Blow me to Bermuda

Author's Rating:

Pros: Merlin, Archimedes, jolly good fun.

Cons: Patchy animation, bit of a greatest hits package.

The Bottom Line: 
My introduction to Arthurian legend, and indeed cinema, was Disney's 'The Sword in the Stone'.

Author's Review
King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table. There are now dozens of takes on Arthurian Legend, from Mallory to Monty Python and from Keira Knightley to Sean Connery. Interpretations range from dark tales of old Gods (Excalibur and Marion Zimmer Bradley's 'Avalon' novels) to the jaunty adventures of wacky knights in anachronistic armour (Camelot and the afore-mentioned Monty Python film). There have been books, films, TV series and computer games (Level 9 computing's text adventure Lancelot being a personal favourite). Many are horrendously free and easy with their source texts, but all are colossal fun. Even if Arthur never existed in any of the forms we tend to see him, it's an excellent mythology.

But my problem is that whenever I'm trying to engage myself in these adventures (and I was at one time a moderately keen Arthurian enthusiast), two of the main characters take on different shapes in my mind's eye. Noble King Arthur, last seen as a Roman general snogging Keira Knightley has something decidely sparrow-like about him and Merlin, whether talking guff about 'the Dragon's breath' or being trapped in crystal caves... well, there's always something a little BLUE about him.

Yes, my introduction to Athurian legend, and indeed cinema, was Disney's 'The Sword in the Stone'. It was showing on a double bill with a worthy B-movie about disabled children called 'The Pigeon That Worked A Miracle'. Don't think I've even checked to see if that's on the Epinions database. I mostly remember getting really annoyed at the number of adverts before the film, crying at the trailers because I kept thinking each one was the actual film. It's something of a surprise that my parents ever considered taking me back into a cinema, to be honest.

First released in 1963, The Sword in the Stone sees young Wart living a bit of a Cinderella-style existence under his fairly kindly father Sir Ector and his loutish brother Kay. Wart is a floppy-haired little blonde moppet, and after a few vague misadventures, he's taken under the wing of the wise wizard Merlin.

Merlin is there to educate Wart for some reason, and all of his lessons seem to involve turning Wart into animals so he can almost get eaten. The point of all this is, to be blunt, never made entirely clear, but it makes for lots of wacky animal adventures that succeed in disguising the fact that Disney can't really draw people.

Thrill as Wart evades pike in the river as an orange fish, breaks hearts as an orange squirrel and flits about amusingly as a little orange bird. It's undemanding stuff, to be honest, but quite a lot of fun, mostly due to the interaction between Merlin and his talking owl Archimedes (well there had to be a talking animal sidekick somewhere, it's Disney).

Perhaps realising that all this fun is a little light on the drama stakes, Disney throw in a set-piece in the form of a wizard's duel between Merlin and Madame Mim, a nutcase who lives in the woods and eats small boys. Shifting shapes frantically, this display of magical one-upmanship is won in a fantastically sneaky way by Merlin. It demonstrates a cunning kind of lateral thinking that really inspired my own mischevious scampish ways.

The film's message is broadly that brains are better than brawn and that cunning and intelligence will solve your problems much more effectively than brute strength and physical violence. To a somewhat short four year old, this was fantastic news.

Merlin is also a fantastic character. He's somewhat displaced in time, and occasionally jumbles up cultural references. His colourful language is a joy - his cry of 'Blow me to Bermuda' sounds really rude to kids but isn't really. In the best tradition of cartoons, Merlin is supposedly a 'wacky' character, but as is so often the case this does fall a little flat. He comes across more as a kindly but stern grandfather. He might be happy to join in childish games with his young charge but he's not to be trifled with and gets quite scary when the cook crosses him. All I can really remember about my original trip to see the film was something about fish and the cook screaming that she'd better not ever see him in her kitchen again and Merlin scowling coldly, 'Madame, you won't' as though she was something he'd scraped off his shoe.

But it's not all great, to be honest. The animation has slipped several notches from what we'd call Classic Disney (ie, Snow White and Fantasia) and there's a sense that it's a bit of a pale retread of past glories. This is made most obvious when Ector and Kay find a kitchen of plates washing themselves. It's not a patch on the mops of doom from Fantasia OR the various domestic scenes of Snow White or Mary Poppins. There's very little drama aside from the wizard's duel and very little suspense as we know right from the start who Wart is going to become.

Perhaps, and this is an odd one for a Disney film, part of the problem is sticking too closely to the book. Plotwise, The Sword in the Stone is remarkably faithful to T.H. White's novel of the same name. And the magic of that novel is in the character quirks which are inevitably dumbed down. Madame Mim can't possibly the horrific child-eating figure from White's source text. The bawdy songs must be cut out, and you can't possibly have Wart and Kay fighting naked in their bedroom.

So once you've stripped away the dodgier content, you're left with some fairly uninvolving adventures with animals that will only get the youngest of pulses racing. A dose of Disney 'magic' and a few more fights and things would have added a great deal of interest.

The songs are rubbish too, but then I was never impressed by Disney songs.

Overall then, The Sword in the Stone is a Disney cartoon that entertains in spite of its very obvious shortcomings. It's unexciting, but quite charming. It's badly-drawn but well characterised. And it has a talking owl.

So if you get fed up of the latest CGI family film (OK, Shrek, Monsters Inc, The Incredibles, even Ice Age were decent but they are starting to go downhill rapidly) or it's raining over this half-term and the kids are bored, you could do far worse than stick on this film.

And maybe one day I'll let you know the truth behind the pigeon that worked a miracle.