A Silly Symphonies Marathon

19 September 2017 // Featured

Dennis Sisterson

Writer

A few weeks ago, I decided I ought to swot up on my animation education and watch all the early Disney animated features, including a few I’ve never seen. Then, I thought that if I was going to start with “Snow White”, I should really try to view it in the context of its time; to see it as contemporary audiences would have seen it, and to appreciate the milestone it represents. Viewing it simply as the first of Disney’s features, in a way, scarcely does it full justice, because then it has to compare with everything that followed, not everything that came before. To get to the point where “Snow White” could be made, the Disney studio had to climb a mountain, so I felt I ought to go back and climb that mountain with them, and the best way to do that was to watch the Silly Symphonies – the cartoons that were a training ground for animators and a testing ground for new techniques. After all, the DVDs had been gathering dust on my shelf for years. They deserved to be watched.

Several of the cartoons are still well known today and crop up in every Disney documentary, but for every “Skeleton Dance” or “The Old Mill”, there’s a dozen “Frolicking Fish”, “Birds in the Spring” or “Funny Little Bunnies”, and although the novelty value of many of them has long gone, most are still noteworthy in one way or another.

Starting at the beginning, it’s easy to see the early cartoons with their stark black and white colouring, repetitive cycles such as three identical flowers dancing alongside each other, and plinky-plunk “Mickey-Moused” soundtracks as primitive, but reading the critical response of the time reminds you that this was still very novel. Hollywood in general wouldn’t really master the sound form for a few years yet, and what Disney were really doing here wasn’t simply adding sound to cartoons but merging the two into a whole that was greater than the sum of its parts – complementing the rhythm and mood of the music with those of the images…not just having cartoon characters dance to a tune, but knitting the sound and image together to form an integrated whole. This was way ahead of what live action films were doing at this point, and it’s easy to believe that they paved the way for the Busby Berkeley musicals of the 1930s.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C0Sb3erCIZU

However, though the difference in quality in the Silly Symphonies from one year to the next is very marked, most of the individual cartoons progress in small increments. There’ll be a few in a row where one feels it’s the same-old-same-old, then suddenly there’ll be something new and startling. 1931’s “Egyptian Melodies” shows us a spider crawling through the stone tunnels of a pyramid, and the camera follows him. For it to do this, each frame of the background – not just the character – has to be individually drawn as we pass through it. The effect is like CGI – we’re moving through a three-dimensional environment. Nothing like this is ever attempted in the feature films and it’s easy to understand why. It’s one thing drawing a new black-and-white line drawing every frame – a fully rendered painting is something else. But imagine if they had!

In the very next cartoon, “The Clock Store”, the bar is suddenly raised on character animation as two porcelain figures on a clock share a courtly dance – a far more nuanced and sensitive representation, and much closer to realistic figure animation, than anything preceding it – but still a world away from “Snow White”.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CdiyDpDcV7A

Just a few months later the cartoons go into colour, and although each one pushes the boundaries a little further, there’s generally an excess of sugar for the next few years. Two or three cartoons like “Lullaby Land” and “Water Babies” is enough to give you diabetes, but fortunately they’re broken up with more witty and engaging entries like “Three Little Pigs” and its sequels – and there are a few surprises here. “The Big Bad Wolf” (1934) and “Three Little Wolves”(1936), in particular, with their fast action and brutal physical humour, are clear prototypes for the Looney Tunes cartoons, but at a standard Warner Brothers would not reach for some years yet. “The Tortoise and the Hare” is very obviously the inspiration for Bugs Bunny – 1943’s “Tortoise Wins by a Hare” is a blatant, if more dynamic, remake. Similarly, “Three Orphan Kittens” is undeniably the basis for every “Tom and Jerry” cartoon, right down to the skirting-board level view of implausibly long rooms, and the legs and feet of the black housemaid, complete with Lillian Randolph’s voice. A sequence with a grand piano even features gags very similar to those used in “The Cat Concerto”, which won an Oscar for Tom and Jerry 11 years later. It only lacks the specific cat and mouse, but they too appear in “The Country Cousin” the following year. (Also in “The Orphan Kittens” is a stunning tracking camera sequence in which a wooden floor, table, chairs and piano are redrawn every frame, as in “Egyptian Melodies”, so as to appear in moving perspective as the kittens run between their legs).

The last few cartoons are a triumphant conclusion to the series. From the clunky black and white dancing flowers of just a few years before, every standard technique of 2D animation is now in place. The most expensive, “Mother Goose Goes Hollywood”, perfects the art of the animated caricature, with – among others less recognisable today – perfect parodies of Laurel and Hardy, Charles Laughton and Katherine Hepburn as Bo Peep (“Ah’ve lost mah sheep. Really ah have.”). The well known “The Old Mill” is a tour de force of new techniques that would find their way into the feature films, not least the multiplane camera, which gave a sense of depth and space previously impossible, and the final cartoon, “The Ugly Duckling”, could plausibly have been made at any point in the following thirty or forty years.

The progress from the first to the last is awe-inspiring and humbling – it’s almost impossible to believe that only eight years separate “The Skeleton Dance” from “The Old Mill”. I’m not aware of any other field of creative endeavour, except perhaps the Apollo program, that has made such progress in such a short space of time.
Well – Snow White, here I come. I feel I’ve earned it now.

The complete list, for anyone wanting to also complete the marathon:

Items mentioned in this article:

Walt Disney Treasures - Silly Symphonies [DVD]

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