Old Yeller 1957 - An influential tear-jerker family movie

IMDB Link
IMDB Rating: 7,3

Director: Robert Stevenson
Main Cast: Dorothy McGuire, Fess Parker, Tommy Kirk, Beverly Washburn

"Old Yeller is one of the best-loved live-action features ever made by the Walt Disney Company. Unabashedly weepy, the film is genuine enough to have become a family classic. Director Robert Stevenson coaxes some fine performances from his cast and does an admirable job recreating farm life in the mid-1800s. The film inspired a number of copycats, and its influence can still be felt in almost any movie that prominently features an animal. Disney began to move away from animation after the success of 1950's Treasure Island; Yeller was one of many live-action hits directed by Stevenson, including Kidnapped, The Absent-Minded Professor, and, most notably, Mary Poppins. Yeller spawned an inferior sequel, Savage Sam, featuring much of the same cast but a different director." - www.allmovie.com

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Bambi 1942 - An enduring classic animated movie from Disney and his crew

IMDB Link
IMDB rating: 7,4

Directors: James Algar, Samuel Armstrong, David Hand, Graham Heid, Bill Roberts, Paul Satterfield, Norman Wright

"The classic Felix Salter story Bambi provides the basis for this near-perfect Disney animated feature. We follow the male deer Bambi from birth, through his early childhood experiences with woodland pals Thumper the rabbit and Flower the skunk, the traumatic sudden death of Bambi's mother at the hands of hunters, his courtship of the lovely doe Faline, and his rescue of his friends during a raging forest fire; we last see the mature, antlered Bambi assuming his proper place as the Prince of the Forest. In the grand Disney tradition, Bambi is brimming with unforgettable sequences, notably the young deer's attempts to negotiate an iced-over pond, and most especially the death of Bambi's mother - and if this moment doesn't move you to tears, you're made of stone (many subsequent Disney films, including Lion King, have tried, most in vain, to match the horror and pathos of this one scene). The score in Bambi yielded no hits along the lines of 'Whistle While You Work', but the songs are adroitly integrated into the action. Bambi was the last of the 'classic' early Disney features before the studio went into a decade-long doldrums of disjointed animated pastiches like Make Mine Music." - www.allmovie.com

DVD links (Region-free):

Dumbo 1941 - A wonderful animation from Disney's classic era

IMDB Link

IMDB rating: 7,3

Directors: Samuel Armstrong, Norman Ferguson, Wilfred Jackson, Jack Kinney, Bill Roberts, Ben Sharpsteen, John Elliotte

"The shortest of Disney's major animated features Dumbo involves a baby elephant with unusually large ears. Ostracized from the rest of the circus animals, poor Dumbo is even separated from his mother, who is chained up in a separate cage after trying to defend her child. Only brash-but-lovable Timothy Mouse offers the hand of friendship to Dumbo, encouraging the pouty pachyderm to exploit his 'different' qualities for fame and fortune. After trepidatiously indulging in a vat of booze, Dumbo awakens in a tall tree. Goaded by a group of jive-talking crows, Dumbo discovers that his outsized ears have given him the ability to fly. The musical score by Frank Churchill and Oliver Wallace won Oscars for them both." - www.allmovie.com

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Pinocchio 1940 - A lesson in honesty

IMDB Link
IMDB rating: 7,6

Directors: Norman Ferguson, T. Hee, Wilfred Jackson, Jack Kinney, Hamilton Luske, Bill Roberts, Ben Sherpsteen

"Though only Disney's second feature-length cartoon, Pinocchio is still celebrated as one of the company's greatest achievements for its Academy Award-winning music, its humor, its beauty, and, most of all, its production value. Determined to make an animated film that improved upon its predecessor, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), Walt Disney employed over 750 staff members on Pinocchio and worked them relentlessly for several years. Technicians developed an enhanced multiplane camera that could dolly in and out of an animated scene (similar to live-action photography), as opposed to Snow White's vertical method of shooting. Animators pioneered using glass plates over the animation to create a realistic underwater look for the scene in the ocean, and established a technique called 'the blend' to give the two-dimensional animation some depth. Twelve artists labored for 18 months to design the character of Pinocchio alone, and the perfectionist Walt Disney is rumored to have thrown out over 2,300 feet of footage (at least five months of work) because it did not fit his vision. Pinocchio's box-office returns did not surpass Snow White's, but its ingenuity and polish impressed critics and further established Disney as an artistic force." - www.allmovie.com

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Fantasia 1940 - Combination of animation and classical music

IMDB Link
IMDB rating: 7,8

Directors: Norman Ferguson, James Algar, Samuel Armstrong, Ford Beebe Jr., Jim Handley, T. Hee, Wilfred Jackson, Hamilton Luske, Bill Roberts, Paul Satterfield, Ben Sharpsteen

