"Make Mine Music" (1946) – Disney Movie Review

What’s going on guys? I’m Tyler and in continuing my series of Disney movie reviews,
Im here to let you know that “Make Mine Music” is NoPerfectMovie! And just like “Melody Time”,
It’s a series of shorts set to classical and popular music. In this one, there are nine shorts, but they are
much shorter in length and have more of a variety show feel to them which adds a lot more to the
entertainment value for me personally.
In a weird way, it’s actually not on Disney+, which I don’t really understand!
You could point to some censorship problems;
Like there’s a brief scene where there is a girl with no clothes on, there’s an entire short where
involves the ‘Hatfields and McCoys’ which involves gun violence. I didn’t even see it because the cut that I have
doesn’t even have that short!
There’s one song during ‘Casey at the Bat’ where it says that women don’t know shit about baseball and…
That wasn’t my favorite short anyways, oddly enough there were worse problems than that.
And of course the “Peter and the Wolf” segment where a little kid is running around with a toy gun
trying to hunt down an animal.
So there are a lot of things he could point to but

these are things that are in Disney+ releases from the 50’s onward that still have those elements to it.
The closest thing I can think of as to why it’s not on here is because of very little popularity. But then again,
half the stuff on Disney+ nobody’s ever heard of so I don’t really know what the deal is.
But it’s a shame because as far as Disney anthologies go it’s still a really good one, and as usual
I’m gonna talk about my favorite shorts first, in order to get the overall feel of this movie.
The first one is called “Blue Bayou”.
It was a short that was originally made for “Fantasia”
but they re-edited it with different music from the Ken Darby Chorus.
It follows two herons who are flying around a bayou
during the middle of the night.
It’s basically a tone poem; you’re watching it just to see the beauty of what nature looks like at night and
that alone gives it this very
peaceful, meditative feel to it. It was a great one to start off with, the music was so nice and elegant and the chorus sang
so softly it fit the mood perfectly!
Most people if they have seen this movie remember the finale which involves a sperm whale who is discovered to be an operatic genius.
And it’s one of the more unique shorts in that the lead performer Nelson Eddy
performs every single character that speaks in this short including the whale, including the narrator,
even this one stray cat at one point it was
interesting to watch because Eddy clearly has this very
top-notch singing range. He was an opera singer too and
the music-even if you’re not an opera fan, you can get into because
it’s sung with so much passion and at a very-as I said before a very versatile range!
I don’t know that many singers who could sing as well as this guy did!
It has an underdog story that’s easy to root for and honestly not even as cliched as I thought it was going to be because usually
with underdog stories, there’s only one believer in a ton of skeptics but in this one
it’s actually the other way around and it leads to some of the best jokes in the short!
The ending is a little bittersweet and I kind of knew that going in just based on the fact that
I did a little bit of digging on this movie beforehand, but in any case
even if you’re not an opera fan
you can enjoy just the scale and the scope of the story and the music because it is so well put together and…
Yeah, there’s not much I can say other than it the movie does have a good beginning and a good ending.
But my favorite short for sure was the second one called “All the Cats Join In”
where a group of teenagers all get this urge to start dancing to jazz and the cool thing about the short is that
there is this pencil drawing all the characters and locations on the spot as the short is happening!
And when I saw the name Benny Goodman as the music director for this,
I knew I was gonna get a good treat out of this because Benny Goodman is one of the best jazz musicians
who has ever lived and this did NOt disappoint! The jazz was so
fast-paced, it felt so damn catchy, the choreography that the characters danced to was also really well done and
the interesting choice to have the pencil draw out everything as it was happening-
It fits the feel of jazz music, it felt improvisational and on-the-spot
which is exactly what it needed!
The only real problem I had with the short is that some characters have dot eyes and some have
irises and it felt like a really
weird mix-up at parts.
But it’s really just an nitpick. But that short alone would have been worth seeing the entire movie for sure!
The only two shorts that really disappointed me are ones that relied more on narration as opposed to the animation and the music;
The first one being Casey at the Bat” and you know the
it was the most overly sexist short out of all the Disney anthologies that I’ve seen because it involves
Casey who is basically a ladies man as opposed to a real baseball player and not only that, the short itself ended on a really
anti-climactic note, I don’t know if that’s how the poem ended but
It really doesn’t make me want to read the poem.
Unfortunately, the biggest letdown in regards to this movie and I didn’t want to say it because I was looking forward to this one the most
but it is “Peter and the Wolf” mainly because
there is just as much pointless narration and pointlessly
told-out facts that we’re watching on screen as “The Irishman”!
I know I said that about the Sterling Holloway short in “The Three Caballeros” short and believe it or not Sterling Holloway
narrates this too. I don’t know why! He has more energy in this one-I’ll give him that but
he just still sounds really unnatural and the fact that this is a story told through an orchestra where every character is
represented by a different instrument…
It’s really hard to pay attention to that when someone’s speaking over it speaking for the characters
even though you have the orchestra to do that for you!
So I don’t really remember that much of the story-
I read it when I was a kid a ton of times
but it’s hard to pay attention when there’s so much stuff going on all once and it’s all coming from one person!
But rant aside, “Make Mine Music” still has an eclectic range of music styles and animation styles
that makes it one of the better Disney anthologies. It has its problems just like all the other ones; it is outdated,
it’s really gonna depend on whether you like older music or older Disney movies,
but I like both of those and this was a good time.
So for all those reasons, I’m gonna give “Make Mine Music” 3.5/5
Guys, thanks as always for watching! That does it for me on the Disney anthologies for now.
I’m gonna get into the popular ones much much later
once I’m done doing all the underrated ones not that many people have heard of. I’m not gonna do “Saludos Amigos” because there’s
really not a ton to talk about-it’s not even an hour long!
So yeah, thanks as always for watching once again!
If you have seen “Make Mine Music”, let me know in the comments below what you thought of it!
Be sure to stay tuned for more reviews and be sure to like and subscribe!
Take care!

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