The Sword in the Stone (1963)
Directed by Wolfgang Reitherman
Wart is a young boy who aspires to be a knight's squire. On a hunting trip he falls in on Merlin, a powerful but amnesiac wizard who has plans for him beyond mere squiredom. He starts by trying to give him an education, believing that once one has an education, one can go anywhere. Needless to say, it doesn't quite work out that way.
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What critics compared The Sword in the Stone to
The kids have Disney’s “The Sword in the Stone” (1963) and foreign-film fans have Robert Bresson’s “Lancelot du Lac” (1974).
But this expensive bit of widescreen nightsoil only makes you yearn for the simple Sunday pictures of "Prince Valiant"; even the child's "The Sword in the Stone" looms like a leviathan in comparison.
For those who grew up with "The Sword in the Stone", "Camelot" and even "Excalibur", this movie with absolutely no romance will come as a shock - and this is the first installment in a reported series.
Anyone with an answer for what the good fuck is going on in John Boorman's Excalibur is the forgiving sort who already has a working conversation with the Arthur mythos--who's already read T.H. White or at the minimum watched The Sword in the Stone.
The design seems a little too familiar, though: Buddy’s design owes a little too much to Remy in Ratatouille, and Surly and his love interest/apologist squirrel Andie (Katherine Heigl) are dead ringers for computerized versions of the squirrels in Disney’s The Sword In The Stone.
There have, ironically, been almost no good movies made of the Arthurian legends (I’d say the best is Disney’s “The Sword in the Stone,” with “Excalibur” coming in a distant second — beyond that, the landscape is littered with high-flown Arthurian detritus like “First Knight,” “The Last Legion,” and “King Arthur: Legend of the Sword”).
Disney’s animated “The Sword in the Stone” enjoys a heightened status and the positively brilliant “Excalibur” from director John Boorman in 1981 set the standard.
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It feels like four or five different movies happening at once, not to mention that it playfully winks at legendary films like Indiana Jones and The Temple of Doom (via Arthur’s hunt for the trident), the Lord of the Rings trilogy (the trident), The Sword in the Stone (also the trident), and perhaps unintentionally Mamma Mia: Here We Go Again (at one point, Arthur and Mera find themselves in a coastal Mediterranean town, and can’t stop love from happening).
“Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time” feels like a cross between “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom,” “The Sword in the Stone” and “Pirates of the Caribbean”.
Where 1989's The Little Mermaid and especially 1991's nauseating Beauty and the Beast tried to pass themselves off as Golden Age Disney (1937 (Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs)-1950 (Cinderella), for argument's sake), before a certain stateliness loosened its grip on the house style, 1992's Aladdin took its cue from Uncle Walt's twilight years, the sixties, when he was interested in telling--as he geared up to pass the torch, perhaps--mentor stories (The Sword in the Stone and The Jungle Book) and pop culture had finally caught up with his incongruous predilections for psychedelia and bohemianism.