The film has one great redeeming vocal performance by Jerry Colonna. The animation is workmanlike and steady, as is the Disney way, and I would consider the work bland in the manner that I declared Football Now and Then the other day, except that the story here is slightly more engaging (though, honestly, I couldn't care less whether he gets the mail through or not).

As this always seemed to work for Disney through the years, why change a pattern for success? As in any Disney myth film, it pretty much treats the source myth as if it were simply the first story treatment for the film, to be trampled and shaped in any way the studio saw fit until it reached their accepted standard for mass consumption. That I know relatively little about the actual story of Casey Jones does not deter me in the least from critiquing this minor but enjoyable Disney effort. It is in this venue that I saw many Walt Disney cartoons and True-Life Adventures (including the infamous lemming-flinging one), and in one horrible night, a fairly bloody documentary on hunting bears and deer that scarred me for much of my life.īut the joyful memories far outweighed any small bad elements from those film nights, the biggest joy being the night of what I call the Walt Disney Myth Cycle: Johnny Appleseed, Pecos Bill, Paul Bunyan, Casey at the Bat, and this film, The Brave Engineer, which is proclaimed to be the story of Casey Jones, the engineer who just had to get the mail through, no matter the obstacle in his path. Over the next three years, since we were without an actual theatre in our town (considered to be a suburb of Anchorage), Homestead Elementary would become the focal point of my burgeoning interest in movies, where they sporadically ran film nights in the gymnasium several times a year. (Our soon-to-be-divided in half class even took a field trip one day, marching the mile or so up to the location of the still-unfinished building, and for the next few months I was unconsolable, for I adored my third grade teacher and didn't understand why I had to leave her). My first introduction to this film came in my youth when I attended Homestead Elementary School, which was built during my third year at another school in Eagle River, Alaska.

The brave engineer