Documentaries have really advanced over the years. There are obviously classics of the genre as early as Nanook of the North, however there are at least two factors that have caused the genre to explode more recently. One is streaming. There was barely a marketplace for documentaries before streaming that weren’t tied to a larger brand. Sure, you could get PBS to air something or HBO. Beyond that, it was hard to find a way to get one seen or bought. It’s not like people ever flocked to theaters for more than one or two docs a year. Second is digital. It’s really hard to carry around a nice film camera and expect to get anything natural. No matter how comfortable around a camera someone was, there was always a sense of artificiality. Or, at the very least, it was harder to always be recording when film is expensive.
What that all means is that a lot of documentaries for a very long time looked like Frank & Ollie. It’s pretty dry. The movie does play like someone got a little money from Disney to interview some old guys and occasionally mix in some animated footage they worked on. There’s nothing innovative or even all that interesting about the doc. It’s nice for a little Disney history but not much else. Scant production value too. This level of documentary filmmaking mostly went away with the internet and Wikipedia.
Verdict: Weakly Don’t Recommend
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