First shot of animation: establishing shot of Appalachia

It’s another package film, with no frame story, and intended from the beginning to be cut apart into individual segments. The uniting theme is music, sort of a Fantasia 2 with a broader and looser perspective. It reminds me of the Muppets, with popular and canonical music both used to tell stories with abstract and vibrant imagery.

First is a Hatfield and McCoy/Romeo and Juliet story sung by a barbershop quartet. It starts with a dozen on each side dying and watching the rest of the short from heaven. Grace is the first Disney character drawn to be sexy, but she gestures and bounces with her whole body like all the other hillbillies, it’s fun.

I kept thinking about nostalgia through this one. Forming the Castle is pretty nostalgic itself, but Casey at the Bat is Edwardian baseball, the Johnnie Fedora and Alice Bluebonnet segment ends with a horse-drawn ice carriage, there’s a pull toward the pre-war.

All the Cats Join In is the most contemporary segment to 1946, but feels like a nostalgia piece because bobbie soxers piling into a jalopy to the malt shop has survived so many cycles. Grease, New Swing Revival, every Archie comic since 1958.

Some of these feel like Fantasia leftovers. The best of them is Blue Bayou, which actually was. Peter and the Wolf might have been in this category of the narrator would just shut up. Totally unnecessary.

I enjoyed this one on the strength of variety and vibrancy. After You've Gone is the simplest concept for a music-based short, instruments dance to the song, but the color and expression make it work. The last segment ends with a singing whale being shot and performing in heaven, so the closest thing to a frame is bookends of death.