In early February 2023 The Walt Disney Company announced that it would be slashing 3% of its workforce, 7,000 people, in response to shareholders upset that recovering from a global pandemic and major investments in streaming weren’t seeing the profits surge as desired. They also announced another Frozen movie and a sequel to Zootopia, and I couldn’t help but be cautiously excited for these projects. Companies like Blizzard have lost my custom or at least my excitement for less, without also being the holders of an effective monopoly, so what makes Disney special? Is it just fond memories of childhood and a desire to never grow up or is there something more to this company?
As someone in their mid twenties I was growing up slightly too late to catch the 90s renaissance in theatres, but I have strong memories of watching our VHS and DVD copies of animated Disney films. Stories of loyalty, of standing up to bullies and doing the right thing even when it costs you. Tales of family, acceptance, love, and brokenness. These elements aren’t unique to Disney but they are what I think of from my own childhood as being strongest in Disney (and Pixar but we didn’t own much Pixar when I was young). As an adult I can see the commercial elements in these - Aladdin was pitched as a Robin Williams vehicle (purportedly before Williams had been approached), Atlantis was a “boys film” filled with explosions, and Lilo & Stitch had most of the social commentary cut from it - but I still know every song in both Frozens and cry when the Madrigal’s sing “We see how bright you burn”. These films affect me in ways few others do.
So what makes Disney special?
Hello and welcome to my Disney Animated Canon retrospective.
Or Watch-through. Or a better name if I come up with it. (I didn’t, Retrospective is the best I got)
This blog will be chronicling a journey through the oeuvre of animation’s most prestigious and longest running theatrical studio.
This will be a journey through a company who has reached some of the heights of storytelling and has, on its own, contributed numerous animated films to so many peoples’ “best of all time” lists.
Together we will see the ups, the many downs, some of the best films of all time, and a staggering number of talking animals - sidekick or otherwise. Hopefully we will all walk away with a better understanding of how the Disney company has been able to so consistently monopolise the Americanised world’s nostalgia and what it takes to make these films.
I am restricting us to the Disney canon for a few reasons, the first of which is just to constrain this in some way; otherwise, this is a project that would end a few years after the universe does.
Secondly it is far more interesting what Disney Animation Studios are able to do when they are attempting to be at the height of the industry, both artistically and financially. Aladdin 2 Jafar’s Return or Olaf’s Frozen Adventure are likely interesting pieces of commercial art in their own right, but hardly represent the studio attempting to craft the next great masterpiece of animation. The expense of these big films leads to its own restrictions, as anything that costs millions to produce (Frozen reportedly cost $150 million) must make back even more, and the tension between the “commercial” and “art” in Disney’s commercial art will lead us to things as avant garde as Fantasia and as trend-chasing as Chicken Little.
Without further preface, let us blunder directly into breaking my own rules in the very first post as I first wish to discuss shorts made before Snow White (at least the ones available on Disney+)
Also most of them are called Silly Symphonies, which is just some wonderful alliteration that I want to take a second to appreciate.
Disney+ (at time of writing) has 21 shorts released, or noted as being released, before 1937, a year when nothing of much relevance occurred, I can’t imagine why I’m mentioning it.
We must then, naturally, begin with the third Mickey Mouse short the Disney Brothers Cartoon Studio released: Oh, and spoilers, for 7-10 minute shorts released nearly 90 years ago.
Steamboat Mickey (1928): This was Disney’s first synchronised sound animation (it narrowly missed being the first ever) AND IT SHOWS. The central gag, and most of the plot, throughout the entire short is Mickey and Minnie making music by inflicting increasingly absurd forms of animal abuse that somehow create music. You might be able to tell that it did not endear me to them. The bit where Mickey peels a potato the size of him and all that’s left is something smaller than his hand did make me laugh, but I don’t think I was laughing at what I was supposed to.
After the success of the Mickey Mouse series Disney began a second series, Silly Symphonies, the debut of this series is the famous The Skeleton Dance (1929), which we’re not covering here because it wasn’t on the Disney+ list I used.
The next short we are covering is the very first Silly Symphony to be produced in Technicolor, -
Flowers and Trees (1932): It’s the charming tale of a bard who woos a woman and sword fights a crotchety old man for her. The only catch is that all three are trees. This felt far more creative and I enjoyed my time with it. While it contains the violence that permeated animation at the time (and much of this list) I found that it was mostly charming and there were more than enough highly creative elements to keep me engaged the whole time.
The best bit was when the birds dive bombed the clouds to leave holes for rain to fall from them. Great stuff.
From here I will talk briefly about most of these, many were pretty uneventful and were simply filled with hyper-violence and simple physical comedy. Fine for what they are but I discovered on this watch-through that I don’t enjoy whatever that is much.
