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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.

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