When The Reluctant Dragon debuted, the review in The New York Times stated that half of the movie “…is nothing more than a super de luxe commercial film showing Disney’s sumptuous new diggings out in San Fernando Valley.”

Eighty-five years later, that half of the film is part of the charm of this different entry in the Disney movie catalog. The Reluctant Dragon is a live-action/animated feature that showcases charming animation alongside a tour of the Disney Studio lot, which now serves as a portal back in time.

With live-action directed by Alfred Werker, and animation directed by Hamilton Luske, Jack Cutting, Ub Iwerks and Jack Kinney, the film opens with a title card that announces what we’re about to see: “This picture is made in answer to the many requests to show the backstage life of animated cartoons. P.S. Any resemblance to a regular motion picture is purely coincidental.”

We then segue into live action, in glorious black-and-white, where we see the humorist Robert Benchley in his pool, shooting suction-cup arrows at fake ducks while his wife (played by Nana Bryant), lying near the pool, reads The Reluctant Dragon by Kenneth Grahame. She tells Benchley that he should pitch the idea of The Reluctant Dragon as a film to Walt Disney and drives him over to the studio, dropping him off for a meeting with Mr. Disney while she goes shopping.

As Benchley then wanders onto the lot, we get a glimpse inside the Disney Studio circa 1941.

Benchley is met by a very efficient tour guide named Humphrey (played by Buddy Pepper, who would later go on to a successful career as a songwriter of such songs as “Vaya Con Dios”). Benchley soon breaks away on his own, and heads into an art class, where a group of Disney artists including Wolfgang Reitherman, Eric Larson, Retta Scott, Jack Kinney and Ken Anderson, are sketching an elephant, who is the model in the room.

Florence Gill and Clarence Nash

Here, he meets up with an artist (Francis Gifford, one of several actors who portray studio employees alongside the actual artists) and watches sound effects and Foley artists add sounds to a cartoon featuring Casey Jr., the train. The conductor for the sound effects team is played by actor Frank Faylen (who would later play Ernie the cab driver in It’s a Wonderful Life and the father on TV’s Dobie Gillis).

After outrunning the tour guide again, Benchley ducks into the multiplane camera department. Here, the black-and-white in the film now segues to color.

Benchley meets Norm Ferguson to the dismay of Humphrey (Buddy Pepper). Click to enlarge.

Next is the “Rainbow Room,” for a trip through the Ink-and-Paint Department (and a montage of different paint colors) as Benchley gets to see a cel of Bambi being painted.

He then passes through the Character Model Department, where, among the many sculptures, we see early versions of Captain Hook from Peter Pan and Si and Am from Lady and the Tramp, both of which were in production but wouldn’t reach theaters for over a decade.

Robert Benchley (center) with Frances Gifford (left) explore the Character Model Department. Click To Enlarge

While learning about the Character Model Department, the artists present a caricatured model/bust of Benchley to the humorist. He then wanders over to the Story Department, meeting up with the artists, one of whom is played by actor Alan Ladd, and they walk Benchley through the storyboard for their newest film, Baby Weems. Disney sketch artist and inbetweener John Dehner is seen sketching in this scene – Dehner would go on after this film to have a very successful career as an actor in radio, movies and television. He would return as an actor to Disney for the 1957 TV series Zorro (as the Viceroy) and as narrator for two shorts, Aquamania (1961, with Goofy) and The Litterbug (1961, with Donald Duck).

In the style of an “animatic”, essentially told using still storyboard drawings, Baby Weems tells the tale of an infant who is born able to speak and quickly becomes a worldwide sensation. This section itself caused a sensation among the artists in the animation industry – and it was not forgotten. It proved a charming, original animated film could work for an audience using only very limited movement, a technique that was used during the war to produce animation faster for military, educational – and later on, cartoons made for television.

After Weems, Benchley once again avoids Humphrey by ducking into a room where animators Ward Kimball and Fred Moore are working. Kimball sketches Goofy and flips the animation paper. On a Movieola, they then give Benchley a preview of Goofy’s latest cartoon, How to Ride a Horse.

