Walt Disney the film-maker didn't fritter away the 1960s entirely - not with `One Hundred and One Dalmatians' and `Mary Poppins' - but he was no more than a shadow of the artist he had been in the 1930s and early 1940s. More than any other animated film he made this one fails to live up to his standards. He made nothing so nothingy. `Peter Pan' had been bland, but not THIS bland. `Alice in Wonderland' had been bad, but its badness was the badness of excess - in any event, it looked good and had some touches that make it worth watching. Apart from some accomplished animation there's no evidence that `The Sword in the Stone' even came from the same studio.
Writer Bill Peet's approach is disastrous - although I admit it feels incongruous to use such strong language for a film so uniformly unmemorable. The Arthurian legend, however you slice it, is a fantasy. This treatment of the fantasy offers no magic, no buzz, no confection, no charm. Peet is studiously detached from his material. Why he was detached, I have no idea. He doesn't distance himself from Arthuriana in order to do anything WITH it, in the way Monty Python did. Here we have a film that has sold its soul - or at least its spirit - and gotten nothing in return.
The songs might as well not be there, not that they make enough of an impression to do any harm, the story goes all over the place without going anywhere, the art directors had no very strong ideas - how many ways can I say it? Not that it would even be worth saying if the film hadn't had Disney's stable of animators working on it, turning out their usual good work and struggling to make an impression. They come close to doing so in the magical duel at the end. But even here, the dogged presentation, the way everything is telegraphed in advance, undercuts their efforts.
No-one has explained to my satisfaction what happened to the old (or rather the young) Walt Disney. So - what happened to him?
Writer Bill Peet's approach is disastrous - although I admit it feels incongruous to use such strong language for a film so uniformly unmemorable. The Arthurian legend, however you slice it, is a fantasy. This treatment of the fantasy offers no magic, no buzz, no confection, no charm. Peet is studiously detached from his material. Why he was detached, I have no idea. He doesn't distance himself from Arthuriana in order to do anything WITH it, in the way Monty Python did. Here we have a film that has sold its soul - or at least its spirit - and gotten nothing in return.
The songs might as well not be there, not that they make enough of an impression to do any harm, the story goes all over the place without going anywhere, the art directors had no very strong ideas - how many ways can I say it? Not that it would even be worth saying if the film hadn't had Disney's stable of animators working on it, turning out their usual good work and struggling to make an impression. They come close to doing so in the magical duel at the end. But even here, the dogged presentation, the way everything is telegraphed in advance, undercuts their efforts.
No-one has explained to my satisfaction what happened to the old (or rather the young) Walt Disney. So - what happened to him?