Barely Necessary, But Fun: Disney’s “The Jungle Book”

Disney’s Nineteenth Animated Feature – 1967

Verna Felton

The Jungle Book is a fun and lively feature, loosely adapted from the stories about “man cub” Mowgli from The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling. This film was the last one for Walt Disney himself, who passed away during its production. It also marks the swan song of voice artist Verna Felton, who provided the voice of Hathi the Elephant’s wife. Felton, who voiced Cinderella’s Fairy Godmother, Flora in Sleeping Beauty, Aunt Sarah in Lady and the Tramp, and the Queen of Hearts in Alice In Wonderland, died shortly before the film’s release.

Putting On the Dog: Disney’s “Lady and the Tramp”

Disney’s Fifteenth Animated Feature — 1955
The opening theme music to Lady and the Tramp is a full-blooded love song, “Bella Notte.” This love story happens to star dogs in all their simple and joyous honesty. As Josh Billings wrote (quoted at the top of the film), “In the whole history of the world there is but one thing that money can not buy … to wit—the wag of a dog’s tail.” To wit and to woo, as upper crusty cocker spaniel Lady is memorably wooed by the Tramp, a mongrel literally from the wrong side of the tracks. We meet him as he wakes up in a refuse heap at a train yard. The story is set in an earlier, quainter era. The opening moments of Lady and the Tramp show a horse-drawn sleigh similar to the “Once Upon A Wintertime” sequence in 1948’s Melody Time.

Curiously Brilliant: Disney’s “Alice In Wonderland”

Disney’s Thirteenth Animated Feature - 1951
Disney’s Alice in Wonderland doesn’t open in the classic Disney fashion, showing the opening of an animated storybook; which is ironic, since Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland is arguably the best source material Disney had worked with to date. Carroll’s fantastical novel with its magical transformations and talking animals begs to be animated. In fact, Disney made his name as an animator in 1923 with a silent, black and white Alice In Wonderland in an animation where he combined footage of a child actor as Alice cavorting in a fanciful, animated world.