Santa’s Workshop (1932): This one actually is pretty funny. The elves run a factory line that makes toys. The looping factory line animations were great! The constant bobbing of Santa was distracting. The elves had super strong seven dwarfs vibes. NEXT
Babes in the Woods (1932): What if Hansel and Gretel were dolls and the witch just wanted to *checks notes* turn them into animals?? The kids free all the witch’s victims and trap her. The witch’s broom made a propeller noise and that got an out loud laugh from me, good work! NEXT
Mickey Mouse in “Ye Olden Days’ (1933): What if Looney Tunes had a better story and worse action. Goofy appears and is called Dippy? Mickey is a vagabond who wants to marry Minnie. Dippy (read Goofy) is marrying her already and they fight a duel over her. Mickey wins. I’ve written a note saying that “We’re gonna have a duel is never going to leave my head” but clearly the next one eclipsed it because it has left my head.
Three Little Pigs (1933): I hated this. The moral of the story is be industrious and don’t be like the straw-house-pig who says “I toot my flute and I don’t give a toot”. The protestant work ethic: the animation but with a song that will actually never leave my head (“Who’s afraid of the big bad wolf”) NEXT!
The Pied Piper (1933): The people sing and talk! It’s a pity the mouth movements really don’t match well, but this is one of animation's largest early hurdles so I won’t hold it against this short. The acting of the less cartoon-y humans leaves something to be desired, but it’s also their first attempt. DEAR LORD THERE ARE SO MANY RATS IN THESE SHOTS! The poor animators, what’s next
The Grasshopper and the Ants (1934): The return of the protestant work ethic. A grasshopper tries to convince ants to slack off and dance to his music then nearly freezes in the winter. The ant queen lets him work for his dinner by… playing music for the ants to dance to. I think Pixar was copying notes from this when they produced A Bug’s Life, NEXT!
The Wise Little Hen (1934): The protestant work ethic strikes back! A hen tries to get a grotesque pig and Donald Duck to help her plant corn. They don’t want to help but want to eat the corn. She refuses and weirdly this ends with them literally kicking each other in the butt repeatedly outside her kitchen window. This run of shorts (excluding Piper) all have the same moral and they are all SOOOOO BORING (including Piper), please give me something else!
Goddess of Spring (1934): OKAY, this is more like it. A more complex story. Greek Mythology, or maybe Roman? The subtitles call him Pluto. It’s very clear that this was around when Walt Disney had decided to make Snow White and was shifting the studio into producing more story driven and mature content. There is an obvious lack of physical comedy and violence in this which is replaced by an extended dance scene and opera. I'm a big fan. The animators also learn along with the rest of the audience that more realistic humans can’t squash and stretch like the cartoony ones can, it’s quite uncanny. It annoys me how much Pluto is clearly more Mestophales than Hades, and Persephone barely says or does anything. She somehow is given even less agency than the myth where she’s kidnapped and trapped by eating pomegranite seeds, at least in the original myth she chose to eat the seeds. Here she’s just kidnapped and Satan/Pluto feels bad for her so lets her out for 6 months a year.. Enjoyable, but probably mostly for the clear progression the studio is showing.
Disney, animate Hadestown, you cowards! Moving on.
The Big Bad Wolf (1934): What if Red Riding Hood but 2 of the three little pigs are responsible for everything that goes wrong, and the woodsman is the good, little, protestant work ethic saviour. Sigh. The song returns, I question my life choices, NEXT
Mickey Mouse in The Band in Concert (1935): On paper I shouldn’t like this, but I actually adore it. Mickey conducts a brass band playing songs that affect the weather. Donald Duck is a nuisance. The violence is at just the right level where I chuckle rather than wince and many of the gags are based in the music itself or dialogue. I laughed, out loud, several times including the ending, and the animation in the air is stunning even by today’s standards. If you have Disney+ do yourself a favour and watch this, it’s 10 minutes you won’t regret.
The Golden Touch (1935): Fairly bland retelling of the Midas myth. I chuckled a few times. I did the maths and Midas would have needed to be counting for 31 years without stopping to have counted over 1 billion coins at the rate he was going at the start. The animation in this is very clean, and movements less cartoony than the art design would otherwise suggest, but I barely made it through the 10 minute run time; it was so dull.
The Tortoise and the Hare (1935): Great animation on the tortoise shell in this. A circular object spinning without ever going off-model always impresses me. The clearly adult Hare showing off for the child coded girls was creepy. The animation is becoming noticeably better in these especially in the sharpness of the timing, and the detail of the designs. I am seeing fewer and fewer errors in the models and a reduction in the line jitter as well.
Mickey Mouse On Ice (1935): Here are all the notes I took for this one, unedited: “Mickey is a talented ice skater, Donald, Goofy and Pluto get up to ‘whacky’ antics. Comedy appears to be provided by misfortune, but this did not work for me.”
Elmer Elephant (1936): We’ve made it! A morality story that seems to be about something other than working hard! Elmer is an elephant, he has a crush on a tiger. The other woodland creatures bully Elmer because he is different, but then Elmer stops a fire with his magic water powers (read: cartoon trunk) and he learns that giraffes and pelicans have funny features too. I’m poking fun but this has a pretty basic but workable anti-bullying message. It plays with some really interesting imagery when Elmer sees an imperfect reflection in a pond and starts making changes to his appearance based on the flawed self-image this provides, but that aspect is not explored further. I found the moment quite affecting but I also think the animators might not have intended it quite the way I interpreted it.
