Disney Strikes Back

Walt Disney, finding that he cannot buck the new trend in cartoons started by Bosustow & Co. (TIME, Jan. 30, 1951), has apparently decided to join it. Two striking evidences of this intention are now on public view.

Ben and Me, a sort of Mickey Mouse with social consciousness, takes a few sly nibbles out of a big cheese in U.S. history: Benjamin Franklin. The story, as told by the hero mouse, demonstrates what many schoolboys have suspected--that, for all his achievements, the great man was a bit of a cold turkey who did not mind gobbling up credit sometimes where it was not altogether his due.

Was it Franklin, for instance, who invented the bifocal, the Franklin stove, and said all those laboriously droll things in Poor Richard's Almanac"? Not so, says the hero; it was a loyal mouse who gave Ben the big idea in every instance, and who furthermore rode the kite the day electricity was discovered.

Done with the usual Disney care for detail and sense of comic pace, and with more than the usual share of good visual surprises, the cartoon reaches a most un-Disney-like climax in a fine burst of political irreverence.

Toot, Whistle, Plunk and Boom, the first cartoon to be made in CinemaScope, purports to tell the history of the four main families of musical instruments (brass, woodwind, string and percussion). In style a clean steal from the Bosustow cartoons (which, in turn, borrowed tricks from such modern artists as Paul Klee), Toot takes Disney in one jump from the nursery to the intellectual cocktail party. There are moments--in the musical score especially--when the film does not seem quite sure how to behave.

The drawings are witty, and some of the caricatures of Egyptian and Roman reliefs are a real howl. The wide-screen problem is neatly solved to the advantage of the audience: contrasts, which can be achieved on the regular screen only by cutting from picture to picture, can now be improved by setting the pictures side by side.

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