100 Greatest Animated Shorts / The Old Mill / Wilfred Jackson
USA / 1937
The Old Mill, a simple but beautifully-made story of animals sheltering from a storm in an empty building, is a prime example of Walt Disney using his short films to test the techniques his studio was perfecting. Disney’s modern day successor John Lasseter has taken on many of the practices of the older studio’s heyday, including the enthusiastic production of shorts in order to test out new techniques and talents. Although Disney’s studio didn’t invent techniques like the multiplane camera and rotoscoping, Disney saw their potential, absorbing and developing the ideas into his overall process.
These kind of developments were introduced as part of Disney’s drive to establish realism in his animation, to make more serious emotional films and to differentiate the studio from the crazy cartoons from the likes of Fleischer Bros and Warner’s which were now rivalling the Disney shorts in popularity. Gearing up for the release of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs later that year and faced with wide scepticism about his radical plan for a feature-length cartoon, Disney believed that in order to sustain an audience’s interest for over an hour he would need to create a realistic and believable world and characters, so that audiences would react with anxiety rather than laughter to situations of cartoon characters in peril.
Disney’s instincts were proved right once again and Snow White was a massive hit which changed animation forever; The portrayal of realism and a wider range of emotions in animation was a success. Spurred on by this acclaim, the Disney studio embarked on the most incredibly productive five years in animation history with the further classics Pinocchio (1940), Fantasia (1940), Dumbo (1941) and Bambi (1942), before the hardships of war, the animators strike and the mixed reception for Fantasia (Disney’s biggest push for his films to be taken seriously) curtailed his ambition and dimmed his enthusiasm.
The lovingly rendered effects in the The Old Mill include extensive use of the multiplane camera, rotating three dimensional objects and a realistic depiction of the natural world including effects of rain, water and storm. The film won an Oscar for Best Animated Short and was voted at number 14 in Jerry Beck’s 1994 book The 50 Greatest Cartoons: As Selected by 1,000 Animation Professionals.
Note: The 100 greatest animated shorts is an list of opinions and not an order of value from best to worst. All suggestions, comments and outrage are welcome but please don’t shoot us, it’s only a list!