Fun and Fancy Free is the ninth feature film from Walt Disney Animation Studios, and the fourth “package film” that the studio made, following the three previous films: Saludos Amigos, The Three Caballeros, and Make Mine Music. In the 1940s, Disney was going through some financial troubles, and so these “package films” were movies rushed out in order to help finance later projects like Cinderella and Alice in Wonderland. People refer to them as “package films” because they’re kind of just compilations of animated shorts, rather than actual feature films. Fun and Fancy Free is a bit different from the last movie, Make Mine Music, which featured about 10 or so animated shorts. Fun and Fancy Free only consists of two segments, which both wind up feeling more like short films.

The two short films in Fun and Fancy Free are Bongo, and Mickey and the Beanstalk. I’ll give a brief rundown on each. Bongo is about a bear named Bongo, who has left the circus and is looking for a new life. He meets a female bear named Lulubelle and immediately falls for her. However, some miscommunication about the way of life for bears in this culture inevitably causes some problems for Bongo. Mickey and the Beanstalk is a story that more people are likely to be familiar with, since it’s Disney’s take on the famous Jack and the Beanstalk story. Basically, Mickey, Donald, and Goofy are experiencing a famine, and so they get desperate. Mickey takes their cow to trade for something, but Donald and Goofy are upset when all he comes back with is “magic beans.” However, these beans actually do turn out to be magic, and they grow a giant beanstalk that leads up into the sky.

I’ll give some brief thoughts on both of these. Bongo was really strange, but also entertaining. The bears involved show affection by hitting each other, which is…a really strange thing to put in a kid’s movie, to say the least. Bongo isn’t anything special, so it’s easy to see why he’s been forgotten over the years, but the story is entertaining enough to be worth the watch. I feel similarly about Mickey and the Beanstalk, but in a different way. I feel like it’s technically the better film of the two, but due to it being a familiar story for a lot of people, it also doesn’t feel like anything special. While watching it, I was mainly just feeling like I was watching Jack and the Beanstalk, but with Mickey, Donald, and Goofy instead. This is kind of the point, but I also asked myself what the point was since this feels like a movie that doesn’t need to exist. Both of these shorts are entertaining in their own way, but neither of them are particularly amazing.

Weirdly enough, I like this film more as a whole than I do the sum of its parts. It feels like a part of the Disney universe, and so the presentation is definitely there. Jiminy Cricket from Pinocchio is hosting the two shorts, so it was neat to see him again in a random movie. Then, Bongo almost feels like a continuation of Dumbo due to it being about another circus animal. Finally, there’s the obvious link of having Mickey, Donald, and Goofy be the stars of the second short. Mickey and the Beanstalk is notable for being Walt Disney’s last time of regularly voicing Mickey Mouse. There’s also a little bit of live action thrown in in between the two shorts, which is entertaining but also kind of weird. I didn’t necessarily love either of the two shorts in this movie, but I loved Fun and Fancy Free as a Disney movie, if that makes sense.

I find that, for the most part, these Disney “package films” have largely been forgotten, and it’s kind of easy to see why, since most of them aren’t anything special. Hell, I outright didn’t like Make Mine Music. The Three Caballeros is the biggest exception to all of this, since people tend to remember it for the Disney ride that it inspired, and it’s largely considered to be the best of these. However, while I don’t consider it to be a must watch in the Disney canon by any means, I didn’t think Fun and Fancy Free was all that bad. I certainly liked it more than Saludos Amigos and Make Mine Music, so it’s one of the better picks if you’re looking to check out some of these old forgotten Disney movies. Just don’t expect anything mindblowing here.

3/5