**/**** Image
B+ Sound
A Extras
B+
directed
by Hamilton Luske, Clyde Geronomi, Wilfred Jackson
by
Bill Chambers Since the 1950s, mainstream audiences have
grown up
knowing Walt Disney’s Peter Pan as the definitive
adaptation of J.M.
Barrie’s play and its subsequent novelization (Peter and Wendy),
and
that’s a mixed blessing. For every thing the Disney does well, like the
swashbuckling, it does
something
horribly wrong, like compounding Barrie’s 19th-century
notions with
retrograde
values all the movie’s own. For instance, the English Barrie may have
regarded
Native Americans as exotic creatures by locating them in Never Land, but
it’s
Disney who immortalized them in literal red skin, then gave them a song
celebrating
their mono-syllabic cretinism:
When did he first say, “Ugh!”
When did he first say, “Ugh!”
In the Injun book it say
When the first brave married squaw
He gave out with a big ugh
When he saw his Mother-in-Law
|
Some traditions of the stage version have
been sensibly vetoed, others–such as the interactive “I do believe in
fairies” sequence–unimaginatively.1 For the first time in any
rendition of
the material, Peter is personified by a boy, because anything else
would read
too cryptically in this medium. Bobby Driscoll, Disney’s answer to
Shirley
Temple, provided both the voice and face of the title
character, and
Peter’s occasionally weaselly expressions predict the fall from grace
that
happened once Driscoll hit puberty and his munchkin features turned
malicious.
Truth be told, I have difficulty watching Peter Pan
without thinking of
all the misery that’s just around the corner for Driscoll, who was let
out of a
lucrative contract with the studio shortly after the picture’s release
when
Disney decided that was preferable to retrofitting the Treasure
Island star’s
persona for antagonistic parts. Driscoll, practically sprung from a
petri dish
on the Disney lot, did not do well on the outside, and his defensive
reflex
around jealous peers soon congealed into a pattern of juvenile
delinquency. He
sought refuge in drugs before landing at the Factory like part of some
show-and-tell for Andy Warhol’s fifteen-minutes-of-fame theory. There,
he dabbled
in experimental cinema, which unfortunately didn’t have the lasting
appeal that
substance abuse did; less than a month into his 31st year,
Driscoll died of a heart attack. With no one knowing him well enough to
identify the body, his remains were buried in an unmarked grave.
If anything trivializes Barrie’s
sentimental, convoluted rumination on growing up, it’s Driscoll’s
story, yet
his participation in this telling lends it a certain poignancy. I
wonder if,
as an actor particularly doomed by age, he identified with the role; I
wonder
if, over the years, he thought back on the irony and the autobiography
of it.
I’m sure he did. But all that’s academic, because the film’s surface
presentation of Peter is hugely unappealing. Vainglorious (he’s drawn
to Wendy
Darling because he’s the star of her stories), petulant (where to
begin?), and
an operator, he runs Never Land like the Kurtz compound, attracting
followers to
his nebulous cause because his unique gifts–the ability to
fly, eternal youth,
and, in this incarnation, lack of British accent–make him seem like he
has the
answers.
He even sits on a throne. Really, he’s a vampire who thrives on his
cult of
personality; there’s a reason that
movie was
called The Lost Boys. (Eh, maybe not.)
Peter’s characterization isn’t exactly a
departure from Barrie, except that his pompousness–at least on the
stage–is
leavened by femininity and Englishness, and Disney peppers Peter’s
speech with
insults, Americanizing him in the ugliest way. I like to think of
Ferris
Bueller as proving you can make Peter Pan empathetic, monogamous, and,
yes,
American, without demystifying him. I hate the way Peter treats his
Girl Friday
Tinker Bell in this film, mocking her ardour towards him by openly
flirting with
Wendy, shaking her like a pepper mill to sprinkle fairy dust on his new
disciples (and not
intervening when the youngest Darling mimics this), and swatting her
away like
a pest as she tries to save his life. Her fakeout death humbles him,
but only
momentarily–the 2002 sequel, Return to Never Land,
bears out this
emotional continuity by having her go right back to being an NBA wife.