After, Norm Ferguson animates Pluto for Benchley when Humphrey arrives, taking Benchley to see Walt, who is in the screening room.

Just as Benchley is about to pitch his idea for adapting The Reluctant Dragon, the house lights dim, and the projectionist starts to screen Walt’s latest finished cartoon short… The Reluctant Dragon.

The animated short tells the tale of a young boy (voiced by Billy Lee) who, after reading a book about dragons, encounters one (Barnett Parkett). However, this dragon isn’t fierce; he’s a gentle creature who wants to recite poetry and sing.

The boy becomes concerned when Sir Giles (Claud Allister), the famed dragonslayer, comes to town, but when the boy brings Sir Giles, who is an old man, to meet the dragon, it turns out that the knight enjoys poetry, as well.

The knight and dragon agree to stage a fake fight to satisfy the villagers.

After the animated film ends, The Reluctant Dragon concludes with Mrs. Benchley driving Robert home, scolding him for not getting the story to Walt sooner. Benchley responds in Donald Duck’s voice with a “Phooey!” and Donald’s famous squawking as the movie ends.

The animated segments in The Reluctant Dragon demonstrate the Studio’s artistic range during this time. The charming Baby Weems reveals the power of story, even with limited movements. How to Ride a Horse displays great cartoony action (especially in its slow-motion segment). The Reluctant Dragon shows how the Disney artists could craft well-designed characters and personalities in full animation.

And, while the behind-the-scenes segments at the Studio are staged, they are still fascinating to see this era in animation captured on film.

Celebrating its 85th anniversary this month, The Reluctant Dragon was released on June 27, 1941, during a challenging time at the Disney Studio. Pinocchio and Fantasia (both 1940) did not do well at the box office, and The Reluctant Dragon was made as an inexpensive, quickly produced film to generate some box-office revenue. Also, an animator’s strike had started the month before. When The Reluctant Dragon opened, a number of strikers picketed the film’s premiere.

In the years that followed, The Reluctant Dragon itself was shown as a standalone short on Disney’s weekly TV show and was also released in that format on VHS. The full-length feature would be shown on The Disney Channel and eventually released on DVD, as part of the Walt Disney Treasures collection. It’s actually available on blu-ray as a hidden Bonus Feature on a double bill release of Ichabod And Mr. Toad and Fun & Fancy Free. The full 1941 feature is also currently available on Disney+.

Since its debut, however, The Reluctant Dragon has faded from many discussions, and for Disney and animation fans, in particular, it deserves better. Leonard Maltin noted this in his book, The Disney Films: “The film does not really deserve such obscurity. It is an interesting footnote to Disney’s career, and, if only for Baby Weems, should be more widely shown.”

NOTE: For a deeper dive into the characterizations in “The Reluctant Dragon” short itself, please read a series of posts here by Esther Bley – here is part 1.

Disney has been trying to find animated shows that can travel the way anime travels, and this new soccer-fantasy series is an obvious swing. Soccer already gives the story a global language, while the magical power system gives it the kind of exaggerated sports energy fans usually associate with anime rather than traditional Disney Channel animation. However, as per ComicBook, that same series was reportedly canceled in the Middle East.

At 35, Daniel Pontón is what is known as a Disney adult. His fans crowd outside his home in Parla in Madrid where he lives with his fiancé. His passion for Disney is such that he is considering removing the bed from the guest room/museum to make way for the invasion of stuffed Disney toys. On the fluffy pillows, there are Mickey, Stitch, Jack Skellington, Olaf, Chip and Chop. The shelves and walls are also plastered with Disney images. All this memorabilia, and other collector’s items, such as park keys, are mementos from his time browsing Disney stores and enjoying theme parks.

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Have you ever wondered about how Walt Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarves was brought to Germany?

After all, the film is based on a German fairy tale, and it was released on the cusp of World War II. Surely, there would have been a German version. Well, it turns out there was a German dub that was intended to release in Germany in 1939. Unbeknownst to many, including the good folks at Disney, the cast they hired for the German dub had consisted entirely of Jewish exiles living in Amsterdam. Not only that, but these actors had been some of the biggest names in the German film industry before the rise of the Nazis.

