After too many years of unremarkable “package films” and not entirely satisfactory experiments in live action and animation hybrids, Disney started to get their mojo back at the end of the 1940s. While The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr Toad isn’t yet a return to the single-story narratives of early favourites like Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), Pinocchio (1940), Dumbo (1941), and Bambi (1942), it was still a big step forward in terms of quality. The film in its component parts had been around for some years, struggling with setbacks and delays – the first story, an adaptation of Kenneth Grahame’s beloved 1908 children’s book The Wind in the Willows, had been pitched to Walt Disney by staff members James Bodrero and Campbell Grant as early as 1938, just after the release of Snow White. Work began on it (as an intended single story feature) in 1941 but the Disney animators’ strike of October 1941 caused Walt to rethink the company’s output and, after reviewing the animation already completed, under the direction of James Algar, decided to abandon the film.

With the Second World War at an end, production resumed in 1946 with animator Frank Thomas assigned to finish off the film along with Algar, though Walt had asked for the finished film to run no more than 25 minutes. It was shelved again when the company underwent some downsizing and Disney instead started adapting Washington Irving’s much loved The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, with Jack Kinney and Clyde Geronimi directing. Walt Disney had planned to pair up the two films with a two other stories, The Legend of Happy Valley and The Gremlins, based on a story by Roald Dahl, into a film to be called Three Fabulous Characters. The Gremlins never happened and The Legend of Happy Valley was redirected into Fun and Fancy Free (1947), leaving Walt no choice but to pair up the Graham and Irving adaptations.

The finished film featured the classiest voice cast in a Disney for a very long time – Basil Rathbone and Bing Crosby were brought on board for narration duties – and the truly gorgeous animation was just a glimpse of the triumphs to come over the next two decades. The pairing of the quintessentially British The Wind in the Willows and the very American The Legend of Sleepy Hollow proved to be a popular one on both sides of the Atlantic and elsewhere the two stories complement each other perfectly. Purists may perhaps find plenty to find fault with both stories but they can be safely ignored – liberties are certainly taken, but the film is still a huge amount of fun.

The Wind in the Willows is first out of the gate, narrated by Rathbone who introduces viewers to the irrepressible J. Thaddeus Toad, Esq (voiced by Eric Blore), an “incurable adventurer” whose enthusiasms invariably get him and his friends Angus MacBadger (Campbell Grant), Ratty (Claude Allister) and Moley (Colin Campbell) into all manner of scrapes. His latest passion is for the new-fangled motorcar, one rather attractive example of which he steals and drives amuck in. At his trial for car theft, he tries to defend himself using his horse Cyril Proudbottom (J. Pat O’Malley) but false testimony from bartender Mr Winkie (Ollie Wallace) has him sentenced to incarceration in the Tower of London for 20 years. Cyril helps spring him from clink, Toad makes good his escape aboard a speeding train, and he, MacBadger, Ratty, and Moley have to fight to get Toad Hall back from the greedy Mr Winkie and his gang of weasels who have taken up residence in his absence.

Eric Blore does a fine job as Toad and the ever-wonderful J. Pat O’Malley is given free rein to deploy his marvellous native Lancashire accent as Cyril Proudbottom the horse, an invention for the film. The weasels are an absolute riot, an inept but comical gang of ne’er do wells but the highlight is the jailbreak, the subsequent manhunt for Toad and his headlong flight from justice aboard a train, pursued by a gang of gun-totin’ cops. It’s one of the finest sequences that the Disney animators had crafted so far, dynamic, exciting and funny in equal measure. The climactic attempts to retrieve the deeds to Toad Hall and the running battle with those ridiculous weasels also has an energy completely lacking in Disney’s more recent offerings.

Sleepy Hollow has a markedly different look to Willows, more stylised, with the dulcet tones of Bing Crosby telling the story and singing a couple of songs – but even when just reciting prose, there’s a gently sing-song quality to his narration. The star of the tale is Ichabod Crane who, in October 1790, arrives in the small town of Sleepy Hollow in New York. Tall, gangly, deeply superstitious and altogether a bit of an eccentric, he takes up the post of schoolmaster. Ichabod charms the women of Sleepy Hollow, particularly the bizarre looking Katrina van Tassel, making him a target for the town bully Brom Bones. Jealous at seemingly losing Katrina to Ichabod, Brom sings him the local legend of Headless Horseman who is supposed to haunt the surrounding area on Halloween – that very evening in fact. Riding home, Ichabod encounters the fearsome Horseman causing the schoolteacher to flee in fear of his life.

Some the characters are rather different to the ones you might remember from the original story (Ichabod and Brom have largely been switched around for example) but that scarcely matters. While it’s not as manic as The Wind in the Willows and lacks some of its lunacy, Sleepy Hollow is still a very odd piece, full of weirdly designed characters (Katrina is almost freakish). And its coup de grace is the first appearance of the Headless Horseman, Disney’s scariest moment since Snow White’s evil Queen first showed her true colours.

Sleepy Hollow isn’t as strong, perhaps, as Willows – the mid-section gets bogged down with Ichabod’s wowing of Katrina and an interminable dance sequence – but it’s still a huge amount of fun and worth the time just for that terrifying climax if nothing else. The two stories complement each other perfectly and the package is much more enjoyable as a whole that many of the other multi-story films of the 1940s. Separated, the stories were issued as supporting featurettes and turned up on various Disney television programmes and as such became two of the best loved Disney’s of all time.

With The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr Toad you can almost feel Disney leaping feet first into a whole new era, shrugging off the humdrum post-war years and setting out its new stall. It’s exhilarating stuff and only the most pernickety of sticklers for literary fidelity will find anything to fault about it. Four months after it was first released, Disney followed it up with their first proper animated feature film since Bambi, the excellent Cinderella (1950) that marked a new beginning for Disney and their animated films.