On April 3, 1965, a low point in American animated films hit the theaters. Advertised on its poster was the tagline, “The Most Delightful Animated Adventure Since Snow White.” This audacious claim would have been more truthful if it had been a comparison between a third-grader’s crayon art and a Picasso, but hey, it did have one honest word: it was animated.
The Man From Buttton Willow, produced by film and TV cowboy star Dale Robertson, left itself wide open with that tagline, and it gets everything it deserves. Neither delightful nor adventurous, this disaster takes its place beside Foodfight, Arctic Dogs, and that great animated epic, Happily Ever After, which spelled the end for Filmation. Button Willow is 81 minutes of boring, poorly produced animation that might have an actual running time of 45 minutes if one were to edit out all the folderol involving humanized animals, the terrible “musical numbers,” and the reused animation cycles.
Let’s get down to business. The story involves Justin Eagle, (Dale Robertson) purportedly the very first “U.S. Agent”, investigating the machinations of the evil Montgomery Blaine and his accomplice, The Whip. These two, readily identifiable by their Scooby Doo – type evil visages, have been buying up the route for the transcontinental railroad and overcharging the government for the land. Oh yeah, they have been driving settlers off and burning their homes, a terrible thing to do since the inhabitants of Button Willow do nothing except walk down an idealized Western street and attend church. We know that Blaine is a scoundrel because he blows smoke rings from his cigar into our faces.
Aha! The good Senator Freeman has evidence of Blaine’s misdeeds! Before he can warn the Senate, the bad dudes kidnap Freeman in San Francisco, which is on the other side of the country from Washington, where the Senate is, but hey. They dump him onto a ship, although nobody knows which one, planning to permanently silence him eventually.
It’s Justin Eagle to the rescue, or at least after a stultifying, absolutely deadly period of doing farm chores and relating to his ranch animals and being attentive to his Japanese adopted little girl Stormy, who speaks in malformed English and attaches the suffix – “san” to everyone’s name. We learn in an awful song whose lyrics consist mostly of “Pardon Me, Ma’am” why Justin’s loyal ranch hand, Jeremiah “Sorry” Baker, never married, which is irrelevant to anything in the plot.
Jeremiah and Justin are both incredibly stupid; when one of their mares, Savannah, is about to foal, they believe she is sick, panic, call the vet, and wait worriedly outside the stall until they get the good news and celebrate! You dunderheads! You own a freakin’ ranch, and you couldn’t figure out that one of your mares was preggers? Anyway, this segues into a lengthy scene of the cutie foal. The dreadful soundtrack launches into the praiseful song, “Savannah,” which consists of that single name repeated endlessly.
Of course, the foal runs away into the mountains, pursued by Savannah’s stud Rebel, Justin’s dog Shady, and pet skunk Alfie. A cougar attacks, and Shady is knocked off a cliff in a fall that Wile E. Coyote might have envied, but of course the kindly vet resurrects him as Stormy prays. We are now at least 100,000 miles off the alleged plot of this tale.
Oh, yeah, Justin is in San Francisco, where he gets shanghaied and ends up on the same boat as Senator Freeman (remember him?) With the help of fellow prisoner Andy (Ross Martin), who boasts the worst Swedish accent since Pat Harrington Jr. voiced Lars in the Filmation series Journey to the Center of the Earth, Justin defeats the entire crew in the only noticeable “action/adventure” sequence in the film. They sail back to San Francisco. Justin goes home. Blaine and the Whip go to jail. Das Ende.
We’ve been over the music. Henry Mancini was allegedly a contributor to George Stoll and Robert Van Epps score, perhaps on a day when Mancini was cleaning out his trash bucket. The animation is abominable. Justin does resemble Dale Robertson when his features aren’t drifting over his face. The characters are stiff and rigid, and I spotted several scenes in which body movements are oddly out of synch. The animation crew seems to be a mixture of the unemployed and the third-stringers left after the death of theatrical shorts. Among the more recognizable are John Dunn, Don Lusk, John Sparey (who did some good work for Ralph Bakshi), Ben Washam, Les Clark, and Marc Davis (uncredited).
There is a horrid animated sequence in which Justin is pitched woo by the local spinster, Ms. Pomeroy; her entire face appears to be a repeating animation cycle, with several of her facial expressions physically and emotionally inappropriate for her dialogue. It’s scary. The only passable animation is that of the ranch hand, Sorry, who looks as if he belongs in a different movie. Since he seems to be a thinly disguised version of Johnny Appleseed’s guardian angel from Melody Time, perhaps he does.
I remain amazed at the vocal cast that Button Willow mustered. Cliff Edwards, Clarence Nash, and Verna Felton, late of Disney. Add Pinto Colvig, Herschel Bernardi, Shep Menken, and Thurl Ravenscroft, most of them playing multiple parts. Give ‘em all credit.
Poor Dale Robertson! This handsome cowboy star founded United Screen Arts in 1964, with Button Willow being its first feature. The now-defunct company produced seven films, the last one in 1968. The only legacy truly remaining is giving Raquel Welch her first film role and producing an animated feature that made Filmation look like Disney.
Lest we forget, Button Willow had David Detiege as director. His most notable prior credits were The New 3 Stooges and the abysmal Syncro-Vox cartoon Captain Fathom. After Button Willow, Detiege went on to a passable career at various studios until he died in 1984.
Martin Goodman is a veteran writer specializing in stories about animation. He has written for AWN and Animation Scoop – and lives in Anderson, Indiana.
