"The Sword in the Stone" - Disney animated film review

The Disney animated movie that I watched for the first time last week was "The Sword in the Stone".

I knew some of the backstory of the film, partly because of the sword in the stone ceremony they used to have with Merlin (I don't know if they do it any more) at Disneyland in Fantasyland by King Arthur's Carousel, and partly because it's a cultural reference pertaining to Arthur, King of England.  Obviously, Arthur is a child in this film, as I've seen from pictures and clips, so let's see what they do.

This was completely not the story I expected to see.  It was a story about a wizard teaching a kid things but it didn't seem to matter at all that it was Merlin and Arthur.  It could have been any random wizard and kid.  I don't think I expected Arthur to be a kid the whole time.  I figured we'd see him grow up at least some.  Nope.  When they turned into fish, Merlin is trying to teach Arthur how to use your brain and learn to adapt to solve problems.  OK.  But then the same thing happens more or less when they turn into squirrels and then birds.  Uh, yeah, different animals, similar lessons.  We had to see this three times?  I'll admit that I lost interest by the time they became birds.

My anticipation of the movie being about the Arthur story that I was familiar with came partly from the opening, when they mention that England had no king, and that whomever could pull the magic sword from the anvil in the stone would be the next king of England.  And then they showed a bunch of people trying to pull the sword out.  It made me think of Thor's hammer, that you had to be worthy to wield it.  None of the people were worthy of pulling the sword out.  (I wonder if Cap could have been the King of England?  Oops, sorry, spoiler and tangent.)  And that scene ended with something about the sword and the stone being covered with overgrown vegetation (like Sleeping Beauty's castle when the spell was cast) and was forgotten.  But then later in the movie, when Arthur discovers it, it's completely out in the open and even looks well-manicured.  So not so much hidden and forgotten?  And, I really didn't like that his pulling the sword out was just happenstance, and it wasn't even for him, but to give to someone else.

I didn't know that the Sherman Bros. did the songs for this film.  I didn't even know this film had songs.  I enjoyed the songs for the most part, but none of them made a specific impression on me.

There were two scenes that reminded me of "Beauty and the Beast" - the one where the sugar container was serving sugar itself, and the scene where all the dishes were washing themselves.  That latter scene also reminded me of the Sorcerer's Apprentice segment of "Fantasia", which came out more than 20 years prior, with the brooms doing the sweeping on their own.  I was kind of annoyed when Arthur's guardian (Sir Ector) put a stop to it all.  I mean, the work was being done, and efficiently too.  What's the problem?

Speaking of which, Sir Ector and his son (Sir Kay) reminded me a little bit of Lady Tremaine and her daughters from "Cinderella", but they weren't nearly as mean to him as Lady T and her offspring were to Cinderella.  Sir Ector wanted his son to win the competition and be king like Lady T wanted one of her daughters to marry the prince.  But at least when it turned out that Arthur would be king, Sir Ector respected that and made his son respect that as well.

I liked the stuff with Merlin knowing about all these things in the future and visiting places that hadn't been discovered yet.  I also liked how he was able to pack the entire contents of his house in his magic bag by miniaturizing everything.  That's a pretty nifty trick.  Hmmm, I wonder if he could fit more things in his bag, or if Mary Poppins could fit more things in her bag?

When Merlin turned himself and Arthur into fish, I thought it was funny that he was blue and Arthur was orange, just like Dory and Marlin/Nemo from "Finding Nemo".  If Merlin had turned himself blue and turned Arthur orange, that would have been even funnier because then Merlin and Marlin would have both been blue!

Normally, I like animals in these films, but I wasn't keen on any of them.  The wolf seemed to really serve no purpose other than inconsequential side story.  He was also drawn kind of funny looking, like Wile E. Coyote but not even that refined, instead of actually being scary at all.  I thought the owl on the whole was just annoying, and the only thing I liked about him was his name (Archimedes).  I really disliked the girl squirrel, who was just falling all over herself for Arthur and who was clearly sexually harassing him.  And then adult female squirrel comes along and does the same thing to Merlin.  Why are so many of the female animal characters so overly flirty and overly interested in attracting the attention of the male, like the female fox in "The Fox and the Hound", Miss Bianca in "The Rescuers", and Duchess and little Marie from "The Aristocats"?

Oh, and on a side note, how does something as vicious as the barracuda end up in a moat?  (I did think he was cool, though.)  Presumably, the moat is a closed environment, so it's not like the barracuda swam in from somewhere else.  Did someone flush a baby barracuda down the toilet and then it ended up in the moat?  Did someone buy a baby barracuda as a pet and then figured out it wasn't a good idea and then decided to release it in the moat?  When Arthur describes the big, vicious, toothy fish, even Sir Ector (I think) wonders how it got in the moat, and was there something weird going on.  And then we completely abandon that tidbit.  Maybe Ursula was responsible.

Madam Mim - She was supposed to be a villain, sort of?  I'm not really sure.  I didn't get much of a feeling about her one way or another.

Arthur - Given that he's the lead in the film (or at least co-lead, with Merlin), I didn't get much from him.  Yeah, I guess the point was that this nobody kid becomes this great king, another case of "ordinary person becomes a famous hero" that is often the foundation of the lead character in a film, but I didn't see anything in him that would lead me to believe he could make that transition.  I also wasn't fond of his voice, though I can't pinpoint why.  Maybe it was because doing the voice of the pre-teen was a man in his 20s?  I mean, that shouldn't really make a difference since voice-over artists should be able to voice people who are not their same age, cultural background, etc., but his voice for Arthur just didn't work for me.

The husband is quite enamoured of King Arthur stories and has either already read every version ever written or is in the process of reading them.  He'd seen this film before and knew that it was based on a book by T.H. White, a book that he was not fond of either.  I knew going in that he didn't really like the film or the book, and after watching it, he did tell me that they did take many elements from the book in making the film, as I was telling him the things I didn't like about the film.

I didn't dislike the film overall, but in addition to it not being what I expected going in, it didn't particularly interest me as the story played out.  There wasn't a character that I really liked or was interested in.