These Disney “package” films were starting to get a bit tiring by this stage and thankfully, Melody Time would prove to be the last, at least in this format of a collection of songs by popular recording artists of the day set to animation. The subsequent The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr Toad (1949) would feature two proper storylines, a direction already tried out in Fun and Fancy Free (1947) and again hinted at here with two longer narrative pieces. There’s no particular over-arching theme discernible here, though two of the pieces concern American mythology – the rest are just an unconnected series of vignettes of highly variable quality.

Once Upon a Wintertime gets things off to a less than riveting start, observing a winter’s day in the life of young lovers Jenny and Joe and the misadventures they get themselves into. It’s uninspiring and instantly forgettable stuff, set to a mediocre tune by Frances Longford and, as a curtain raiser, it does little to instil much confidence for what’s to come. More interesting is Bumble Boogie, a manic piano-led rendition of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Flight of the Bumble Bee performed by Jack Fina at the keyboard and Freddy Martin and His Orchestra. The animation may be terribly literal (a bee tries to elude an anthropomorphised piano keyboard) but it has a manic energy about it that the opening segment sorely lacked.

The first of the film’s two more substantial pieces follows as Dennis Day the tale of legendary pioneer John Chapman in The Legend of Johnny Appleseed. The story will be more meaningful, perhaps, to American audiences, who might be better versed in the legend and for who the tale will resonate more acutely, and it is rather struck down with that oft-derided malaise that would come to mar many a Disney film over the decades, a surfeit of sentimentality. But it’s a nicely animated diversion and at least has a more narrative heft to it than most of the rest of the film.

Less agreeable, especially to those with long memories, is Little Toot, the tale of a young tugboat that wants to impress its father. Based on a story by Hardie Gramatky and featuring a song by The Andrews Sisters, it’s a re-run of the ideas and sentiments from Pedro, a story in the very first “package” film, Saludos Amigos in 1943. There the protagonist had been a determined young aircraft, here it’s a tugboat but essentially the story is the same. Pedro hadn’t been the best of vignette and this shameless retread is just as dull.

Trees follows next and features the film’s most gorgeous animation. Based on a 1913 poem by Joyce Kilmer, there’s no story here, just a series of beautiful images of trees seen weathering the changes of season. Layout artist came up with the notion of having the artists paint directly onto specially made frosted animation cells giving this section a truly unique look, one that Disney wouldn’t try to replicate. The poem is dreary and the musical adaptation by Oscar Rasbach and performed by Fred Waring and the Pennsylvanians is mostly awful but purely as a visual experience, it’s the film’s standout moment.

One of the recurring motifs in these “package” films is the presence of Disney’s most irritating character, the perpetually enraged Donald Duck. He’d turned up on Saludos Amigos, The Three Caballeros (1944) and Fun and Fancy Free and here he is again, as unfunny as ever, in what looks for all the world like an outtake from The Three Caballeros. He’s reunited with cigar-smoking parrot José Carioca and the Aracuan bird as he samples the pleasures of the samba, dancing to a musical accompaniment from Ethel Smith at the organ (she appears in the film in live action form). If you’re a fan of the fiery waterfowl then you’ll probably enjoy this but really it’s just another throwaway bit of fluff as Walt Disney and his team keep trying out their technique of combining love-action with animation.

Melody Time comes to a close with Pecos Bill, another slice of American mythology, recounting the story of the eponymous Texan legend, supposedly raised by coyotes before becoming the greatest of all cowboys. There’s more live-action here as Roy Rogers, his horse Trigger (“the smartest horse in the movies”) and the Sons of the Pioneers singing group (who perform the segment’s two songs, Pecos Bill and Blue Shadows on the Trail) tell a young girl, Luana Patten from Song of the South (1946) and Fun and Fancy Free, seemingly playing herself, the story of Bill, his horse Widowmaker and Bill’s attraction to cowgirl Slue Foot Sue. Again it may resonate more with those brought up on the legend but for those not, it’s an undistinguished piece that takes an age to go nowhere in particular. It suffered some censorship issues when Melody Time was belatedly released on video to remove any evidence of Bill’s smoking, necessitating the removal of a whole sequence involving a tornado during which Bill is seen lighting up using a lightning bolt. The version currently (as of summer 2021) available on streaming service Disney+ restores the cuts.

All of the “package” films tended to be mixed bags with some impressive little pieces sitting alongside an awful lot of mundane material, only adequately animated, that probably wouldn’t pass muster as standalone pieces – all of the stories were indeed released separately and were seen repeatedly on The Wonderful World of Disney television series, but had they started life as discrete releases, one suspects that they would have been largely forgotten by now, perhaps only the two longer pieces, The Legend of Johnny Appleseed and Pecos Bill particularly standing out.

Melody Time opened to what might best be described as “mixed” reviews and it hasn’t fared much better over the years. The music and animation often feel mismatched and the overall feeling is of watching a collection of offcuts and half-developed ideas with no sense of any over-arching theme. Coming just a couple of years before Disney revived the feature length narrative animated film to stunning success with Cinderella (1950) and at the tail end of this particular strain of the “package” film, it’s easy to overlook Melody Time. Sadly rediscovering it or finding it for the first time reveals a rather sorry affair that struggled – and failed – to find an identity or even a point for its existence at all.