Josh Spiegel
To argue in the era of Frozen and Moana that Disney’s animated features once had the capacity to terrify an all-ages audience feels like living that meme of the elderly woman being assisted by someone much younger. But it’s true! Films like Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Fantasia, and 101 Dalmatians may cover distinctive stylistic ground, but they each boast a little bit of nightmare fuel. No matter how old the audience member, Walt Disney and his animators were very comfortable making that wide crowd squirm in their seats as much as make them laugh or cry. And at this spooky time of year, there’s really no better example of Disney’s ability to scare you than by The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad.
This 1949 diptych, celebrating its 75th anniversary this week, is the last film of Disney’s package era of the 1940s. Though that decade began with classics like Pinocchio and Bambi, America’s involvement in World War II was accompanied by a governmental cry for wartime propaganda from film studios. As that work wasn’t lucrative, Disney resorted to a) re-releasing earlier efforts for a quick buck and b) using lower budgets to make feature-length packages of shorter animated stories. At least one of those films is a hidden gem (the 1944 film The Three Caballeros), but some were stripped-down versions of Fantasia: pieces of animation with next to no dialogue scored to everything from “Clair de Lune” to a Benny Goodman-led jazz composition. The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad ended the era with slightly beefier, more literary goals in mind.
Title aside, the story of Mr. Toad comes first in a truncated adaptation of The Wind in the Willows that has only gotten scarier with extratextual context. Mr. Toad is a flighty sort who gets obsessed with automobiles and is willing to sell Toad Hall just to get his flippers on one, but he ends up being conned by some anthropomorphized animals, and is sent to jail for his troubles. This half of the film, narrated by Basil Rathbone, has become terrifying for anyone who’s visited Disneyland in the last few decades. Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride, a dark ride in Fantasyland, mostly covers the short film’s plot points, except it ends with sending Mr. Toad not only to jail, but to Hell. No, really – just skip to 2:15 in this three-minute video and see for yourself how abruptly and darkly the attraction concludes.
But for the real thrills, head straight to the back half of the film, an adaptation of Washington Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” narrated by iconic crooner Bing Crosby, who also provides the voices for the bullying Brom Bones as well as reedy schoolmaster Ichabod Crane. The broad strokes of the story are roughly the same as in the Irving piece, in which Ichabod woos the fetching young Katrina Von Tassel, who’s meant to be wed to Brom. The latter man decides to scare Crane out of his pants, devising a premise in which a ghostly Headless Horseman pursues Crane after a Halloween party. Crosby’s more important to the story because of his unique voice (though there are five overall songs in the film, one of them is “Auld Lang Syne” and Crosby sings three of the others), adding new spooky flavor with his booming baritone.
And then, of course, there’s the final few minutes, which partially lean on the kind of visual sight-gag-style humor of Disney’s animated shorts (there’s a preponderance of jokes as Crane and his horse attempt to flee, and he keeps switching positions on the saddle) and partially leans into the terrifying, spectral image of a man riding a black horse with nothing above his neck. Perhaps the most welcome surprise is that the film doesn’t give Ichabod Crane a happy ending. Before Ichabod is at least scared off for good, he seems to verify that the Headless Horseman isn’t Brom in disguise, and we’re never meant to know what actually happened. Did Ichabod get killed? Was Brom just being a nasty bully? Is there actually a ghostly horseman missing his head? This adaptation doesn’t add any details to give you answers one way or the other, which makes the ending both abrupt and all the more disturbing. This isn’t like Pinocchio giving you a fake-out ending in which the hero seems to have died; when Ichabod’s gone, he’s gone for good.
We may think of horror films, of splatterfests and buckets of blood, when we think of Halloween movies. But you can’t sleep on Disney animated films, even titles like The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad. Yes, it’s a Disney movie, but that lowered expectation means you might be even more creeped out by the ways in which the animators (and theme-park Imagineers) are willing to terrify you—to the point where you may even lose your head.
“The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad” is streaming on Disney+.