"Fantasia, Walt Disney's animated masterpiece of the 1940s, grew from a short-subject cartoon picturization of the Paul Dukas musical piece The Sorcerer's Apprentice. Mickey Mouse was starred in this eight-minute effort, while the orchestra was under the direction of Leopold Stokowski. Disney and Stokowski eventually decided that the notion of marrying classical music with animation was too good to confine to a mere short subject; thus the notion was expanded into a two-hour feature, incorporating seven musical selections and a bridging narration by music critic Deems Taylor. The first piece, Bach's 'Toccata and Fugue in D Minor', was used to underscore a series of abstract images. The next selection, Tchaikovsky's 'Nutcracker Suite', is performed by dancing wood-sprites, mushrooms, flowers, goldfish, thistles, milkweeds and frost fairies. The Mickey Mouse version of 'Sorcerer's Apprentice' is next, followed by Stravinsky's 'Rite of Spring', which serves as leitmotif for the story of the creation of the world, replete with dinosaurs and volcanoes. After a brief jam session involving the live-action musicians comes Beethoven's 'Pastorale Symphony', enacted against a Greek-mythology tapestry by centaurs, unicorns, cupids and a besotted Bacchus. Ponchielli's 'Dance of the Hours' is performed by a Corps de Ballet consisting of hippos, ostriches and alligators. The program comes to a conclusion with a fearsome visualization of Mussorgsky's 'Night on Bald Mountain', dominated by the black god Tchernobog (referred to in the pencil tests as "Yensid", which is guess-what spelled backwards); this study of the 'sacred and profane' segues into a reverent rendition of Schubert's 'Ave Maria'. Originally, Debussy's 'Clair de Lune' was part of the film, but was cut from the final release print; also cut, due to budgetary considerations, was Disney's intention of issuing an annual 'update' of Fantasia with new musical highlights and animated sequences. A box-office disappointment upon its first release (due partly to Disney's notion of releasing the film in an early stereophonic-sound process which few theatres could accommodate), Fantasia eventually recouped its cost in its many reissues. A sequel, Fantasia 2000, was released in theaters in 1999." - www.allmovie.com

DVD links: 

Snow White and the seven dwarfs 1937 - Disney's first full-length animated production

IMDB link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0029583/
IMDB rating: 7,7

Directors: William Cottrell, Walt Disney, DavidHand, Wilfred Jackson, Larry Morey, Perce Pearce, Ben Sharpsteen, Webb Smith, Dorothy Ann Blank, Richard Creedon, Dick Richard, Merrill de Maris

"It was called 'Disney's Folly'. Who on earth would want to sit still for 90 minutes to watch an animated cartoon? And why pick a well-worn Grimm's Fairy Tale that every schoolkid knows? But Walt Disney seemed to thrive on projects which a lesser man might have written off as 'stupid' or 'impossible'. Investing three years, $1,500,000, and the combined talents of 570 artists into Snow White and the seven dwarfs, Disney produced a film that was not only acknowledged a classic from the outset, but also earned 8,500,000 depression-era dollars in gross rentals. Bypassing early temptations to transform the heroine Snow White into a plump Betty Boop type or a woebegone ZaSu Pitts lookalike, the Disney staffers wisely made radical differentiations between the 'straight' and 'funny' characters in the story. Thus, Snow White and Prince Charming moved and were drawn realistically, while the Seven Dwarfs were rendered in the rounded, caricatured manner of Disney's short-subject characters. In this way, the serious elements of the story could be propelled forward in a believable enough manner to grab the adult viewers, while the dwarfs provided enough comic and musical hijinks to keep the kids happy. It is a tribute to the genius of the Disney formula that the dramatic and comic elements were strong enough to please both demographic groups. Like any showman, Disney knew the value of genuine horror in maintaining audience interest: accordingly, the Wicked Queen, whose jealousy of Snow White's beauty motivates the story, is a thoroughly fearsome creature even before she transforms herself into an ancient crone. Best of all, Snow White clicks in the three areas in which Disney had always proven superiority over his rivals: solid story values (any sequence that threatened to slow down the plotline was ruthlessly jettisoned, no matter how much time and money had been spent), vivid etched characterizations (it would have been easier to have all the Dwarfs walk, talk and act alike: thank heaven that Disney never opted for 'easy'), and instantly memorable songs (Frank Churchill, Leigh Harline, Paul J. Smith and the entire studio music department was Oscar-nominated for such standards-to-be as 'Whistle While You Work' and 'Some Day My Prince Will Come')." - http://www.allmovie.com/movie/snow-white-and-the-seven-dwarfs-v45383

Download links:

(DVDrip, avi, 700 MB):

http://uploaded.net/file/5z2k2zw6/Snow.White.And.The.Seven.Dwarfs.1937.iNTERNAL.DVDRip.XviD-SLeTDiVX.avi

Or:

(1080p Blu-Ray, mkv, 4,35 GB):

http://d01.megashares.com/dl/br39fYt/Snow.White.And.The.Seven.Dwarfs.1937.1080p.BluRay.DTS.x264-DON.mkv?r=ft