Walt & His Silly Symphonies

Walt Disney produced 75 Silly Symphony short films between the years 1929 and 1939. After the success of the Mickey Mouse cartoons, it was suggested to Walt by composer Carl Stalling to create a new series to focus on animation that coordinated with music. Walt saw this idea as an added opportunity to experiment with different animation techniques and storytelling to further the field of animation.

And so the first Silly Symphony, The Skeleton Dance, was released on August 22, 1929.  Each Silly Symphony advanced the art of animation and a leading example is how Flowers and Trees (1932) was the first cartoon (ever!) to be made in colour. Production had already started for Flowers and Trees in black and white but then Walt heard about the new three-strip Technicolor process. He pushed his team to start right back at the beginning so that their final result would be an astonishing coloured cartoon. Walt then signed a contract with Technicolor which allowed his studio to be the only studio permitted to use this three-strip process for the next few years.

Another major milestone achieved by a Silly Symphony was the use of Disney’s vertical multiplane camera. This version of the multiplane camera, created by William Garity for Walt Disney Productions, allowed for seven layers of back, middle, and foreground to be filmed under a moving camera. The first Silly Symphony to use this technology was The Old Mill in 1937 which was a stepping stone in using the multiplane camera for future full-length animated films such as Pinocchio (1940) and Bambi (1942). Walt Disney Productions was honoured with a Scientific/Technical Achievement Award at the 1937 Academy Awards for the design and use of the multiplane camera.

As Walt was getting ready to start a project the world had never seen before, another important step needed to take place. This step was to animate humans as realistically as possible and was first attempted in the Silly Symphony The Goddess of Spring (1934) in which the artists animated the goddess, Persephone. Persephone turned out to be the forerunner for Snow White in Walt Disney’s very first full-length feature film, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937).

Though Walt was not a fan of sequels, several of his Silly Symphonies were sequels of previous shorts due to their major success. Most notably was the success of Three Little Pigs (1933) which resulted in three addition shorts: The Big Bad Wolf (1934), Three Little Wolves (1936), and The Practical Pig (1939).  Other sequels were Toby Tortoise Returns (1936) following The Tortoise and the Hare (1935) and the 1939 colour remake of the original 1931 The Ugly Duckling.

Seven of the Silly Symphonies won Academy Awards with Flowers and Trees winning the inaugural Best Animated Short Film in 1932. The other winning films were Three Little Pigs (1933), The Tortoise and the Hare (1935), Three Orphan Kittens (1935), The Country Cousin (1936), The Old Mill (1937), and The Ugly Duckling (1939).  All of these Oscars were personally awarded to Walt as the producer.

The Silly Symphonies were all major accomplishments done by Walt Disney Productions and over these ten years, major animation developments were done by Walt and his artists. The Silly Symphonies helped established Walt Disney Productions as a key frontrunner in the entertainment industry and they were short films that Walt could be proud of.