The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad (1949)

The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad is a collection of adaptations from two stories: The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving. In the first, a toad by the name of Mr. Toad is easily obsessive with new fads. He sells the prestigious Toad Hall to a bunch of weasels for a stolen motor vehicle. He ends up in jail and his friends The Mole, The Badger, and The Rat have to clear his name and get him out of there. The second story tells of a guy who wanders into the hamlet of Sleepy Hollow and takes the job of the local schoolmaster. Dude loves to eat and he really, really loves the ladies. So when the hottest lady in town shows up, he’s suitably impressed and does whatever he can to win her heart; but the town bully won’t let him win without a fight. Oh yeah, there’s something about a Headless Horseman in there, too.

This is one of Disney’s most average films. Although it follows the two texts relatively closely, the animation is notably dull; this could be due largely to the pastoral settings of both segments. The colors are mostly drab and washed out, possibly a product of the film’s age but I think it’s an un/successful attempt at casting a drab tone. The stories are also very short–roughly 25 minutes each–so there isn’t a whole lot of wiggle room in terms of development. Things happen, which lead to more things, and then things stop happening. Yawn.

I guess Disney wasn’t committed to turning either of these concepts into a full-length motion picture; maybe it was testing the waters or something? Up to this point the company’s last big picture was arguably Bambi, which came out in 1942, with every other film being only a package of cartoons that explored a myriad of concepts and tones in the vein of Fantasia. Perhaps it was tired of those, too; judging from the main movie list on the Wikipedia they went balls deep into full-length motion-picture territory after this one as a sort of return to form. Whatever the case, your kids may still pay attention to it. The first segment’s essentially a kiddie film, after all; the second segment’s probably enough to scare them a tiny bit but make their imaginations run wild for a time–your mileage may vary with that one.

C