Silly Symphony (also known as Silly Symphonies) is an American animated series of 75 musical short films produced by Walt Disney Productions from 1929 to 1939. As the series name implies, the Silly Symphonies were originally intended as whimsical accompaniments to pieces of music. As such, the films usually did not feature continuing characters, unlike the Mickey Mouse shorts produced by Disney at the same time (exceptions to this include Three Little Pigs, The Tortoise and the Hare, and Three Orphan Kittens, which all had sequels). The series is notable for its innovation with Technicolor and the multiplane motion picture camera, as well as its introduction of the character Donald Duck making his first appearance in the Silly Symphony cartoon The Wise Little Hen in 1934. Seven shorts won the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film.
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The series also spawned a Silly Symphony newspaper comic strip distributed by King Features Syndicate, as well as a Dell comic book series and several children's books.
The Silly Symphonies returned to theaters with its re-issues and re-releases, and eventually tied with Joseph Barbera and William Hanna's Tom and Jerry's record for most Oscar wins for a cartoon series in the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film category.
Why It's Not Afraid Of The Big Bad Wolf
- Like the Mickey Mouse series, the series is often filled with cheery, heartwarming and uplifting stories and helped to end the Great Depression.
- "The Skeleton Dance" was a good way to start the series and the first Disney film to have a pre-recorded music score.
- Great voice talents from Pinto Colvig, Allan Watson, Marcellite Garner, Walt Disney, Billy Bletcher, etc.
- The series was responsible for introducing color to animated Disney films, beginning with 1932's "Flowers and Trees". It was also responsible for the transition of ten years from the old-fashioned rubber hose style into naturalism, which would become Disney's trademark style for the studio's feature films.
- This series introduced the techniques of overlapping action (by Norm Ferguson) and squash-and-stretch (by Fred Moore), leading to the development of full animation.
- "The Goddess of Spring" was one of the best examples to study the realistic human form, especially on Satan and the Goddess, though there were still some glaring flaws with the animation, such as their movements being way too rubbery compared to later efforts at animating realistic humans.
- Overall, the main purpose of these shorts is solely as a training ground for the Disney animators to perfect their craft in animation techniques, storytelling and script-writing, as well as the conception of characters, in order to get the animators to be able to animate more than just cartoon shorts such as feature length films, beginning with Walt Disney's first ever animated feature film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, all without forgetting or abandoning any attempts at trying to entertain the audience with a compelling story. This training ground plan thankfully paid off very well for Walt Disney and is animators, as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs proved to be a wild critical and commercial success thanks to all their hard work at refining the art of animation, and successfully urged both filmmakers and moviegoers of the time that animation indeed could be taken seriously as feature-length projects too rather than just cartoon shorts. The success of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs had inspired the Disney studio to work on some more animated feature length films that have become fan favorites over the years such as Pinocchio, Fantasia, Dumbo, Bambi, Cinderella, and so on, with the animated feature films often being often considered by Walt Disney himself as "the grown-up versions of the Silly Symphonies" after the Silly Symphonies series ended its run in 1939.
- Short films would mostly vary from stories timed to music without any dialogue to operettas with mostly singing dialogue. Later entries would ditch the operetta format in favor of stories and narratives.
- It was the first Disney series since the Alice Comedies to study on human characters.
- Since his debut in the 1934 short, The Wise Little Hen, Walt Disney's newest cartoon character, Donald Duck, quickly stole the show, to become one of Disney's most popular cartoon characters.
- The music had improved with the introduction of Leigh Harline in the 1933 short film, "Father Noah's Ark". It was more beautiful in orchestration than the previous entries.
- After the switch to United Artists as distributor, Disney used RCA High Fidelity Sound for future shorts after 1932. The Mickey Mouse series also followed suit with the new sound system.
- The popularity of "Three Little Pigs", led to their comic book spin-off series with Zeke as the real name of the Big Bad Wolf. Other characters, such as Bucky Bug, were given the comic book treatment.
- 1937's "The Old Mill" introduced the process of the multiplane camera. It moved parts of the background in opposite directions, creating a three-dimensional effect.
- The 1939 version of "The Ugly Duckling" was an improvement over the 1931 version, which followed more along the lines of the original Hans Christian Andersen story. It also ended the series on a good note.
Bad Qualities
- Some of their shorts can be pretty disturbing to watch, most notably the early entries before Iwerks' departure. Examples include The Skeleton Dance (despite being an eerily great cartoon), El Terrible Toreador and Hell's Bells. Thankfully, most of these dark elements have been dialed down in the mid-1930s (and to some extent, the early-1930s once the cartoons went into color) following the enforcement of the Hays Code rules in 1934 not allowing theatrical cartoons of the time to be too frightening for younger children.
- The Golden Touch was considered a flop by audiences upon its initial release (not because of the animation, but because of how the characters were portrayed). Midas' character is badly butchered from a king who cared for his daughter into an unsympathetic comedy protagonist who has no daughter, so much that he doesn't even care about his cat either when he turned him into gold.
- Like many other Golden Age cartoons, some of them contain brief racial stereotypes, such as a short scene involving the black doll saying "Mammy!" in "Santa's Workshop" (1932) and the infamous Jewish peddler wolf scene in "The Three Little Pigs" (1933), which has been re-edited entirely for its 1948 theatrical re-release. These are often removed when they are shown on TV after segregation against black people in America had come to an end in 1965 with the help of Martin Luther King Jr. in the time.
Trivia
- The Three Little Pigs and The Big Bad Wolf are the most popular characters of the series, so much later made numerous appearances in various Mickey Mouse media, such as Mickey's Christmas Carol, Disney's House of Mouse (including giving them one spin-off cartoon short from Mickey Mouse Works entitle "Lil' Bad Wolf") and the 2013 reboot of Mickey Mouse (the latter two produced by Disney Television Animation).
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