It’s easy to find fault with “The Man from Button Willow”, given its rambling plot, animation errors, shifting layouts, logical lapses, inane song lyrics, and so on and so forth. But I can assure you that if I had seen it as a small child (which I did not), I would have loved it. Any animated film with songs and lots of animals was guaranteed to be a hit with me, but then I was pretty easy to please. I loved “Dr. Doolittle” was I was six and would have been happy if it had been twice as long.
Over the years I’ve developed my critical faculties to some extent, and, as I said, “The Man from Button Willow” is easy to find fault with. But it’s definitely not in the same class as “Foodfight!”
Let’s not forget to give credit, or blame if you will, to producer Phyllis Bounds Detiege, the hard-drinking, chain-smoking wife of director David Detiege and the niece of Walt Disney’s wife Lillian, who wrote the song lyrics to this film under the masculinised pseudonym “Phil Bounds.”
I love it that Justin built a replica of the Addams Family mansion on his ranch.
My mother, who like my grandfather was a painter, frequently compared Picasso’s work to the crayon art of a third-grader — to the third-grader’s advantage, of course.
What an anomaly of a movie! If I wanted to see a cartoon movie that was not made by Disney, I’d pick Gulliver’s Travels or Mr. Bug Goes To Town. They ain’t perfect, but they might as well be Grave of the Fireflies compared to this.
(Speaking of, did anyone else try to do a feature cartoon in this era other than Dale or the Fleischers?)
Well, UPA did two films (“Arbian Nights” with Magoo and “Gay Purr-ee”) and H-B just did “Hey There, It’s Yogi Bear”, which some of the same animators of this film did better work for.
John Hubley attempted an animated adaptation of Finnean’s Rainbow, and had recorded the voice track with people like Frank Sinatra, Louis Armstrong, Jim Backus and others. Unfortunately, the Red Scare scuttled it. Hubley later did the 53-minute Of Stars and Men, which was more of an animated documentary than a conventional narrative film.
Based on the review and from what I’ve read about the film over the years, I expected to dislike it. But the first half-hour at least has its quiet charm. The pacing is slow, and the characters don’t have much depth, but the backgrounds are actually very good and the colors are vibrant. While this film will never make my top ten list, I’ll just state that I found it more engaging than I thought. It has a specific setting, there is at least enough movement to make it seem like an animated film, and the voice work is decent. I enjoyed Verna Felton’s catty gossip, and the irony of her attempt at being a love interest. I guess this film is watchable if the viewer doesn’t demand much.
Like all negative reviews of non-Disney cartoons, this just makes me wanna watch this movie out of spite.
What were Marc and Les doing this film for? I thought they were already hard at work at Disney doing better projects (with Marc doing WED projects and Les doing special animation projects). I hate to know Walt’s reaction to this film.
I admit I’ve never seen the full credits but I was under the impression a lot of Hanna-Barbera people worked on this after hours, and that Robertson’s studio was across the street.
I’ve seen it, and while I agree with the points made, it still had a certain innocent charm.
Besides, the film was made for little kids who don’t care about any of the things seasoned animation veterans would. I’m certain most kids who saw it enjoyed it, even if it wasn’t Disney quality product.
If I’m not mistaken, according to Jerry Beck this film started out as a pilot for a TV series and the first 30ish minutes are basically the TV pilot.
Incidentally, this was announced in October of 1962 and slated for a June 1963 release (it was incidentally screened by Dale in July of 1963 according to Motion Picture Exhibitor)…evidently, it’s released was delayed quite a bit lol.
I maintain that this was conceived as a television series, then repurposed as a theatrical release — perhaps with a TV show still intended. Live-action Robertson’s explanation of what we’re going to see sounds like the pitch for a series. We’re introduced to the town, the regular cast, and the major villains — most of which we’ll never see again. We visit the playset-ready ranch, where we’re introduced to merchandisable animal characters (We’ve got a cowboy spy for the boys, now we get horses and a pony for the girls). Then we get what’s essentially a freestanding episode of Eagle in San Francisco, only vaguely attached to the land grabbers with the main villains nowhere in sight. Then Eagle goes home, and a voiceover tacks on an arbitrary ending that implies there were adventures after this one.
In a way it anticipates how Filmation and Disney would launch syndicated animated shows a decade or so later: A “movie”or special setting up the cast and premise, then straight into weekly episodes.
Faint memory of seeing this in a real movie theater; specifically the prologue and an odd moment where a Chinese caricature is singing in a saloon. It was also promoted with a multi-page spread in “Jack and Jill”, a glossy color children’s magazine.
Even the crudest animated film ever made the 1974 dirty duck movie manages to look more enjoyable than this! The movie you posted kinda foreshadows on what cartoons would look like in a few years after 1965.
I don’t recall that many TV cartoons using extensive use of rotoscope by that point.
I haven’t seen The Man From Button Willow myself, but from what I’ve gathered about it from online reviews and that stuff, including the review from The Animated Movie Guide, this movie seems to have something of an identity crisis, in that it wants to try something new for animation, but it’s pulled down by the common animated movie cliches of the era.
It wants to be more of a serious action-packed Western drama, but there’s also a bunch of kid-friendly padding involving Disney-esque animal antics. Many of the characters look cartoony, but some of them, like Dale Robertson’s character, are drawn in a more realistic style reminiscent of Johnny Quest. And while the idea of giving the main character an adopted Asian daughter is a nice sentiment, the execution does not seem to have aged well, considering the era it was made in. Not helping matters is how there’s very little behind-the-scenes material for this movie, so it’s hard to gauge exactly what they were thinking when putting this together.
If anything, it sounds like something the folks who do Mystery Science Theater 3000 or Rifftrax would have a field day with, if they ever decided to do more animated films. I have no idea if this was originally meant to be the pilot episode of a TV series that never got produced, but it wouldn’t surprise me if it were the case.