Mickey’s Rival (1936): Mickey is a controlling jealous partner. Mortimer is a trash character we’re meant to hate. I hate it all. Only notable as Mortimer is drawn with pupils and the flesh coloured face that Mickey will be given in his Fantasia redesign. NEXT!
Three Little Wolves (1936): Oh kill me. What if it was the boy who cried wolf but the three little pigs AND the Big Bad Wolf has three kids too? We only technically get the two ‘lazy’ pigs calling wolf twice, but it’s the same beat in the story. And we end on the wolf being tarred and feathered in another example of uncomfortable over the top violence? Count me out.
Toby Tortoise Returns (1936): This one almost lost me a few times but a tortoise flying like a WWI fighter plane shooting fireworks in a boxing ring is a sentence I’m just happy to have an excuse to type. The animation is great, what’s being animated bores me (except the fighter tortoise firework plane). We gotta be nearing the end?
Three Blind Mouseketeers (1936): I love the pun in the name, and the Mouseketeers avoiding traps without even knowing they’re there was hilarious. Honestly I was on board until the end when the uncreative hyper-violence returned
Mickey Mouse in Through the Mirror (1936): This short opens with a shot of Mickey falling asleep reading Lewis Carrol’s Alice Through the Looking Glass at which point a Mickey Ghost emerges from the sleeping body and proceeds through the looking glass. This short shows a dream and it follows PRECISELY the kind of absurdist logic I love to see in dream stories, and absurdist animation in particular. It was clever, it was funny, I wrote down almost all the jokes because I thought each of them was going to be the highlight but then it was topped once more! There was an extended dance rather than tonnes of violence, which is a tick in my book, but the violence that was there was highly creative and amusing. At one point playing cards were grabbing the designs off themselves and flinging them at Mickey. The ending joke of Mickey’s alarm clock being a phone in the dream so he attempts to answer his clock like a phone was relatable, funny, and possibly more true than ever now when my phone is my alarm clock.
At the end of all 21 of these I am left feeling that there are three broad categories these fall into. Morality tales, experiments (whether in story or animation), and comedy - including the much mentioned violence, but also shorts like Band in Concert.
Things made for all ages are able to be mature, I would point to Avatar: the Last Airbender for anyone who wants to disagree, but an interesting arc throughout these shorts was seemingly not quite being sure whether these are aimed at children, adults, or all ages. This was most apparent in what I’m calling the morality tales (Three Little Pigs, Grasshopper and the Ants, etc…) The fact that a clear majority of them had the moral of: “Working hard is morally good” and didn’t really explore anything further either textually or subtextually made these feel like the worst connotations of the “for kids” moniker. When the closest thing to nuance is an animation studio revealing that playing music *gasp* IS VALID WORK! I start to lose hope for anything challenging.
The comedy for me was generally the least enjoyable due to the reliance on characters experiencing pain and misery. I found the characters were never quite evil enough for me to feel any schadenfreude, and usually the actions of the protagonists made me despise them. Band in Concert was really fun, but mostly lacked this element.
Finally the experiments made this experience worth it. Even the Golden Touch, which was boring, attempted something interesting, and shorts like Through the Looking Glass and Goddess of Spring showed a studio that was not content to continue producing the same thing they had been making without improving as storytellers and animators. In a list where I only properly enjoyed a few entries, the experimental shorts had an ambition to them that I couldn’t help but be impressed by.
A constant note throughout the 21 shorts covered here was a steady increase in story scope and animation quality. This leads into Disney’s next venture (the first ever animated feature film), but sadly does mean that this analysis is left hanging on a slight cliffhanger. Next time we will see why the storytelling has been slowly improving and what a studio with this kind of talent and experience could do when given $1.4 million. Next time we look at “Disney’s Folly” Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937).
Thanks for reading and I hope to see you there.
P.S. I have a bonus two shorts because I started to despair around the run of PROTESTANT WORK ETHIC shorts and wanted a palate cleanser, so enjoy:
The Little Matchgirl (2006): After watching several hours of 1930s animation it’s wild how good 2D animation got in the early 2000s. A destitute girl lights the matches she needs to sell in a desperate attempt to stay warm as she freezes to death in the Moscow winter. I cried. A lot. More than you’re thinking. It’s a beautiful, heartwarming, and crushingly tragic tale of humanity’s casual cruelty to itself. Disney at its best. There is no dialogue and if this was in a Fantasia I wouldn’t have blinked an eye (except from the tears). 10/10 this is the power of animation
Paperman (2012): I’m pretty sure that this is 3D animation but I can’t be certain because of how well it’s stylized. Paper planes are the best wingmen. I refuse to write a better synopsis. I laughed a bunch, my heart grew ten sizes (I’m like a boring Grinch in many ways), and Christophe Beck’s score was a standout. After watching the stumbling first steps of a studio it’s a little awe inspiring to switch to artists at the height of the craft. 10/10, this too, is the power of animated storytelling.
See you next time folks.
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