Disney’s Magic Highway

I’m not sure if I’ve ever mentioned this before, but I recently watched it again and thought it was worth a revisit.

Not content with producing lavish blockbuster rehashes of fairy tales and building fibre-glass pink castles in California; Disney commissioned animator and director Ward Kimball to produce a cartoon called ‘Magic Highway USA‘ as part of the ‘Disneyland TV’ series. Back in 1958 when the cartoon was aired, America’s future was an infinite carpet of sci-fi optimism and it was laid-out for anyone to roll on. The cartoon was to capture the very essence of transportation possibilities in an age that knew no bounds. In doing so, it also inadvertently committed a blindingly perfect example of the mid-century cartoon illustration style to celluloid.

There are so many classic elements to this production that make it so charming: The prancing cartoon soundtrack, the improbable physics of some of the engineering, the grainy hand-coloured tones of the artwork and the slightly crazed timbres of Chuck Jones‘ voice-over. But none of the imperfections matter really, what really counts is that the concept is solid and back in 1958 there was a firm belief that some sort of invisible technology would handle all of our problems of the future. There is a lot going on in this film, propaganda, energy crime, social engineering and even some very accurate predictions on container shipping…