I Watch Every Disney Movie In Order So You Don’t Have To: The Reluctant Dragon
The Reluctant Dragon was first released by the Walt Disney Company in 1941. It is the fourth Disney movie that was created and another hybrid movie consisting of live-action and animation. I watched this movie with my boyfriend and while it was funny and interesting, it just felt long and sometimes pretty boring. It just felt as though it wasn’t getting to the point. Here’s the plot:
The movie opens up to this woman reading the kid’s story The Reluctant Dragon to her husband, Robert Benchley, who is playing with his son or nephew’s toy gun. After reading the story, his wife just decides that they should go to Walt Disney himself and tell him to make this book out of a movie. Now, as much as I would love for a famous movie producer to make movies out of some of my favorite books, there is no way I could just waltz into Universal Studios and say “Hey can you make Junie B. Jones a movie?” Even if I could, it would take so long just to get an appointment. It only took a day for this guy to get access to Disney Studios.
Anyway, Robert gets distracted so much throughout this film. He finds himself in the art class where all of the animators are learning how to draw, the sculpting class, technicolor room, storyboard room etc. Throughout these scenes we are shown little shorts created by Disney. Now, don’t get me wrong, I love seeing the behind the scenes of a movie company, especially Disney, and hey, I get to see more Disney shorts in the process, however, I wanted to see The Reluctant Dragon, not the process of how they made it. Anyway, after about an hour in, Robert finally gets to see Walt Disney. As a Disney fan, I was fangirling a bit when I saw the REAL Walt Disney on my TV screen.
As Robert is about to explain to Walt the plot of The Reluctant Dragon they first sit through a movie screening of…wait for it….The. Reluctant. Dragon. After an hour of watching this guy get lost in the Walt Disney Studio, we finally get to actually watch the movie we clicked on.
It was a cute story. This little boy sees a dragon and asks if he is as bad as his books describe. When the boy finds out the dragon isn’t as scary and instead likes poetry, he is a little disappointed, which I can understand. When the townspeople find out about this dragon, they send the dragon slayer to kill it, but you know, the dragon doesn’t want to fight, so the little boy sets up a meeting between the dragon and the dragon slayer. Turns out the dragon slayer also likes poetry, so they decide to not fight and come up with this plan to have a fake fight instead.
So, they have this fake fight, the dragon slayer “wins” and then the dragon takes an oath that he won’t terrorize the village (even though he wasn’t doing that anyway but okay). Then it’s happily ever after. The movie is over and the scene ends with Robert’s wife nagging her husband about how he was too late to ask about the making of a kid’s book that was already being made before they thought about making it a movie. Did I also mention that literally everyone at the studio knew “Mr. Benchley’s” name meanwhile, he JUST arrived on the studio lot? I mean I know word gets around, but geez, I didn’t know it could go around that fast.
In the end, I think this movie would have been good as just a short. If you’re interested in the behind the scenes of old Disney movies, there are plenty to watch on YouTube. I definitely think you could skip this movie if you were planning on watching it. It’s sort of a waste of time. The lesson of this movie, for me at least, is: if you have a movie idea for Disney, don’t bother telling them because they probably already made it.
