Peter Pan 1953

[8.0/10] Maybe it’s Katheryn Beaumont. The young actress, who plays Wendy here and also voiced the title character in Alice in Wonderland, seems adept at portraying young woman who are sick of pressures from the adult world, dream of going off to a wondrous fantasyland, and only to discover the downside of what they wished for and want to go home. Sure, there’s not that much connective tissue between Alice’s desire to experience a world of nonsense and Wendy’s not to have to grow up, but their epiphanies that there’s drawbacks to their fervent wish, experienced through colorful but occasionally calamitous enouncters in a faraway place, makes them peas in a pod.

They also both are whisked away to a place where the Disney animators can go wild with their designs and rhythms. This may be the single most expressive set of characters The Mouse has ever produced. Pan floats and darts around like a paper airplane. Captain Hook shivers and shouts and gesticulates like a man possessed. Smee moves as though his mid-section is made of rubber and his legs have been wound up to high heaven. Each figure the animators put on screen has distinctive movements that catch the eye and the delight the viewer every time.

And that’s before you get to the characters who don’t have the benefit of speech to let us get to know them! Tinker Bell is nothing short of a revelation. Bolstered by Margaret Kerry’s modeling, the little pixie is a pistol. Through just her expressions, head shakes, and frantic movements of her limbs, she conveys so much fight and personality. Similarly, the crocodile never comes close to saying a word, but his cartoony pursuit of the rest of Captain Hook, his swifts and sways to the beat, and his smiles and frowns when he’s close or far from achieving his goals make him a memorable presence in the more Looney Tunes-esque portions of the film. Even Nana, who’s on screen for a grand total of about five minutes, makes a sympathetic impression in a short amount of time.

Unfortunately, having been released nearly seventy years ago, the film has some cultural artifacts that are, to put it charitably, read as distasteful today. The scene that represents indigenous people, with caricatured designs, broken speech, and other bits of exoticism is hard to watch in the modern day. The song “What Makes the Red Man Red” is particularly rough, applying stereotypes and then coming up with belittling explanations for them. The best you can say for these sequences is that, if you want, you can try to excuse them as the product of a young Londoner’s imagination and not meant to represent actual indigenous people as in Pocahontas, but that’s pretty thin. The truth is that these portions of the film are embarrassing, no matter how you frame them.

By the same token, there’s a subtler, but no pernicious brand of gender essentialism at play. Every female character in the film (short of Anna Darling) is jealous, rivalrous, and spiteful of the others, assuming each is after Pan’s affections. By contrast, all of the boys are rowdy, wild rough-housers who play games and knock one another around at every opportunity. For theoretically being the product of a young woman’s reveries, Neverland plays much more like a young boy’s view of the opposite sex and his fellow man than anything less bound in gender stereotypes that were already tired in the 1950s.
Still, if you can compartmentalize those regrettable parts of the film and enjoy what’s left, Peter Pan remains a delightful, imaginative spin on the joys and perils of youth. The early parts of the picture in the Darlings’ nursery presage what’s to come nicely. The spate of treehouses and pirate ships and mermaid lagoons capture the sense of a world of adventure and possibility for a young mind.

It’s also a sonically superb outing for Walt Disney Animation Studios. “You Can Fly” is an earworm that will stick in your head for days, and “Following the Leader” is just as catchy. But it’s the more incidental pieces of music that really liven up the film. Peter’s trademark tune on his pipe is a nice aural accent to his character. The jingling noises of Tinker Bell’s movements and pixie dust deposits similarly give her a signature sound that helps her command the screen. And last but certainly not least, the metronomic ticking of the crocodile’s approach, and the equal and opposite rhythmed panic that overtakes Captain Hook is absolutely fantastic.

Hook is also superb in the inevitable confrontation between him and his green-capped adversary. The sword-fight between the malevolent buccaneer and the spritely spirit of youth, taking place up, down, and all around a pirate ship, is one for the ages. Hook’s comic fury is matched by Pan’s prankish energy, with genuine tension and drama emerging when Pan vows not to use his power of flight in the fight. The world of this movie is one of constant, engrossing movement, and nowhere is that more present than in the Errol Flynn-esque standoff between Hook and Peter.

But of course, it can’t all be sword fights and pixie dust. Eventually, the Darlings must return home (if they ever left) to once again enjoy the warm embrace of their loving mother at the expense of their blustery, hapless father (another bit of gender essentialism). The hint that it was all a dream is another tie between Wendy and Alice, as is the renewed sense that maybe there’s a merit to her everyday life and the grown-up expectations that come with it when contemplating and visiting the alternative.

And yet, there’s an extra wrinkle to Peter Pan, something that makes it deeper and more engrossing than at first blush. The opening narration suggests that Wendy takes after her mother, warm-hearted and caring, and not at all like her boisterous, naysaying father who bloviates on about what’s practical and setting childhood aside. But by the time Wendy returns from Neverland, in one way or another, the film suggests the distance between them is not so great.

When forced to play house mother for a den of rambunctious kids who wants to do nothing but play and tussle and live like [shudder] “savages,” it’s Wendy who focuses on practicality, showing hints of her father’s personality and eventually understanding the need to grow up. But it also shows Mr. Darling as gazing at Peter’s ship of clouds and recalling something like his own adventures in Neverland, suggesting that Wendy’s sense of imagination may have come from an unlikely source.

Wendy Darling shares a great deal in common with her Wonderland-visiting counterpart, beyond just a voice actress. But what makes Wendy feel different is that return to her home life, laden with love and eventual understanding on both sides of the parental divide, which turns out not to be as great as she, or we, once thought.