Silly Symphonies - Program 4

The Silly Symphonies program was fun, and probably it was good that I only got to see one 70-minute program. (As opposed to watching all four programs. It would be like watching a whole bunch of half-hour sitcoms until you walk away feeling empty, as if a few hours of your life have gone down the drain with nothing to show for it -- you've been neither educated nor entertained, and you've not accomplished anything either. And people wonder why I don't have a TV? I know my weakness.)

The best of the lot was the six-minute cartoon "Hell's Bells" from 1929, the earliest of the series. The music was good, the animation consisted of, er, devilishly clever but simple line drawings. There are some ghoulish touches, such as one devil playing a skeleton bass, and another doing percussion on a skull and pressing the bellows with his foot to sound a trumpet (the "bellows" is another devil, lying on the ground with a trumpet to his lips). Meanwhile, the bubbling lava provides additional percussion. The whole thing is kind of sassy and sweet. The official program describes the crux of the plot as follows: "After the devil king drinks fire milked from the udder of a dragon, he eats one of his devil servants and pursues a second one over a cliff." The scene is more dramatically and psychologically rich than the writeup suggests, and (naturally) vastly more entertaining to watch. The king has to pursue the second servant because he (the second one) won't stand still to be eaten after seeing the fate of the first servant. He then outwits the king and manages to lure him out to the end of a cliff while he hides underneath, then climbs up a crevice behind the king, and boots him over the edge.

I also really liked The Old Mill (1937), which is a lovely 9-minute wordless tale of the creatures who inhabit an old windmill (gotta love the bats) and how they deal with the battering of a severe storm which temporarily jars the old mill into life.

Water Babies (1935) was fascinating, with an innocence that now looks a bit creepy through modern eyes - I don't think Disney would make a film like this anymore. It reminded me a little of the work of Anne Geddes.

The others were interesting, though some have aged better than others. The eerily similar "Little Red Hen" and "Wise Little Hen" (both released in 1934), nonetheless evoke very different responses in the modern viewer. LRH was almost unwatchable, while WLH was okay if a little over-cute. I was more intrigued by the fact that two studios (perhaps independently) came up with the same basic idea, just as they did in 1998 with "Armageddon" and "Deep Impact." Is it the case that great minds think alike (i.e., mere coincidence)? Or were creative minds in both places reading the same zeitgeist? Or, for you conspiracy theorists out there, did one studio get wind of the other's plan and decide not to be left out of the "trend"?