Classic Movie Review: The Reluctant Dragon
By Josh Spiegel
February 21, 2011
BoxOfficeProphets.com

Someone needs to tell him bread makes you fat.
The life and times of Walt Disney are truly fascinating, even if most of us have already concocted the man’s life in our heads thanks to plenty of help from the media. In this case, the media equals the Walt Disney Company, but the effect is the same. If we have a vision in our head of the late Walt Disney, it’s likely either extremely positive or extremely negative. He was either just like our favorite uncle, wearing worn jackets and always wanting to act like a kid again, or he was a rabid racist. There are few grey areas in the image we create of the man, but there’s more to the story. Disney was a perfectionist, and was single-mindedly obsessed with making his early movies and then his theme parks as great as they could be, no matter what the cost.

When I read the Neal Gabler biography of Walt Disney recently (a great book that I highly recommend), I was taken aback at how, after a certain point in his life, Disney didn’t really take the time or put in the effort into his films as he used to do. Disney often thought of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs as the best movie he’d ever make, and that every film coming after was just a pale imitation in some way of what he and his animators had done in 1937. Of course, many people today would disagree, but if you want to read about the behind the scenes work on such classics as Peter Pan, Cinderella, or even Dumbo, you might be disappointed at how little work he put into the films, compared with what he did in the past.

Part of this is due to the fact that he became obsessed with creating Disneyland. For the work he did in the 1940s, which was almost expressly not feature-length stories, Disney worked heavily with the United States government to create wartime propaganda, whether it was a friendly look at Latin America (there are two such films, Saludos Amigos and The Three Caballeros), or various short films describing how air raids were how America could win World War II. One interesting piece of propaganda, though, wasn’t about the war at all, but about the still-somewhat-fledgling animation company itself. Coming out at a very bad personal time for Walt Disney, in 1941, the film is called The Reluctant Dragon. The title of the film comes from a children’s story by Kenneth Grahame, the man who wrote The Wind in the Willows, which would one day become a Disney film.

The Reluctant Dragon is a story about a child who coaxes a friendly dragon into putting on something of a show for the townspeople, who assume that a dragon would be a fire-breathing beast. The film that uses the title is both an excursion into how animated films were made and an adaptation of the story. The former is far more compelling than the latter, and part of the reason is simple: for all of the work that goes into the shoddiest of animation, if it doesn’t look great — and even back then, Disney knew how to make animation look as evocative and beautiful as any piece of art in the Louvre — it doesn’t work as a story. More than most of the animated shorts that would be combined into package films in the 1940s for Disney (Saludos Amigos and The Three Caballeros are two such films), The Reluctant Dragon just looks too cheap to be loved.

But what comes before that final bit of animation — which takes up about 20 of the film’s 75 minutes — is fascinating. Some people, of course, won’t be interested to see how the process of creating full-length or even short animation works, but for those who are, you would be remiss in not watching this movie. The Reluctant Dragon is also worth watching for its truly odd attempt at fashioning a story out of the documentary-style filmmaking of the first 50 minutes. The main character is writer Robert Benchley (formerly of the Algonquin Round Table), whose wife tells him that he should talk to Walt Disney about making The Reluctant Dragon into one of his animated stories. He arrives at the Disney studios and, before he ends up meeting with Walt, he stumbles his way throughout the whole place, learning as he goes.

Now, having seen a few of the package films Disney made in the 1940s, I prefer this method of storytelling to a narrator intoning everything that’s happening. As an example, one of the shorts in Saludos Amigos, called Pedro, is about the titular airplane becoming a mail carrier through a nasty storm. The narrator explains everything that’s happening on screen, as if we needed hand-holding. If the other option is a gadfly traipsing through the place where the magic happens, fine with me. Benchley is fine on screen, an appropriately blustery character who’s good-hearted. I’m not sure why the folks at Disney had felt he’d be best, but it is what it is. His journey from watching Clarence Nash, the original voice of Donald Duck, show him how to talk like Donald; to watching the Casey, Jr. sequence from Dumbo getting its soundtrack; to watching the storyboard process is fascinating.

The film itself was not well received when it came out in 1941, partly because of the supreme disconnect between what was on the screen and what was happening in real life. On the screen, Benchley walks through the idyllic Disney studio, coming across many happy employees who are clearly in love with their jobs. Off the screen, there was a very nasty strike going on as the film came out; it’s this strike that caused Walt Disney to become so rabidly anti-Communist just as the Red Scare kicked in, and thus be tied to anti-Semitic people. Disney would again maintain being a friendly celebrity, of course, but The Reluctant Dragon could’ve been the greatest film ever made, and it still would have tanked. More to the point, kids going to the movies wanted to watch cartoons, and this movie made them wait for nearly an hour.

The Reluctant Dragon is an interesting portrait of what it was like to work at the Disney studios, perhaps in a more happier time. Though the process has changed somewhat, it’s almost quaint to watch, for example, the vocal effects on display as a woman reads lines of dialogue for a train whistle that can speak; or the multiplane camera technique that Disney invented to allow multiple animations to appear in one shot. Benchley becomes something of an afterthought, especially once the titular animation begins. His final appearance — meant as a bit of an epilogue, but mostly an afterthought — is a surprising reminder that, oh yeah, this guy’s in the movie. Nothing about The Reluctant Dragon, 70 years after its release, is bad, even if the climactic title sequence is uninvolving and a bit of harsh foreshadowing to the blandness that is The Sword and the Stone. As a relic from a time gone by, though, when Walt Disney was still as much a star as Mickey Mouse, it’s more compelling than most of his films.