Animating Springtime 1929-1936

Spring is a good time to be just about anywhere.  In the temperate zones of the northern hemisphere, you have only to walk out of your door to sense portents of renewal.  This past week in New York City, the weather was sunny, the temperature a few degrees above freezing.  We had a snowstorm on Monday, and the last patches of snow melted away Tuesday morning.  Somewhere close by, I trust,  buds are opening in the fresh air.

Spring is an eternal dream of the human spirit.  We could make a pilgrimage through the most celebrated depictions of the season of renewal, from all ages and cultures, but I'll focus on a couple of animated cartoons from the 1930s.  I first found them a few years ago, and enjoyed sharing them with my young daughter. 

The sequence begins with a couple of black and white Walt Disney Silly Symphonies.  The series covered all of the seasons in 1929 and 1930, while producing similar items like The Merry Dwarfs, Night, and Playful Pan.  These are mostly plotless frolics, not quite as good as the best early Silly Symphonies, namely Hell's Bells and The Skeleton Dance.  Birds In The Spring is an early Technicolor Silly Symphony from 1933.

Springtime Silly Symphony 1929 24 October 1929
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pJQJzsJvpIw

Playful Pan Silly Symphony 1930 27 December 1930
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r36LFx-bpa0

Birds In The Spring Silly Symphony 1933
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mov3ZSyTnr4


Then there are two cartoons from the studio of Ub Iwerks, who was Walt Disney's chief animator on the early Mickey Mouse films and Silly Symphonies, and then established his own studio in 1930, which functioned until 1936.  Another key Disney employee left to work at Iwerks' studio--the great music director Carl Stalling.  They released Jack Frost, with a score by Stalling, in December 1934, and Summertime, in which the music was cobbled from overtures by Von Suppe and Offenbach, in June, 1935.  In Jack Frost, a young bear who doesn't want to hibernate runs away from his family's cave.  Old Man Winter traps him, but friendly Jack Frost brings him home.  Along the way, there's a magnificent sequence in which a scarecrow comes down from his pole and does a fabulous loose-limbed dance accompanied by brilliant, seemingly German-inflected scat singing, somewhat in the manner of Cab Calloway.  My guess is that this sequence is based on a film clip of a singer/dancer--I wish I knew who it was!  Then a snowfall turns the scarecrow into a snowman.  In Summertime, Old Man Winter reappears, and is chased by the angry sun.  We see the snowman we recognise from Jack Frost.  The snow melts, revealing the satyr god Pan, who calls forth the flowers, animals, and centaurs with his panpipes.  A brilliant silhouette sequence shows a group of trees morphing into lithe burlesque dancers, and back again.  The groundhog gets his letter, Winter attempts a comeback, and Pan, the animals and centaurs fight him back.  Spoiler alert!: the bees land the decisive blow.  The transforming snowman links the two cartoons, which should be watched together.

Jack Frost Ub Iwerks 1934
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YqWbbrmt3zg

Summertime Ub Iwerks 1935
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ehb8_MX7bQs


Disney's The Goddess of Spring, from 1934, is brilliant.  This was the first time that the studio tried to depict a realistic human main character.  The big challenge was to get Persephone's torso and arm movements to look right, and the results are just short of being fully convincing.  More important, the the essentials of the Persephone myth are well conveyed, and only lightly Disneyfied.  Hades looks great, rising from a flaming volcano with horns and a cape.  Best of all, it's an opera.  All the words are sung, except for one dramatic speech where Hades expresses, in sprechstimme, his exasperation with Persephone's moping.  The above ground sequences are Puccini-esque, while Hell swings to hot jazz.  This makes an interesting contrast to the Iwerks/Stalling Silly Symphony Hell's Bells, from 1929.  The composer for The Goddess of Spring is the underrated Leigh Harline, who later did the score for Sam Fuller's 1953 film noir Pickup On South Street, which will be the subject of a future post here.  Hades was sung by Tudor Williams, who appeared on and off-screen, always uncredited, in dozens of features, including Citizen Kane, where he played the chorus master, and John Ford's How Green Was My Valley, where he is the singer.

Goddess of Spring Silly Symphonies 1934
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=80UIC1g__yY

Hell's Bells Silly Symphonies 1929
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4mXSNg3MeaA


Finally we have MGM's To Spring from 1936, who was produced by Hugh Harman and Rudolf Ising, and directed by the rookie William Hanna.  A crew of hyperactive troglodyte gnomes start the colorful veins of the season flowing.  As in Iwerks' Summertime, they prevail against the stubborn winter spirit.  The music is borrowed from Grieg and Mozart.  Winter is voiced by another fine bass, whereas the head gnome chants rather than sings his lines.  The glory of the cartoon is in the sequences of pulsing and gushing rainbows of fluid, presumably destined to bloom into flowers.  In our house we used to refer to this cartoon as "color spilling."

To Spring MGM Happy Harmonies 1936
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lUxtDhfSZHY