The Sword in the Stone 1963

[6.0/10] The Sword in the Stone isn’t quite good. It isn’t quite bad. It’s just kind of there. Nothing in it is objectionable, but it lacks a driving idea, an engrossing story, or some other spark to make it more than an hour and change’s worth of amiable but unavailing content. What it gains from having no major faults it loses in having nothing in particular to recommend it.

The movie, to use the term loosely, essentially breaks down to a series of episodic vignettes. Merlin finds Wart. Merlin teaches Wart a series of irrelevant lessons. Wart becomes King Arthur. There’s little, if any connective tissue between these episodes. Instead they are, at best, showcases for some chases and transformative chaos, which lose their impact from the movie repeating the same setup over and over again.

To the point, there’s barely a story in The Sword in the Stone. If you squint, you can make out something about Wart being torn between his humdrum life as an aspiring squire under his demerit-dispensing surrogate father, Sir Ector, and the life of royalty that Merlin is trying to prepare him for. But the movie gains nothing really from that contrast beyond some mild conflict between the portly old knight and the spindly old wizard.

To the extent the film has a point, it’s Merlin finding the boy who would be king and trying to emphasize brains over brawn. Theoretically, that comes in two forms: actual lessons on reading, writing, and arithmetic in the classroom and more figurative lessons on wisdom in the field.

It’s the latter, naturally, that make up the bulk of the movie. First, Merlin turns Wart into a fish, and they learn an important lesson about needing to be clever to avoid dangerous predator fish. Then, Merlin turns Wart into a squirrel, and they learn an important lesson about...avoiding amorous squirrels. Then, Merlin turns Wart into a little bird, and they learn an important lesson about needing to be clever to avoid dangerous predator birds and, eventually, witches who cheat at wizards’ duels.

It’s all very repetitive and arguably derivative. If you’ve seen Tom and Jerry, or Sylverster and Tweety, or any number of other, similar chase cartoons, then you’ve more or less seen what The Sword in the Stone has to offer. The skirmishes with interlopers in the land, air, and sea are all fine enough, but there’s nothing especially glowing or novel about them that you couldn’t see in hundreds of other animated shorts of the same vintage. One or two sequences along those lines might be a fun flight of fancy, but strung together, it starts to feel like the movie-makers ran out of ideas and needed to pad the runtime.

The only of these segments with any real verve is that last duel between Merlin and the Marvelous Mad Madam Mim. With their stand-off, the film can boast an entertaining, animalistic game of rock-paper-scissors, as each tries to thwart the other with the latest creature transformation. Therein also lies the film’s only worthwhile lesson from Merlin. Whereas Mim’s transformations just get bigger and badder, he wins the fight with clever counters instead of speeding into an animal kingdom arm’s race. The various designs, which incorporate human elements into animal forms, have a type of fun to them that’s missing elsewhere (even if it seems like they stole the same crocodile design from Peter Pan).

The problem is that none of these lessons end up mattering for Wart. If he somehow used the things he’d learned to become king, or was shown using them as king, there’d be something to them. Instead, they’re just showcases of the same tired chases, and all it takes for Wart to rule England is to pull the titular sword from the titular stone.

The best moral you can attach to the film is that education is important, even if you don’t think it’s necessary for your path, because you never know where your path might lead. Wart is more interested in the strength and brownie points it takes to become the doltish Sir Kay’s second, because he thinks that’s his future, little realizing that Merlin’s guidance and direction will end up being much more important for the future King of England. But even that tepid “stay in school” message doesn’t add much to the picture.

The one positive thing you can say for the film is that there’s some interesting animation work in the characters’ movements. Archimedes the Owl in particular has a distinctive way about him, and his cantankerous and bossy qualities, matched with his avian flourishes, make him the most memorable player in the piece. But the other characters also have an expressive, almost rotoscoped quality to them, where natural gestures are matched with cartoonish embellishments. You can see it in Merlin playing with his beard or Ector’s bouncing midsection. Sometimes it becomes too much, but it’s one of the few distinctive things in the film.

That’s a plus, because otherwise the animation looks particularly cheap and unmemorable for a Disney flick. While the movements themselves carry a lot of expression, the designs seem rudimentary and, in places, almost unfinished. If I didn’t know better, I’d almost call this a T.V. show chopped up and sewn together into a film, both given the quality (or lack thereof) of the visuals and the lumpy, episodic nature of the thing.

Even that sort of hang-out/showcase approach could have worked if there were any decent characters in the thing. Every figure in the film is one-dimensional at best, with few having a real motivation and most barely having a personality beyond some broad archetype. Sometimes you can overcome that with performances, but nobody here acquits themselves above the level of “perfectly fine.”

That’s an indictment that could extend to the movie as a whole. Aside from a bevy of poorly-done, forgettable songs, very little here falls below a level of decent competency. And yet, The Sword in the Stone plays like a movie made of spare parts. The resulting “flying machine” that Disney assembles with them certainly runs without issue, but it won’t take you very far and certainly never soars. As a series of wizard’s tricks, there’s little wrong with it. There’s just, sadly, not any magic here.