"Ichabod and Mr. Toad," a film happily uncluttered with "live" Hollywood actors, marks Walt Disney's return to the field of the straight animated cartoon. The result is uneven, but its high spots are as completely charming as any of Disney's earlier successes.

The first, and more engaging episode is the saga of Mr. J. Thaddeus Toad, hero of British author Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Disney has brought him to life on the screen with a spontaneous, satirical humor that does well by Mr. Grahame.

As Basil Rathbone tells the audience Toad inhabits his ancestral home, Toad Hall. Instead of acting with the dignity befitting a young man in such circumstances, Toad is a madcap adventurer, a faddist whose fancies often become manias of the most compulsive (and hilarious) sort. After cavorting about the countryside in a canary-yellow cart drawn by a horse named Cyril, Toad winds up in the Tower of London.

There the repentant Toad determines to lead a new life, exemplified by his loyal but stuffy middle class friends, Badger, Mole, and Rat. When he escapes from the Tower, however, he reverts to his behavior as headstrong scion of the aristocracy.

What follows his escape is a mad chase on locomotives through the slumbering countryside, a scene with all the peculiar virtues of the Keystone Cops, the drawings of Punch's artist Emett, and Liza crossing the ice.

After Basil Rathbone's neatly trimmed and waxed voice, Bing Crosby's narration of Washington Irving's Legend of Sleepy Hollow is a letdown. The suspicion that Bing isn't taking the tale seriously is disquieting. The doings of schoolmaster Ichabod Crane are tailored to fit Crosby rather than Irving; that is probably why much of the charm of the first episode is missing in this one. There is enough left over to make good entertainment, though.

Ichabod possesses remarkable equanimity, which remains undisturbed until his path is crossed by the inevitable woman--the coquette Katrina. From then until his encounter with the Headless Horseman, he floats about on the screen in a transport of joy. As for the Horseman, he scared the pants off the kids at the RKO-Keith. More mature moviegoers will have no trouble in this respect.