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Peter Pan first flew on a London stage looking for his shadow in 1904. Periodically since then Sir James Barrie’s play has been a paradise for stage designers seeking to re-create the special world of topsy-turvy coyness which this work demands. The resources and imagination of the Walt Disney artists and animators have now been turned to this end and they have endowed Peter Pan with the lushest, most colorful surroundings of all his career. In the handsomely realistic views of London as seen by airborne Peter and his friends, and the fanciful tours of the enchanted island. Peter Pan progresses into new realms of spectacle which lift it happily above the conventional Disney cartoon technique. All the familiar figures - Peter, Wendy, Captain Hook, the Pirates and Indians - appear in this version in their old guises, though a break with convention was made by having Peter - his voice, that is - played by a boy, Bobby Driscoll, instead of by a grown woman. At the story’s climax, Tinker Bell does not have to he brought back from death’s door by the audience’s tearful shouts that they do indeed believe in fairies. The sprite is revived by hearing Peter huskily murmur in her ear that he loves her more than anyone in the world. […]