Peter Pan (1953)
Peter Pan , originally published under the title Peter Pan's Cheerful Adventures , is the 14th full-length cartoon from Walt Disney Studios and was released in 1953 . It refers to the stories of Peter Pan by James M. Barrie . In 2002 the sequel Peter Pan: New Adventures in Neverland was released .
action
In search of his cufflinks, the quick-tempered family man George Darling gets into all sorts of awkward situations, the common cause of which he ultimately identifies the stories of Peter Pan that the eldest daughter Wendy told her two brothers. Annoyed, father Darling announces Wendy's last night in the nursery and forbids the children to use Peter Pan. When the parents go out to dinner in the evening, Peter Pan surprises the Darling children in the night in search of his shadow. To protect Wendy from growing up, he invites all three to come with him to Neverland. Using the fairy dust of the fairy noseweis (Tinker Bell), who is not thrilled that Peter no longer only has eyes for her, Wendy, Klaus and Michael fly over nightly London to Neverland. Once there, they are greeted by the thunder of cannons from Captain Hook's pirate ship. While the Darling children are on the run, the jealous fairy Naseweis alerts the "lost children" and, on behalf of Peters, orders them to kill Wendy, which Peter Pan can prevent at the last moment. He banishes the star fairy.
While Wendy and Peter Pan go to the mermaid lagoon, the lost children, Klaus (John) and Michael, are kidnapped by Indians who want to avenge the robbery of the Indian princess Tiger Lily. This was stolen by none other than Hook, who wants to find out about Peter Pan's hiding place and threatens to let her drown in the rock of the skull at high tide. There, too, Peter Pan can intervene to save him, whereupon he is made an honorary Indian at an Indian festival. Wendy becomes very jealous of this and wants to go home with her brothers.
In the meantime, Captain Hook learned of Pan's hiding place from the star fairy he is holding captive. He kidnaps the children and sinks a ticking time bomb in the shaft of Peter Pan's hiding place. Peter Pan survives the explosion due to the timely warning of the escaped fairy and wins in a final battle against Captain Hook and the pirates. Wendy and her brothers come back home.
Wendy is sleeping by the open window when her parents come home. Together they look out of the window, where Peter Pan can still be seen with the flying ship. Father Darling realizes that he acted too early and lets Wendy stay a child.
Production history
Disney had been trying to get the rights to Barrie's play Peter Pan or the boy who wouldn't grow up from Great Ormond Street Hospital in London since 1935 . His studio began developing the script and character design in the early 1940s. It was intended to bring Peter Pan to the cinemas as the successor to Bambi , but the Second World War and the associated financial bottlenecks initially prevented it from being realized.
As with Pinocchio , there were big differences between the initial drafts of the characters in the 1940s and the realized results: Originally the story was much darker and had a darker ending. So it was planned to let the fairy Naseweis / Tinkerbell die in the explosion of Hook's bomb - in the original, she is poisoned. Peter Pan was supposed to sing a song about it out of mourning, but this was reversed out of consideration for the younger audience. However, a sequence after the explosion reminds of this, in which Peter calls the star fairy and a faint glow indicates the place where Naseweis / Tinkerbell is buried. Then she reappears in the final scene without explanation.
The cartoon offered the possibility of portraying the characters and elements more realistically than the stage could. So the crocodile, the dog Nana and the elf Tinkerbell appeared for the first time in shape (in the theater the dog had been moved by an extra, the presence of the fairy could only be guessed by a mere change of light and the approaching crocodile was behind by a ticking the scene has been clarified). The common stage practice of casting a young woman in the lead role was also broken and Peter Pan was realized as a male for the first time. However, the English dialogue version kept the peculiarity of having Mr. Darling and Captain Hook speak of the same actor.
Responsible as chief draftsman, who worked according to the color and concept design by Mary Blair , were: Milt Kahl, Frank Thomas (Captain Hook), Wolfgang Reitherman (crocodile), Ward Kimball (Indian chief), Ollie Johnston (Mr. Smee), Marc Davis (Tinker Bell), Eric Larson, John Lounsbery (George Darling), Les Clark, Norman Ferguson.
Reviews
"To this day" Peter Pan "is one of the most successful films of the Disney studios and probably the most successful adaptation of the fairy-tale material that Steven Spielberg took up again with" Hook ". The appearances of the crocodile, so feared by Hook, are particularly successful; However, the routine staged film does not offer artistic highlights. "
backgrounds
- In the original novella from 1911, Nana is a Landseer , not a St. Bernard as in the film.
