney) is joined by Donald Duck (Clarence Nash) and Goofy (Pinto Colvig) who we first see close to starvation in their dingy home. Mickey comes home with some magic beans – a scene where he buys them Honest John and Gideon from Pinocchio was animated but cut) that row int a monstrous beanstalk. When the trio climb it they find themselves in the castle of the oafish Willie the Giant (Billy Gilbert) and try to retrieve the talking and singing harp that Willie has stolen from the local village, plunging Happy Valley into gloom and despondency and make good their escape.

Mickey and the Beanstalk had begun life as The Legend of Happy Valley, work commencing in the wake of Fantasia‘s release in 1940. The Disney animator’s strike of 1941 saw production curtailed with only 50 minutes of footage completed. Similar problems befell Bongo, based on a short story by Sinclair Lewis. The final version of the script was completed and handed in on the day after the attack on Pearl Harbour, just as the Disney studios were requisitioned by the US military to help in the war effort with very little footage actually animated.

After the war, Walt Disney revisited the existing material and felt that the animation wasn’t up to the standard of a Disney feature (it’s actually rather good and certainly nothing to be ashamed of) but suggested that Happy Valley, now renamed Mickey and the Beanstalk, might make a good companion piece to an adaptation of Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows, instructing his team to set up a two-part anthology provisionally titled Two Fabulous Characters. At some point Walt changed his mind and took out The Wind in the Willows and paired in instead with an adaptation of Washington Irving’s The Legend of Sleepy Hollow in The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr Toad (1949), leaving Mickey in the company of Bongo.

Despite Disney’s misgivings, the animation in both halves is certainly up to snuff, but there’s a blandness to the proceedings, particularly Bongo, that makes Fun and Fancy Free one of the least memorable of the “package” films. Bongo in particular feels more like a showreel for the animators to show off their full arsenal of techniques rather than an engaging story in its own right. It quickly degenerates into a sappy romance, complete with cherubim cavorting around the young lovers as they float around on pink, heart-shaped clouds wile Dinah Shore warbles a love song on the soundtrack. It’s a curiously maudlin little tale that has a nicely scary villain in the shape of Lumpjaw but very little else. You’ll likely have forgotten it even by the time the next story was just halfway through.

The live-action sequence featuring Edgar Bergen is deeply odd. Bergen, a vaudevillian and ventriloquist, cuts a patronising figure as he entertains Luana Patten, from Song of the South (1946), at her birthday party with the help of his creepy puppets Mortimer Snerd and Charlie McCarthy. Poor Luana is saddled with Bergen and his dead-eyed companions apparently at the expense of any real friends – some birthday party this is, where the most interesting “guest” is the unseen gate-crasher Jiminy. It’s a very peculiar sequence that the film really didn’t need – they could have just cut from one story to the next without any need for any of this silliness.

Mickey and the Beanstalk is better, despite the considerable annoyance of Donald Duck exploding with rage (again) for absolutely no reason whatsoever every few minutes. The animation showing the beanstalk growing is as good as anything that Disney had done so far, a real tour-de-force of state of the art animation and the ending, in which Willie materialises in the real world, echoes that of Song of the South. It’s a somewhat more interesting story, full of action set-pieces, exciting chase scenes and some genuinely funny little gags. If Fun and Fancy Free is worth watching at all, it’s for Mickey and co’s adventures, not the drippy Bongo nonsense.

Fun and Fancy Free remains one of the least well known of the 1940s Disneys and for good reason. Mickey and the Beanstalk is fun (if not exactly fancy free) but as both films were later made available as standalone shorts, there’s very little incentive to sit through Bongo first. The Mickey Mouse story succeeded in Walt’s desire to see the character restored to previous levels of popularity though it would mark the end of an era for the world’s most famous animated rodent – this would be the last time that he would be voiced by Walt Disney himself. With restoration of feature length production just around the corner, the theme parks and the growing library of live action films to look after he no longer had the time for voice acting and so James MacDonald stepped in for future appearances.