It begins quite slyly as a boisterous domestic comedy, with the prosaic and huffy Mr. Darling rummaging around after the cufflinks that his fanciful children, playing pirates, have appropriated as "buried treasure." Then it leaps to the fantasy realm, with the beautifully timed, thief-in-the-night appearance, on the rooftops of Victorian London, of Peter Pan, in search of his mislaid shadow. The Disney animators' pictorial skills are reaffirmed throughout: the deep perspectives (airborne views of London and of Never-Never Land), the painstaking details (shadows, clouds, glints of moonlight on the dark ocean), the extravagant kitsch (the Maxfield Parrish-ish mermaid cove), the carefully observed and individualized movements of the characters (Wendy's timid balancing act on the rocks of the mermaids' hangout), and so forth. These skills have been lavishly tributed in the picture books on the Disney studio. Less acknowledged have been the narrative skills on exhibit here: the swift pacing and timely, teasing shifts of locale, the bits of comic business in endless supply (an enraged grizzly makes to grab a child skipping through the woods and suddenly pulls back, puzzled at the sight of the little tot's teddy), the wild outbursts of action (Captain Hook's encounter at Skull Rock with his nemesis, the ticking crocodile: more exciting than anything in "Jaws"), and the witty, varied characterizations (Pan, the mischievous sprite and cold-hearted proselytizer for eternal childhood; Tinkerbell, his pocket-sized companion, curvaceous, vain, and jealous; Hook, the neurotic, obsessed buccaneer; Smee, the servile, ineffectual first-mate; and the three precocious Darling kids). Based on the play by James M. Barrie. (1952) — Duncan Shepherd
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