A Disney movie, so my expectations were low. It’s a strange movie, especially by modern standards. I think it would play better to kids, but as an adult, so many things seem laughable. The island somehow has at least one tiger, an anaconda, elephants, ostriches, zebras, hyenas. Somehow, the family is able to build an absurdly fancy house using salvaged scrap from the shipwreck. The absurdity of this is compounded by the way that the movie avoids giving a sense of passage of time. As far as I can tell, it took about a day or so for the house to be built.
There are a few interesting things going on. One of the primary plots involves a love triangle between the two brothers and a girl they rescue from pirates. The tension is interesting, and it doesn’t play like normal Disney material. The boys actually fight. There’s a big finish battle at the end, during which the family kills a good number of pirates. While the violence is kept in check, near the end, pirates are shot, and some of them fall off the side of a cliff.
A lot of the running time is devoted to the family having fun, playing at a swimming hole, playing with animals. There are a few sequences that have family members riding an ostrich, which seems cruel, but it seems to be something you can do nowadays.
There was also a scene where the two Great Dane dogs they have fight with a tiger. They seem to legitimately fight, which was really puzzling. Neither of them seemed to be injured, but I really wonder how they did it.
But the most important thing about this movie is how the imagery and ideas shaped the fantasies of children for a long time. I see elements of this movie present occasionally in The Simpsons and Life in Hell. The image of the fancy jungle house is silly, but it’s charming, and it captures the imagination very effectively.
My biggest complaint about this movie is that there’s no indication that there was any struggle. They never address how they get food, or clean drinking water. I don’t mind that they have a good time… but it just seems like they should have had to earn it. They don't even seem to be worried when the ship is wrecked!
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