- The film marks two endpoints in Disney history: on the one hand, it was the last in which all members of the Nine Old Men worked together as chief draftsmen, and on the other hand, it was the last to be rented by the Hollywood company RKO before Disney started its own rental company Buena Vista .
- Accordingly, it is also the last full-length Disney film, the German version of which was created in the RKO Berlin studios in the Berlin-Lankwitz dubbing department. The high proportion of German actors from the prewar period or the 1940s is characteristic of these productions. Today, Peter Pan in the German version is the film with the most unsatisfactory sound quality, but one of the few that is also available on DVD in the original (first) dubbing.
- Some songs that were intended for Alice in Wonderland found their way into the soundtrack for Peter Pan. For example the main title during the opening sequence “The second star to the right”.
- The song Never Smile at a crocodile is sung nowhere in the film, but appears again and again as a leitmotif in the orchestra in the bassoons as soon as the crocodile emerges from the water.
- Kathryn Beaumont was hired for the second time after Alice as the voice for Wendy, as her talent had particularly inspired the illustrators
- Disney child star Bobby Driscoll had his last major success by modeling and speaking in the lead role of Peter Pan before his artistic decline and human tragedy began.
- Although reference is made to James M. Barrie as the writer, this is the only better-known version of Peter Pan in film that does not use original dialogue from the drama, with the exception of the scene where Hook tells Smee why the crocodile is always chasing him. Both the musical adaptations and the silent film from 1924 fall back on the original dialogues of the drama.
- Based on the film, an attraction called Peter Pan's Flight was created in Disneyland , which, decades after its opening, continues to enjoy unbroken, high popularity and has been copied in almost all Disney parks.
Publications
- movie theater
- USA - February 5, 1953
- Germany - December 22, 1953
- Austria - December 3, 1954
- DVD / BD
- Peter Pan. Special Collection . Walt Disney Home Entertainment 2002
- Peter Pan. 2-Disc Platinum Edition . Walt Disney Home Entertainment 2007
- Peter Pan - Special Edition . (BD). Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainment, 2012.
- Peter Pan - Special Edition. Special Collection . (DVD). Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainment, 2012.
- Soundtrack
- Oliver Wallace , Sammy Cahn , Frank Churchill , Sammy Fain , Jack Lawrence , Edward H. Plumb , Ted Sears : Walt Disney's Peter Pan. Classic Soundtrack Series. Walt Disney Records , Burbank 1998, audio carrier no. 60958-7 - digitally restored original recording of the film music.
- Oliver Wallace, Sammy Cahn, Frank Churchill, Sammy Fain, Jack Lawrence, Edward H. Plumb, Ted Sears, Christine Lembach : Disney's Peter Pan. Original German film soundtrack. Walt Disney Records 2002, audio carrier no. 0927-44363-2 - digitally restored original German recording of the film music.
literature
- James Matthew Barrie : Peter Pan, or the Boy Who Didn't Want to Grow Up . German version by Bernd Wilms . Deutscher Theaterverlag, Weinheim / Bergstrasse approx. 1994, 48 pp.
- James Matthew Barrie: Peter Pan. (Original title: Peter and Wendy ). German by Bernd Wilms . With illustrations by Sybille Hein and an afterword by Joan Aiken . Dressler, Hamburg 2001, 220 pp., ISBN 3-7915-3589-7 .
- Leonard Maltin : The Disney Films. 3rd edition, 384 pp. Hyperion, New York 1995, ISBN 0-7868-8137-2 .
- Elmar Biebl, Dirk Manthey, Jörg Altendorf et al .: The films of Walt Disney. The magical world of animation. 2nd edition, 177 p. Milchstraße, Hamburg 1993, ISBN 3-89324-117-5 .
- Frank Thomas , Ollie Johnston : Disney Animation. The Illusion of Life . 575 S. Abbeville Press, New York 1981, ISBN 0-89659-698-2 .
- Christopher Finch : Walt Disney. His life - his art. (Original title: The Art of Walt Disney. From Mickey Mouse to the Magic Kingdoms ). German by Renate Witting. (Limited exclusive edition.) Ehapa-Verlag, Stuttgart 1984, 457 pages, ISBN 3-7704-0171-9 , (current English-language edition: The Art of Walt Disney. From Mickey Mouse to the Magic Kingdoms. Abrams, New York 2004, 504 pp., ISBN 0-8109-4964-4 .)
Web links
- Peter Pan in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- Peter Pan at Rotten Tomatoes (English)
- Peter Pan in the online film database
- Overview of the film music publications at Soundtrack-Collector
Individual evidence
- ↑ Peter Pan. In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed April 6, 2018 .
