The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad is Disney’s eleventh animated feature film, and the last of the six “package films” that the studio came out with in the 1940s. I call this the “forgotten era” of Disney movies, as I never really hear movies like this or Melody Time brought up anymore. These “package films” were more of a collection of shorts than anything else, and so I don’t think they’re watched as much as the feature-length classics. Still, Disney faced some financial troubles in the 40s, so after Bambi they exclusively made these collections instead, before going back to the beloved features that we love in the 50s, like Cinderella and Alice in Wonderland. I find package films like this to be a bit harder to review, since I’m more reviewing what I think of each short rather than the collection itself. Luckily, like the previous Fun and Fancy Free, The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad just consists of two half-hour films: The Wind in the Willows and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. Let me talk about each individually.

The Wind in the Willows is about a toad, simply named Mr. Toad. He winds up becoming obsessed with automobiles, so much so that he winds up stealing one. He finds himself in legal troubles because of this, and ends up going to jail. That’s all I’ll really say about the plot here. Weirdly enough, I think I’ve seen more praise for this one, so it seems to be the more highly regarded of the two. I feel like I watched something different than everyone else, because I think The Wind in the Willows is horrible. It has very unlikeable characters, especially Mr. Toad who is just a really terrible person. I had a hard time understanding a lot of the dialogue because of heavy accents, and it was hard enough for me already to get invested in the story. There never feels like there’s any redemption for Mr. Toad, so I don’t really understand what the point of it all is. I actually think that this is one of the worst things that Disney has ever done.

The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, on the other hand, is excellent. Most people are already familiar with this story, but basically it centers around a guy named Ichabod Crane who is pining after a woman. This other guy is also trying to win her affections, so he tries to scare off Ichabod by telling the story of a headless horseman who kills people in the woods. I remember seeing this segment somewhere as a child, and it really stuck with me because of how scary it is. This is probably one of the creepiest, darkest things that Disney has ever made in one of their animated features, and so for that I think it really stands out. If you’re looking for something out of the norm that is the closest thing that Disney’s made to a “horror movie,” then I think this one is worth checking out.

So, as you can see, it’s hard for me to give an actual score to The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad as a whole, because I feel so drastically different about the two shorts involved. I think The Wind in the Willows is horrible, but The Legend of Sleepy Hollow is actually really good. To me, this is a really weird pairing of movies, so it makes it hard to recommend the package as a whole. I think Sleepy Hollow is worth checking out, but I found it hard to sit through Mr. Toad’s segment.

2.5/5