The opening credits to Walt Disney’s 18th animated feature film tells us that it’s based on the 1938 novel of the same name by T.H. White, a book that chronicles the history of the early years of the legendary King Arthur and which Walt Disney himself had purchased the film rights to as early as 1939. And while it follows the basic plot of the book – itself the result of much conjecture and fantasy on White’s part – it ends up being a plotless series of vignettes that ends just as the story is getting interesting and which in the end amounts to very little indeed.

In this version of the Arthurian legend, the Once and Future King (the title given to the tetralogy that White eventually wrote – The Sword in the Stone was followed by The Queen of Air and Darkness (1939), The Ill-Made Knight (1940), and The Candle in the Wind (1958)) is an 11-year-old young orphan boy nicknamed Wart (voiced at various points by Rickie Sorensen, Richard Reitherman, and Robert Reitherman) who has been taken in by Sir Ector (Sebastian Cabot) and his hulking, dim-witted son Kay (Norman Alden). When the king, Uther Pendragon, dies leaving no heir, a sword appears in an anvil embedded in a stone, materialising in London for some reason and not in Wales or Cornwall as we might expect from more traditional versions of the story. The sword bears an inscription stating that whoever can remove the sword will become rightful King of England.

We all know from the countless retellings of the story that Arthur/Wart will eventually draw the sword and set up court at Camelot, with his Knights of the Round Table but we get to see very little of this. He does indeed draw the sword in the last few minutes but spends the rest of the time hanging out with Merlin (Karl Swenson) and his talking pet owl Archimedes (Junius Matthews), having all manner of wholly inconsequential adventures as the wizard turns him into a variety of wildlife (a fish, a squirrel, a sparrow) as part of his odd efforts to prepare the boy for his destiny. They also meet the evil witch Madam Mim (Martha Wentworth), a character cut from White’s revised version that appears in the 1958 collected tetralogy, which whom Merlin fights a magical duel (he then high tails it to 20th century Bermuda for a holiday in one of the film’s most bizarre turns). Eventually Arthur pulls the sword from the stone, is hailed king and the film just stops, rather abruptly, just as we reach the point where the story of Arthur starts to become interesting.

The Sword in the Stone was another box office hit for Disney but it’s one of their lesser animated features – indeed aside from the “package films” of the 1940s, it could be their worst so far, with unmemorable characters a couple of dreary songs (it’s all “one big medieval mess” as someone here notes) and a King Arthur who sports an American accent throughout and utters several Americanisms that are at odds with the setting but which most children wouldn’t have given two hoots about. The reason why he’s voiced by three different actors is that Sorensen’s voice started to break during production, so director Wolfgang Reitherman called on his two young sons to take his place – you can hear the change of actor in several scenes.

Bill Peet’s screenplay plays fast and loose with the established myths and legends – the eponymous sword in the stone arrives in old London town in a Biblical beam of light for example – and the business about Arthur transforming into various animals, though a part of White’s novel, is just weird and takes up so much of the film that you’d forgiven for wondering if Excalibur was ever going to put in its historic appearance – it’s a full 74 of the film’s 79 minutes before the title actually means anything and it starts to feel more like one of Disney’s True Life Adventures than a majestic Arthurian epic. It’s too shapeless and episodic to be really effective and recalls the flabbiness and lack of cohesion of those “package films” than any of the more recent films which favoured stronger narratives.

Technically the film is fine, though it continues with the Xerox animation technique pioneered on One Hundred and One Dalmatians (1961) and as such it has that sketchier look, once again lacking in the lushness of the earlier features. This wouldn’t really have mattered all that much if there was a bit more meat on the narrative bones, but the thin storyline and its choppy, episodic nature count against it and it emerges as a surprisingly dull film quite lacking in any of the charm one had come to expect from even the lesser Disney animated features that preceded it.

With Disney now focussing on the building of his second theme park, Walt Disney World in Florida (it wouldn’t actually open until October 1971, four years after Walt’s death), he decided that from now on animation production would slow with features only appearing every three or four years from now on. Which was at least more often than his older brother Roy wanted – he wanted the animation division to shut down completely and rely instead on re-releasing the previous films in perpetuity. After Mary Poppins (1964), which featured a sequence mixing animation with live-action, the animation team would return in some style with the marvellous The Jungle Book in 1967.

The Sword in the Stone had previously been adapted for radio by the BBC in 1939, with incidental music from Benjamin Britten, though only a single episode survives today. The Beeb mounted two more radio productions, in 1952 and 1982. In the original novel, Arthur and Merlin meet Robin Hood, Little John and Maid Marion, an episode excised here though Disney would stage their own retelling of that other great English legend – with much the same results – in 1973’s Robin Hood, and the almost inevitable live action remake of The Sword in the Stone was first announced in 2015 though as of February 2022, it’s failed to materialise.