So Dear to My Heart

Set in rural Indiana at the start of the twentieth century, So Dear to My Heart follows a boy named Jeremiah Kincaid, who lives on a farm with his stern but loving grandmother. When the family sheep gives birth to twins, one white and one black, the grandmother wants nothing to do with the dark-coated lamb. Jeremiah takes it in anyway and names it Danny after a famous racehorse he admires. The lamb grows into a troublesome creature that causes plenty of damage around the farm, but the boy keeps training it, and with encouragement from the kindly blacksmith Uncle Hiram he sets his sights on showing Danny at the county fair. His grandmother remains firmly opposed to the whole idea.

The film mixes live action with animated sequences, in which drawings in Jeremiah's notebook come to life and offer him guidance. Harold D. Schuster directed, and Hamilton Luske, who had just made Melody Time, also directed; this is the tenth of the fifteen films he directed, made between that feature and Cinderella. John Tucker Battle wrote the screenplay and Walt Disney produced. Bobby Driscoll plays Jeremiah, with Luana Patten as Tildy, Beulah Bondi as Granny Kincaid, Burl Ives as Uncle Hiram and Harry Carey as the head judge at the fair.

Released in late 1948 and running eighty-two minutes, the film drew modest but enduring attention. On IMDb it holds a 6.7 rating from roughly 1,900 votes, while on TMDB it sits at 6.6 from a much smaller pool of around fifty voters.