Movie Review – Peter Pan

- Summary -
Director : Clyde Geronomi, Wilfred Jackson, Hamilton Luske
Cast : Bobby Driscoll, Kathryn Beaumont, Hans Conried, Bill Thompson
Censorship Rating : G
Target Audience : Animation, kids.
Length : 90 Minutes
Synopsis: Wendy, John and Michael are whisked from the home in London to Neverland, a place where children never grow up, by Peter Pan. There they fight pirates, meet Indians, mermaids and discover that family is the most important gift of all.
Review : Superlative, exceptionally well animated film, Peter Pan still remains one of the most enduring successes of Disney’s early films, the animation and vocal performances ensuring the quality of this film is unsurpassed even fifty years later.
Our Rating : 10/10 A must-see.
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Walt Disney was an undisputed genius. That much is certain. His ability to take famous (and semi-famous) European fairy tales and morality stories and turn them into feature films of animation so beautiful is renowned, his early works considered to this date classic masterpieces of the artform. Rightfully so, too. Who am I to try and knock the great man (after all, he’s dead, and can’t respond!), so I can really only give you my thoughts on what is one of the studios most beautifully rendered films.
Peter Pan was conceived by Scottish-born playwright John M Barrie, and his first appearance was in a published version of The Little White Bird in 1902; his leading role status wouldn’t be seen until 1904, when Pan was written into a play featuring the now famous characters we all know and love, including Wendy, John and Michael Darling. Peter Pan appeared in numerous stories, in much the same way a serialised character like Sherlock Holmes would, in which the same character would get into various serialised adventures that ended up becoming the basis for the more modern take on the character. Part of the legend of the character was held that the part of Peter himself, when performed on stage, was played by a girl, rather than a boy, to try and keep the mischievous ambiguity of the character alive and well.

Pan creator, JM Barrie circa 1910
Peter Pan, along with the Lost Boys, Captain Hook, Smee, Tinkerbell and Tigerlilly, and finally the Darling children, became part of modern English folklore, a sort of mythology of childhood fantasy so eloquently expanded a few decades later by Tolkein and CS Lewis, among others. However, the underlying themes of Barrie’s stories were a little darker than the version we see today. More on this later.























