Fun and Fancy Free
Short description
Fun and Fancy Free is a 1947 Disney animated feature made up of two separate stories linked by the narrator Jiminy Cricket. In the first, Bongo, a circus bear raised in captivity escapes into the wild, where he has to adjust to freedom and its dangers while falling for a bear named Lulubelle. The second, Mickey and the Beanstalk, follows Mickey, Donald and Goofy as they climb a beanstalk into the clouds and reach a giant's castle after a singing harp that brings prosperity to their valley is stolen. The film is hosted by Edgar Bergen, and the voice cast includes Dinah Shore, Cliff Edwards as Jiminy Cricket, Anita Gordon as the singing harp, and Walt Disney as Mickey Mouse.
The film was directed by Bill Roberts, Hamilton Luske, William Morgan and Jack Kinney, written by Frank Tashlin and produced by Walt Disney for Walt Disney Productions. It runs 73 minutes and belongs to the studio's run of animated features built around packaged shorts, following Make Mine Music (1946) and preceding Melody Time (1948) in Kinney's directing record. It is the seventh of fifteen films Luske directed.
Audience responses place it in mixed territory: it holds a 6.3 rating on IMDb across roughly 10,000 votes and the same 6.3 on TMDB from about 542 votes. A film critics' rating of 5.8 from 11 reviews sits slightly below those viewer scores.
What's left behind the scenes
- Edgar Bergen (1903-1978) was one of the most popular ventriloquists in the 1940s, and even had his own radio show. After watching the film, he was upset by how visible his lip movements were and stated that working in cinema had ruined him (in the sense that he wouldn't have allowed himself to do so on the radio).
- Both parts of the film were shot separately as two independent feature-length projects, but due to the difficulties of the post-war period, Walt Disney (1901-1966) decided to combine them.
- Between 1941 and 1947, the film was in what was known as 'production hell,' due to complex relationships between Walt Disney Studios on one hand, and the United States government and the military on the other. When the US entered World War II, various government agencies commissioned Walt Disney Studios to create training and propaganda films for military personnel and the general public. As a result, some projects already underway were shelved, and by 1942, 90% of the studio's employees (a total of 550 people) were working on war-themed films.
Auditions in India
Casting calls in USA
Castingi w Polsce
Кастинги в Україні