It’s
maddening to me that Disney will put this poison pill on Blu-ray while
continuing to suppress Song of the South: The
latter may be bluntly
offensive, but Peter’s unchecked hostility is potentially
much more insidious. Who wants their son taking his cues from this
meanspirited
“hero”? Disney’s Peter Pan is every two-timing creep I’ve ever known, and I
root for Hook to blast him out of the sky.2
Of course, Tinker Bell got her revenge by
becoming the bigger name via a wildly popular series of dtv
“prequels” that don’t yoke her to a boy. And she’s a brilliant
pantomime thanks to animator Marc Davis (rotoscoping model Margaret
Kelly),
although her poor body image in a bit where she measures her hips kind
of shows
you where this production’s head is at. Indeed, visually the picture’s above
reproach, opening up the play well beyond the parameters of the
stodgily
theatrical Hook and 2003’s lovely but
claustrophobic Peter Pan.
Never Land remains a conspicuously spartan utopia, but it has a depth of
detail
that rewards macro and micro appreciations, with Tinker Bell’s oversized
surroundings
revealing a dollhouse craftsmanship. Still, it’s the film’s awesome
moonlit
vision of Victorian London that’s become truly iconic, the image of the
Darlings poised on the minute-hand of Big Ben as sublime as anything in
cinema.3
THE
BLU-RAY DISC
I’m wary of praising Peter
Pan‘s
elegant 1.33:1, 1080p Blu-ray presentation after failing to notice the
detrimental amount
of
noise-reduction applied to Cinderella last
year. The problem with
these “restorations” of classic animation is that it’s perfectly valid
to
erase
the grain: Celluloid was a means to an end–a faithful reproduction of the original artwork was
always
the goal.
But grain is detail, like a dot on a pointillist painting, and when you
filter
out too much of it, you sacrifice, in Disney’s case,
the
meticulous craftsmanship that makes them the Fabergé of the industry: the creases in a
billowing
dress, the residual dust from a magic wand. I no longer have earlier
editions
of Peter Pan to compare this one to, but I don’t
trust the perfection of
it, the eunuchal smoothness of it. I do, however, laud the pastel
colours of this transfer, even if they don’t necessarily line up with
my
Technicolor memories. There’s a rococo quality to the movie’s palette in
HiDef
that very simply feels authentic.
The
7.1 DTS-HD Master Audio is more
aggressive than Disney’s typical home-theatre remix, though it
complements this
visceral film. The bomb blast that nearly kills Tink shakes the room,
while
Candy Candido’s famously growly voice–which Disney nerds will
recognize from Sleeping
Beauty and Robin Hood–grinds the
woofers
into a fine powder during
the Indian Chief’s big spiel. Only the music disappoints, sounding
bright and
hollow as it swells up in every corner of the soundstage. It’s much
more of a piece
with the
original mono mix, also on board, unadvertised, in lossy DD 2.0.
Recycled on
another track is the audio commentary from the 2007 Platinum Edition
DVD,
featuring Roy Disney, Jeff Kurtti (half of DVD producers
Kurtti-Pellerin),
animators Davis, Ward Kimball, Ollie Johnston, and Frank Thomas,
Leonard
Maltin, animation historian John Canemaker, Kerry and her Wendy
counterpart
Kathryn Beaumont, and Walt Disney hissownself. It’s a well-constructed
patchwork ultimately regurgitated with the benefit of
visual
aids by the remaining “Classic DVD Bonus Features.”
Exclusive
to the BD is an
introduction-cum-infomercial by Diane Disney Miller (1 min., HD), who
shares
that the Disney Family Museum is home to Mary Blair’s and David Hall’s stunning concept art for
Peter Pan,
here teased in too-brief glimpses that
made me
grateful for HD clarity–albeit irritated that such a thing as a
still-frame gallery has gone the way of the Dodo. Next, a selection of
“Deleted
Scenes
and Songs” offers Henry Calvin’s take on “Never Smile at a
Crocodile,” somebody else performing “The Boatswain Song,” and
scrappy reconstructions of alternate arrivals to and departures from
Never
Land. (At one point, Nana the Dog took the journey with the Darlings
instead of
just floating in their yard like the world’s saddest Macy’s balloon.)
