The Sword in the Stone

In Wolfgang Reitherman’s Disney adaptation, the boy’s voice will not hold still. Rickie Sorensen was cast as Arthur and hit puberty during production, so Reitherman filled the gap with his own two sons, Richard and Robert, and all three recordings stayed in the finished picture. Arthur’s voice therefore shifts audibly between scenes and sometimes inside one scene. It is not a bad transfer; it is worked into the film. Bill Peet wrote the script alone and, against the usual order, wrote it before any storyboards were drawn. He found T. H. White’s 1938 novel hard to reduce because the Arthurian material was tangled with other myths. The drawings reached the cels through the photocopy process begun on 101 Dalmatians, which is where the scratchy outline comes from. The songs were the Sherman brothers’ first work on a Disney animated feature; The Jungle Book and The Aristocats came later. George Bruns was nominated for the music adaptation Oscar, and Irma La Douce won it. Reviewers at the time found the humour too slight to carry a thin narrative. A good fit if you will take Merlin’s lessons as separate turns rather than a connected plot. Not for you if you want the sword itself at the centre; the pulling of it is held back to the last minutes.