Peter Pan

Clyde Geronimi, Wilfred Jackson and Hamilton Luske share the direction of this 1953 feature: Wendy and her two brothers follow Peter Pan to Neverland, where Captain Hook waits. Walt Disney wanted the play in 1935, got the rights only after Barrie’s death, and reached cinemas thirteen years later. Barrie had left Peter Pan to London’s Great Ormond Street children’s hospital in 1929, and a 1988 copyright clause still sends it royalties. Hans Conried voices both Wendy’s father and Captain Hook, a doubling taken from the stage, so Hook reads less as a pirate than as the adult authority the children fled, reframing the going-home ending. The animators drew Peter’s flying and sword work from dancer Roland Dupree, not Bobby Driscoll, who acted the quieter beats; that is why he moves as though choreographed even mid-fight. Disney’s own text says the film has Native people speak an unintelligible language, uses a racist term for them, and has Peter and the Lost Boys dance in headdresses. Since January 2021 it has not appeared in children’s profiles on Disney+; only an adult profile opens it. A good fit if you will stop these seventy-seven minutes at that sequence and talk it through. Not for anyone wanting to hand a child a film its own studio flagged and say nothing.