The centrepiece of the new supplements, almost worth the cost of the
set by itself,
is “Growing Up with the Nine Old Men” (41 mins., HD), a first-person
documentary in which Frank Thomas’s son Ted goes around the country
interviewing fellow offspring of Disney’s famed Nine Old Men. He wants
to
compare notes, to hear which fathers brought their work home with them;
he asks
them what their dad carried in his pockets. It’s a melancholy,
strangely
haunting survey of a prosperous segment of the Boomer generation. Some
of them
had real “Leave It To Beaver” childhoods, complete with working
railroads on their property. Others were more like The
Tree of Life.
Previously-available
SD extras begin with
1998’s lacklustre “You Can Fly: The Making of Peter Pan”
(16
mins.), which sees the likes of Maltin and Davis toeing the company
line. (No mention of Driscoll’s fate, in other words.) “In Walt’s Words: Why I Made Peter Pan” (8 mins.)
abridges an
article Disney wrote for BRIEF MAGAZINE describing his childhood
brushes with
Barrie’s play, read aloud by a Disney soundalike not trying too hard and
introduced by The Little Mermaid co-directors Ron
Clements and John
Musker. “Tinker Bell: A Fairy’s Tale” (8 mins.) expands on the
evolution of Tink from a flashlight shone on the wall to the Disney
minx we know and love. The
ubiquitous Don Hahn tries to make it sound like childhood sex fantasies
about
Tinker Bell are normal while the unseen narrator debunks the
myth that
Marilyn
Monroe served as the inspiration for the blonde, busty pixie.
Tantalizing
excerpts from the 1924 silent Peter Pan, directed
by Herbert Brennon and
starring Betty Bronson as Peter, find the interviewees first
celebrating that
version’s ingenuity, then denigrating its primitivism. It looks pretty
cool, regardless.
Clement
and Musker return in “The Peter
Pan That Almost Was” (21 mins.) to account for a lengthy
development
process that included numerous false starts, almost always caused by
departing
too much from Barrie’s text. Lastly among the makings-of is a vintage
featurette, “The Peter Pan Story” (12 mins.), that aims to educate
with stentorian narration and M.O.S. shots of Disney staring
contemplatively at
a statue of Peter Pan. Black-and-white clips from Song of
the
South and Treasure
Island dressed up as historical footage thinly ice the cake.
Meanwhile,
filed under “Classic Music and More” is a rough demo of “The
Pirate Song” married to thumbnail sketches from that deleted sequence,
in addition to a lost song, 1940’s “Never Land,” that Richard M.
Sherman–the combover half of Disney’s legendary composing duo–took it upon
himself
to complete decades later. Paige O’Hara, the voice of Beauty
and the Beast‘s
Belle, performs the song in an accompanying video that hits every MusiquePlus
cliché on the checklist: purple evening gown, dry ice, rear projection,
lyrics
belted out every which way but at the camera, and a late-materializing
string
quartet. In another video, the cynical marketing creation T-Squad
performs a hippity-hoppity rendition of “The Second Star to the
Right.” Where are they now? Where were they then?
Rounding
out this “Diamond Edition” platter, thank Christ, are trailers for Planes,
Wreck-It
Ralph, Monsters
University, and Tinker Bell and the Quest for the
Queen, plus the
upcoming Blu-ray reissues of The Little Mermaid, Return
to Never Land,
Monsters, Inc., The Many Adventures of
Winnie the Pooh, The
Muppet Movie, and Mulan. Oh, and
there’s
a storyboard app (requires
a Mac device–ironic, since Mac hates Blu-ray), as well as an intermission
menu. And
did I mention the jump-to-a-song index?
Does
the whole thing come with a DVD and a
Digital Copy? Does Tinker Bell have wings?
1.
Others
still are adhered to, but don’t play. For instance, the Freudian
gimmick of casting the same actor as Captain Hook and Mr. Darling is
observed by having the great Hans Conreid voice both, yet this rotund,
bushy Mr. Darling bears so little resemblance to this
slender and manicured Hook that the synaptic spark of recognition never
occurs. return
2. For
the better part of the nineteenth and twentieth century, amputee was
shorthand (no pun intended) for villainy, the best efforts of William
Wyler aside. Peter took Hook’s hand, however, and fed it to a
crocodile–with that being the sum total of their rivalry’s backstory,
why am I on Peter’s side, again? return
3.
Of
course,
Peter’s such an asshole that he casually changes the time for the
entire city.
return
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