Walt Disney has turned out another full-length feature, with pretty girls, and songs and dances. Its stars get no billing, its dialogue is not heard, the public will never get to see it. For this is the big show that the Disney studio puts on for its cartoon animators; the live-action film they use to guide them through the difficult job of making thousands of colored drawings come alive on the screen. This time the show was put on "Peter Pan," the Disney cartoon version of Barrie's immortal play, now in the final stages of production.
An audience of about 200 saw it, and the actors who stole the show for this audience were not Peter Pan, Wendy, Captain Hook, the Crocodile, but three anonymous mermaids.
In the Barrie play the mermaids have little to do; they were introduced by the author into the Never-Never Land lagoons as an afterthought. Disney has expanded their roles in the cartoon version to seven and a half minutes of screen time, has given them an undersea ballet and various other bits of business.
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