After Snow White and the Seven Dwarves premiered in the United States in 1937, Disney quickly moved to create 12 international versions of the film. It wasn’t difficult to secure distribution deals in most countries, but Germany proved to be a tough nut to crack. By 1938, all of the American owned studios had pulled up stakes and left the country due to rising political tensions. American movies could still be released in Germany, but they had to go through UFA, which was the German state-owned film distributor.

Nazi leader Adolf Hitler, and Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels, who directly controlled the movie industry in Germany, worked with Disney through UFA to try and secure a deal for Snow White. Hitler was a big fan of Disney, and Snow White was based on a German fairy tale, so he knew they had to show the movie in Germany. To Hitler, having the great Walt Disney adapt a German fairy tale as a feature length animated film was a great national honor. For Disney, going through the government of Germany took a lot more time than negotiating a deal with a traditional, privately owned studio. While they worked out a deal, Roy Disney flew to Amsterdam to oversee the production of the Dutch version of Snow White.

In Amsterdam, Roy Disney worked with local Dutch producer Max Tak, who hired director, actor, and comedian Kurt Gerron to direct the Dutch dub of Snow White. Since Gerron was fluent in German, he was asked if he could also direct a German dub of the film. Gerron was more than happy to take the job offer, as he was part of a community of German speaking actors who had recently moved to Amsterdam. There was one little detail that likely went unnoticed, however. Gerron and his community of actors were Jews from Germany who had fled to Amsterdam after Jews were banned from working in the German film industry.

Dora Gerson

Dora Gerson was a German-Jewish actress who appeared in films alongside Bela Lugosi during the silent era. She had been married to film director Veit Harlan briefly in the 1920s, he would later go on to direct the antisemitic propaganda film Jud Süss in 1940. Gerson fled Germany for the Netherlands in 1936, and would eventually be caught and sent to Auschwitz with her husband and two children. The family was murdered at Auschwitz on February 14th, 1943.

Otto Wallburg was a prominent comedian and actor who performed in dozens of movies in the 1920s and 1930s. He appeared alongside Kurt Gerron in the 1931 comedy Bombs on Monte Carlo, also in 1931 he appeared in The Congress Dances, which was an international sensation. He escaped Germany for Austria in 1933, where he continued working in film until fleeing to France, and then finally the Netherlands. After the German invasion of the Netherlands in 1940, Wallburg was arrested and sent to the Westerbork transit camp, before he was killed at Auschwitz on October 29th, 1944.

Kurt Lilien was an actor who was most active between 1927 and 1933. During this time he appeared in a number of films, including Two Hearts Beat as One starring Lilian Harvey. Lilien also performed in the 1927 silent film The Most Beautiful Legs of Berlin alongside Kurt Gerron. He was killed at the Sobibor Concentration Camp in Poland on May 28th, 1943.

Of those who performed in Snow White, there is no one more historically significant than Kurt Gerron, himself. Unbeknownst to Disney at the time, Gerron had a reputation with the regime. To international audiences, Gerron was Marlene Dietrich’s manager in The Blue Angel, an UFA produced film about a professor who falls in love with a burlesque dancer. To the Nazis, Gerron represented the personification of Jewish excess. In his films, Gerron commonly played the part of the Jewish banker, lawyer, or any sort of greedy businessman. His appearance inspired many of the anti-semitic cartoons published in right-wing newspapers of the 1930s, and in 1940 his image would be used disparagingly in the propaganda film The Eternal Jew. Gerron was the image most German people had in their heads of what a Jew looked like.

Kurt Gernon

In late 1938, German filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl made a now-infamous trip to Hollywood to promote her documentary Olympia, about the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Riefenstahl was notorious for producing propaganda films for the Nazi party, so you could imagine her presence in Hollywood was about as welcome as a joke in an article about the Holocaust. Walt Disney was the only person in town willing to see her. He even gave her a tour of the Disney studios, showing her concept art and production materials from Fantasia, which was in production at the time. Riefenstahl had hoped to show Disney Olympia, but Disney’s projectionist had refused to screen it, as the projectionist union had taken a vocal stance against Riefenstahl.

