The Reluctant Dragon Reviews

Worth a watch less a complete film and more as a curio from the most fertile creative period in the Disney studio’s output. The Reluctant Dragon pretends to be an extended behind-the-scenes glimpse of how the Disney animation team makes one of their cartoons, but it’s a scrubbed clean and antiseptic look. This is not a real look into making an animated short or feature, but a scrubbed clean face of a studio in troubled times.

Take for instance that many of the animators and staff that Robert Benchley meets during his wanderings in the studio are actors and day players. At the time, Disney was in the midst of an animator’s strike, and Uncle Walt was a contentious figure among the staff at this point. Dumbo, here glimpsed through a cameo appearance from Casey Jr. and a team of animators studying an elephant model, contains a biting joke about this exact dispute if you know where to look for it.

The Reluctant Dragon also throws a lot of wizardry at the screen in hopes that something will entertain you. To be fair, it does contain a lot of truth about the long, slow process involved in making an animated film, but the actors-as-animators-and-technicians deliver their jargon in awkward bouts. None of these interactions feel remotely plausible, and a cringe-worthy degree of artifice kicks in during these live-action bits. There’s also a change from black-and-white to vivid Technicolor for no discernible reason other than they could do it, so why not.

There is a certain glee in spotting early versions of characters from Lady and the Tramp, Peter Pan, and a cameo from Bambi as a demonstration of what a completed cell looks like. These charms cannot go unsaid, even some of the material surrounding them is clunky. But everything entertaining about this oddity goes back to animation, which is really the backbone of the Disney industry.

Where The Reluctant Dragon soars is in the four animated segments, which vary in quality but provide more consistent amusement than the rest of the film. “How-To Ride a Horse,” the first of the How-To films starring Goofy, is a hoot. The kinks of later “How-To” shorts have yet to be worked out here, but this feature is off to a solid start. “Baby Weems” is the weakest of the lot. A series of barely animated storyboard drawings, “Baby Weems” is interesting in concept but the story is weak and lacking in several ways, including humor. “Casey Junior” is charming but slight, but the entire sequence involving it is a real winner.

Of course, the best part of the film is the two-reeler short film, “The Reluctant Dragon.” The story involves a book worm, who moves, sounds, and acts a bit like Pinocchio with a developed frontal lobe, helping a fey dragon integrate into the village. It’s just a bizarre story with several fun characters, and a minor delight that plays far breezier and more whimsical than much of the studio’s upcoming output.

The Reluctant Dragon was thrown together to keep revenue coming into the studio after the outbreak of WWII, and it shows. It has less in common with the Golden Era’s immaculate features and far more in common with the Package Years. Its placement is something of a clear signpost of this transition, released just before Dumbo in the same year, a year prior to Bambi and the first of the package films, Saludos Amigos. It’s an odd little curious object, one that has gained cobwebs as a complete package but pieces have found life separately. Then again, that’s something that could be said about the entirety of the Package Years.