Family Album Acts In
Disney Musical
While the direct story of Walt Disney’s current feature film, “So Dear to My Heart”,is told in live action, there is also the traditional Disney cartoon animation to embellish the romantic narrative, all in colour by Technicolor. The animation serves to picture the boy’s reflections as he thumbs through the family album and treasure book, while the narrator—representing that same boy now grown to manhood-relates what happened.
In this fashion the album opens to start the tale, to the accompaniment of the title song, “So Dear to My Heart.” In animation the wise Old Owl comes to “life” as the boy substitutes the picture of his little black lamb for that of the race horse, Dan Patch, as the new idol of his boyhood. The Owl and the cartoon version of the boy’s pet ram, go through a droll daydream scene until reality again is resumed by living actors.
Another vivid animation scene has the Owl inspire the boy with examples of courage and venturesome ambition, citing Christopher Columbus and Robert Bruce and the spider as examples, in the scrapbook scenes.
A County Fair fantasy again shows the Wise Old Owl and the prize black ram enjoying a gay time, in animation, with scenes evoked from gala postcards and trophies of days now faded into the time to youth. And finally, there is the cartooned brief epilogue as the hand of the man-who-was the-boy closes the aged album, with its special award ribbon betokening that the youngster has indeed “made” something dependable from what he “had—an animal of merit from a discarded lamb, and the foundation for own adjusted adult life.
The black sheep is a live animal for the main story action, and a cartoon character only for the animation interludes.