"2DAniCritic" Review:

Fun and Fancy Free

Review Score: 3.14 / 5.00        

"Fun and Fancy Free," released in 1947, was one of the weird package-films that Disney released around the time of WWII out of necessary. It's a particularly strange one, as it heavily features only two main shorts, bookended by new animation of Jiminy Cricket (from "Pinocchio") introducing the movie with a song, and some live-action footage of a small house party with Edgar Bergen, the ventriloquist, and his puppets Charlie McCarthy and Mortimer Snerd. The puppets were popular icons at the time, so it must have seemed like a good opportunity for Disney to feature them.

The general theme is that of a happy-go-lucky party. Jiminy opens with a song about his optimistic way of living (the phrase "Fancy Free" comes up throughout the movie, although it makes no sense to me in English grammar). Then there's the animated short "Bongo," about a circus bear who escapes to the forest, learning to get accustomed to wild nature and meeting a pretty girl bear. It's a bit dull, repeating story beats from "Dumbo" and "Bambi" (although it's more fun with songs and narration by Dinah Shore), and at nearly 30 minutes, it's far longer than it needs to be. Then we transition to the live-action party, with Edgar Bergen performing a skit (puppets Charlie and Mortimer making commentary off on the couch), before proceeding to tell the story of "Jack and the Beanstalk." Yes, this is THAT classic "Jack and the Beanstalk" short, with Mickey, Donald and Goofy in the lead roles, with Edgar narrating, and his puppets occasionally interupting to remind the viewer that the live-action part was still part of the movie. Depending on when you first saw the iconic Mickey short, this narration might be different from the one you remember (Wikipedia mentions three other narrations; I think I saw the one with Ludwig Von Drake first).

You'd think the appearance of a ventriloquist would ruin the movie, but I actually like his sense of humor, and hearing him, Charlie and Mortimer narrate the "Jack" story is quite a bit of fun. You can clearly see Edgar's lips move, but he's still a good storyteller. In fact, the whole movie has a certain charm in its humor, making it much more watchable than it might have otherwise. Having two shorts that are both fairly long also helps give some direction that is missing from Disney's other package films, although it might have helped to have a third short to extend the runtime and round out the content.

Even if the stories are basically no better than your standard "Silly Symphony" shorts, "Jack and the Beanstalk" is such a classic that you should see it somehow (in fact, you might want to see all the different versions of it, including this one). Even if "Fun and Fancy Free" doesn't compare to "Fantasia" by any measure, it's a fun example of modernizing the format with recent singers, and it works well enough to entertain the average viewer.