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Peter and the Wolf (1946)
Wonderful and too little-seen Disney
This 1946 version of Prokofiev's "Musical Fairy-Tale" is probably my favourite of Disney's animated adaptations. Peter and the Wolf was clearly ideal for this type of film - I read somewhere that Prokofiev wrote the piece with Disney in mind - and Uncle Walt doesn't let us down. It's (hilariously) funny, genuinely scary and even touching. Favourite moment: the wolf drooling over Sacha the duck's prone body. Shiver. Note: After many years unavailability in the UK, this is now available on DVD either separately or as part of Make Mine Music, the compilation film in which it received its original theatrical release. From memory (and it's been years), Peter and the Wolf is vastly better than anything else in the larger film - the only other bit worth a glance is a segment about a whale singing opera.
The Piano (1993)
Hopefully the nadir of antipodean film
The Piano is the prime, shining example of how a film may win great critical acclaim by combining a politically correct theme with an esoteric subject matter, despite having almost no other redeeming features. With the single exception of the rather beautiful (and genuinely allegorical) opening image of the Piano itself, sitting incongruously on a New Zealand beach, the film has nothing new, challenging or remotely entertaining (heaven forbid!) to offer. Holly Hunter's heroine's silence is a ludicrously contrived conceit, presumedly invented by Campion to force down her unfortunate audience's throats the notion that the most eloquent form of communication in this film is through music; I think we could have worked that out without it being so unsubtly pinpointed. As for the actual plot - well, it creaks and groans with so many improbabilities, anachronisms and eye-rollingly obvious symbolic gestures that this viewer was left puzzling, mouth agape, that even the most sympathetic critic could consider it anything better than embarrassing. I know it won universal acclaim at the time and remains a favourite for many, but the reasons remain entirely beyond me. It deserves 1 point for the image mentioned above, but no more.