Disney Animates Mr. Claus, Part One
A Walt Disney SILLY SYMPHONY Cartoon Short.As Christmas approaches, SANTA'S WORKSHOP becomes a beehive of activity, producing & quality testing a myriad of new toys, with the jolly old elf himself checking his list & filling his big bag.
This is a very colorful & entertaining film, with lots for the eye to look at. The march of the toys - including a Charlie Chaplin doll - into the bag is lots of fun. Quibble: some of the toys, in the unedited version, are a bit racist and it was a real lapse of taste to group the Hassidic doll with the toy pigs.
The SILLY SYMPHONIES, which Walt Disney produced for a ten year period beginning in 1929, are among the most fascinating of all animated series. Unlike the Mickey Mouse cartoons in which action was paramount, with the Symphonies the action was made to fit the music. There was little plot in the early Symphonies, which featured lively inanimate objects and anthropomorphic plants & animals, all moving frantically to the soundtrack. Gradually, however, the Symphonies became the school where Walt's animators learned to work with color and began to experiment with plot, characterization & photographic special effects. The pages of Fable & Fairy Tale, Myth & Mother Goose were all mined to provide story lines and even Hollywood's musicals & celebrities were effectively spoofed. It was from this rich soil that Disney's feature-length animation was to spring. In 1939, with SNOW WHITE successfully behind him and PINOCCHIO & FANTASIA on the near horizon, Walt phased out the SILLY SYMPHONIES; they had run their course & served their purpose.
score 10/10
Ron Oliver 25 October 2000
Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw0009766/34956
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