Peter Pan

Walt Disney’s Peter Pan takes J.M. Barrie’s play about the boy who would not grow up and makes it into 77 minutes of flying, fencing and pirates falling into the sea. Three directors, Wilfred Jackson, Clyde Geronimi and Hamilton Luske, share the credit, and eight names share the writing, which tells you how it was built. It is a bright, fast, likeable children’s adventure with one of the studio’s best villains. It is not much of a Peter Pan, because everything in Barrie that hurts has been taken out, and what is left is a chase.

The London opening is the best-written stretch. Mr Darling (Hans Conried) cannot find his cufflinks, Nana the dog is put out in the yard, and Wendy (Kathryn Beaumont) is told this is her last night in the nursery. Then Peter (Bobby Driscoll) comes through the window after his shadow, Tinker Bell is shaken out over the children like pepper, and they are gone. We have watched the four of them circle the clock face and head out over the river more times than we can count, and we still sat up. It is the whole city laid out in blue and gold under a child’s feet, and under that the song “You Can Fly”, which has the sense to be simple.

Then there is Hook. Conried voices him as well as Mr Darling, and the doubling is the film’s one real idea about fathers: the same voice fussing over a shirt front and over a hook. His Hook is a vain, easily frightened dandy with a lace cuff and a weak stomach, and the animators give him more expression than anyone else on screen. Bill Thompson’s Smee is a soft, kindly idiot who keeps trying to shave him at the wrong moment. Between them and the crocodile, who arrives with a clock ticking in its stomach, the film has a running joke it never wears out. We laughed at every humiliation, and there are perhaps a dozen.

Never Land itself is flat, saturated colour: a pink lagoon, green light inside Skull Rock, a purple night over the pirate ship. The colour is the part of the film that has dated least; the backgrounds look like painted paper rather than a place, which suits a story that is meant to be dreamt. Oliver Wallace’s score is brass and bells and keeps quoting the songs back at us, which wears thin. Donald Halliday cuts the whole thing at a run. No scene lasts more than a few minutes, which is a mercy for a six-year-old and a cost for anyone who wanted to know who these people are.

Now the trouble. The film’s idea of women is that they hate each other on sight: Tinker Bell tries to have Wendy shot, the mermaids try to pull her under, Tiger Lily has almost nothing to say. Tinker Bell is a lovely piece of pantomime drawing, all hips and sulks, and a spiteful little character, and the film thinks this is charming. Then the Lost Boys and the Darling brothers are marched to the Indian camp, and the film stops for a song explaining the colour of the Indians’ skin. It is racial caricature with a tune attached, several minutes of it, and it is also the one stretch where the drawing gets lazy, the same three gags about noses and war-whoops. We winced through all of it. It is the only part of the film we would be glad never to see again.

Peter himself is the other loss. Driscoll gives him an American swagger and a laugh like a car horn, and the film is content with that: a cocky boy with a knife who is right about everything. Barrie’s Peter is heartless and forgets people, and the play knows that not growing up is a kind of death. Disney’s has no interest in sorrow. Wendy, who in Barrie chooses to go home and pays for it, here mostly stands at the edge of the frame looking worried while the boys have the fun.

Against the studio’s own record, Pinocchio (1940) took a child somewhere frightening and let him feel it; this one runs past the frightening bits with a whoop. Watch it with a child if you have one, be ready to talk during the camp scene or to skip it, which costs the story nothing, and stay for Hook. It runs 77 minutes and carries a U certificate.