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Hamilton Luske, Clyde Geronimi & Wilfred Jackson (1953)

When there’s a smile in your heart
There’s no better time to start
Think of all the joy you’ll find
When you leave the world behind
And bid your cares good-bye
You can fly, you can fly, you can fly, you can fly, you can fly!

Peter Pan is a 1953 animated adventure fantasy film produced in 1952 by Walt Disney Productions. Based on J. M. Barrie’s 1904 play Peter Pan, or the Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up, it is the 14th Disney animated feature film. The film was directed by Hamilton Luske, Clyde Geronimi, and Wilfred Jackson. Featuring the voices of Bobby Driscoll, Kathryn Beaumont, Hans Conried, and Bill Thompson, the film’s plot follows Wendy Darling and her two brothers, who meet the never-growing-up Peter Pan and travel with him to the island of Neverland to stay young, where they also have to face Peter’s archenemy, Captain Hook.

In 1935, Walt Disney began considering plans to adapt Barrie’s play into an animated feature. He purchased the film rights from Paramount Pictures in 1938, and began preliminary development in the next year. However, following the attack on Pearl Harbor, Disney shelved the project when his studio was contracted by the United States government to produce training and war propaganda films. The project sat idle in development for the rest of the decade until it experienced a turnaround in 1949. To assist the animators, live-action reference footage was shot with actors on soundstages. It also marked the last Disney film in which all nine members of Disney’s Nine Old Men worked together as directing animators.

Disney’s Nine Old Men were Walt Disney Productions’ core animators, some of whom later became directors, who created some of Disney’s most famous animated cartoons, from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs onward to The Rescuers, and were referred to as such by Walt Disney himself. The Nine Old Men consisted of Milt Kahl, Marc Davis, Frank Thomas, Eric Larson, Ollie Johnston, Woolie Reitherman, Les Clark, Ward Kimball, and John Lounsbery.

Peter Pan was released on February 5, 1953, becoming the final Disney animated feature released through RKO before Disney founded his own distribution company. The film was entered into the 1953 Cannes Film Festival, Upon its release, the film earned positive reviews from film critics and was a box office success. Its representation of the Native Americans received retrospective criticism.

In this Disney animated film, Wendy and her two brothers are amazed when a magical boy named Peter Pan flies into their bedroom in pursuit of his rebellious shadow. He and his fairy friend Tinkerbell come from a far-off place called Neverland, where children stay perpetually young. Enchanted, the kids follow him back. But when Pan’s nemesis the pirate Captain Hook causes trouble, the kids begin to miss their old life.

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Clyde Geronimi, Wilfred Jackson & Hamilton Luske (1950)

Have faith in your dreams.

Cinderella is an American animated musical fantasy film from 1950 by Walt Disney and RKO Radio Pictures. It’s based on the fairytale of the same name by Charles Perrault and is the 12th Disney animated feature film. The film was directed by Clyde Geronimi, Hamilton Luske, and Wilfred Jackson. Mack David, Jerry Livingston, and Al Hoffman wrote the songs, which include Cinderella, A Dream Is a Wish Your Heart Makes, Sing Sweet Nightingale, The Work Song, Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo, and So This is Love. It features the voices of Ilene Woods, Eleanor Audley, Verna Felton, Rhoda Williams, James MacDonald, Luis van Rooten, Don Barclay, Mike Douglas, William Phipps, and Lucille Bliss.

After Fantasia, Pinocchio, and Bambi all bombed in the box office, Cinderella was the greatest success since Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Dumbo and helped the studio through their financial burdens.

In 1948, actors were filmed on large sound stages mouthing to a playback of the dialogue soundtrack. Disney had previously used live-action reference on Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Pinocchio, and Fantasia, but as part of an effort to keep the production cost down, the footage was used to check the plot, timing, and movement of the characters before animating it. The footage was then edited frame-by-frame onto large Photostat sheets to duplicate, in which the animators found too restrictive as they were not allowed to imagine anything that the live actors did not present since that kind of experimentation might necessitate changes and cost more money. Additionally, the animators were instructed to draw from a certain directorial perspective to avoid difficult shots and angles. Frank Thomas explained, “Anytime you’d think of another way of staging the scene, they’d say: ‘We can’t get the camera up there’! Well, you could get the animation camera up there! So you had to go with what worked well in live action.”

Walt Disney hired actress Helene Stanley to perform the live-action reference for Cinderella. Animators modeled Prince Charming on actor Jeffrey Stone, who also provided some additional voices for the film. Mary Alice O’Connor served as the live-action reference for the Fairy Godmother.

From Rags to Riches: The Making of Cinderella

By 1950, the Animation Board had settled down to nine supervising animators. Although they were still in their thirties, they were jokingly referred by Walt Disney as the “Nine Old Men” after President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s denigration of the Supreme Court. Including Norman Ferguson, the principal animators included Les Clark, Marc Davis, Ollie Johnston, Milt Kahl, Ward Kimball, Eric Larson, John Lounsbery, Frank Thomas, and Wolfgang Reitherman.

Larson was the first to animate the title character whom he envisioned as a sixteen-year-old with braids and a pug nose. Marc Davis later animated Cinderella, in which Larson observed as “more the exotic dame” with a long swanlike neck. Because the final character design was not set, assistant animators were responsible for minimizing the differences. When Disney was asked what was his favorite piece of animation was, he answered, “I guess it would have to be where Cinderella gets her ballroom gown”, which was animated by Davis.

Milt Kahl was the directing animator of the Fairy Godmother, the King, and the Grand Duke. Originally, Disney intended for the Fairy Godmother to be a tall, regal character as he viewed fairies as tall, motherly figures, but Milt Kahl disagreed with this characterization. Following the casting of Verna Felton, Kahl managed to convince Disney on his undignified concept of the Fairy Godmother.

Unlike the human characters, the animal characters were animated without live-action reference. During production, none of Kimball’s designs for Lucifer had pleased Disney. After visiting Kimball’s steam train at his home, Disney saw his calico cat and remarked, “Hey—there’s your model for Lucifer”. Reitherman animated the sequence in which Jaq and Gus laboriously drag the key up the flight of stairs to Cinderella.