It must be noted that Disney only welcomed her as part of negotiations for Snow White, and not because he had any positive feelings toward the Nazi regime. This didn’t matter to the rest of Hollywood, who decided that Walt Disney was an antisemite as a result. Whatever beliefs Disney privately held, this incident was purely business. Germany had the second biggest film market in the world at the time, so when you’re gambling your fortune on a film project, you want to make sure it gets seen in Germany.

Leni Riefenstahl directing

This was the absolute last chance Walt Disney had to sell Snow White to the Germans, but after Riefenstahl returned to Germany having felt slighted by Hollywood, the German government banned American films entirely. Goebbels was willing to make an exception for Snow White, but unfortunately, Kristallnacht, a nationwide pogrom against Jewish people, had occurred at the same time as Riefenstahl’s trip. Disney felt it better to abandon the sale altogether. Tensions in Europe were at a boiling point, and it just wasn’t worth the trouble.

While the German dub of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves wouldn’t see release in Germany, it would premiere in Switzerland in December 1938, as well as Hungary. It wouldn’t be shown publicly anywhere else until after the war, but when the Soviets raided the Reich’s film archive, they found four copies of Snow White. The English version was present, along with the French and Dutch versions, but curiously enough, they also had the German version. It’s been said that Hitler was a fan of the movie, even if they couldn’t show it in Germany, he certainly enjoyed watching it privately. There is no evidence that Hitler knew who starred in the German version, but as Hitler and Goebbels were both avid movie buffs, it wouldn’t be hard for them to pick out Gerron’s voice specifically.

After the war, the film would premiere in Austria in 1948, and finally make its way to Germany in 1950. Through the 1950s and 1960s, German audiences would become familiar with the 1938 version of Snow White, however, in 1966 Disney decided to create a new dub for Germany. This dub would then be replaced by another one in 1992 for the film’s home video release. Both the 1938 and 1966 versions would be sealed away in the Disney vault, not for any reason other than practicality. The latest dub in each language is typically the default version, and there’s no point in giving attention to earlier versions, unless there’s substantial fan outcry to see them.

Disney isn’t necessarily hiding some dark secret, in all likelihood they probably weren’t aware at the time. Had Roy Disney realized the cast he hired was made up of Jews, he most likely would have pulled the plug on the project. Not due to any antisemitism on his part, but because he was trying to sell this movie directly to Hitler. It’s not likely the Disney company were even aware of who dubbed the film in the years following the war when it started to be screened publicly. It was a one and done job where a group of actors were plucked off the streets and paid for a few days’ work.

So, how do we know who starred in the German dub? German-Jewish journalist Paul Marcus, otherwise known as PEM, had fled Germany early on in the 1930s and had started a personal newsletter reporting on Jewish actors and entertainers living in exile. One of these newsletters from 1938 detailed the production of both the Dutch and German dubs of Snow White. This newsletter is backed up by articles from local Amsterdam-based newspapers. It’s because of the underground resistance movement that we have this information today.

Sources

• “Walt Disney’s European Tour in 1935: Germany, Austria, and Switzerland.” The German Way, 4 May 2020, www.german-way.com/walt-disneys-european-tour-in-1935-germany-austria-and-switzerland.
• Giesen, Rolf, and J. P. Storm. Animation Under the Swastika. Jefferson, North Carolina, McFarland, 2012.
• Prisoner of Paradise. Directed by Malcolm Clarke and Stuart Sender. Menemsha Entertainment, 2002.
• “De Nederlandsche Versie van Walt Disney’s Sneeuwwitje.” Nieuwsblad van Het Noorden, 7 May 1938. ·“Hollands Sneeuwwitje Vóór de Zomer Klaar.” Zaans Volksbad, 19 May 1938, p. 14.
• Snow White Archive. “1938 German Dub of Snow White.” Filmic Light, 19 Nov. 2017, filmic-light.blogspot.com/2017/11/1938-german-dub-of-snow-white.html.
• Doherty, Thomas. “When Leni Riefenstahl Came to Hollywood.” The Hollywood Reporter, 23 Aug. 2021, www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-features/leni-riefenstahl-hollywood-1235001606.