Walt Disneys Silly Symphonies Analysis Film Studies Essay

Walt Disneys swooning Symphonies Analysis Film Studies EssayWalt Disney, arguably whiz of the 20th centurys greatest story tellers, found his voice in the 1930s. Fol emiting from the succeeder of the Mickey Mouse shorts, the Disney Studio began the production of the dizzy Symphonies, a serial that reworked fairy tales and nursery wisdom reviving the classics in the hope of producing an en gon feature article. Mickey Mouse was Disneys superstar and occasional alter-ego. Steamboat Willie (1928) had made the studio a cut above his rivals still Disneys smart project would take the watcher far beyond Mickey and into a new universe to a greater extent daring and original that would make the studio non provided classic unless border line serious art. Taking from various sources such as paintings, magazine illustrations, films and posters, the Silly Symphonies fed the swelling stream of bathetic modernism at the Disney Studio, blending the unwarranted and the real, the irr ational and sentimental, magic and empiricism, senseual and lowbrow culture (Watts, 2002 111).The Silly Symphonies entirelyowed the spectator to enter a fantastic world of nature, fairy-tales and metamorphoses, providing escapism dependable of tinct and movement, free from history and repression. Russian filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein was a great admirer of Disneys early Silly Symphonies and the features up until Bambi (david hand, 1941). In his unfinished papers he discussed the work of the Walt Disney Studio amid 1928 and 1941. Eisensteins fascination with Disney vim is ground on the fantastical, alogical order in which it is judgeable toachieve a mastery and supremacy in the realm of liberty from the shackles of logic, from the shackles in general (Disney) gives us prescriptions from folkloric, mythological, prelogical thought but al appearances rejecting, get-up-and-go aside logic, brushing aside logistic, formal logic, the logical case (cited in O.Moore, 2002125).The Silly Symphonies allowed the vitalisers to try out new techniques and ideas with the two most important being the ability to squash and stretch giving the animators freedom to exaggerate their characters actions and expressions but also to create believability in such a way that the audiences accepted the distortions in a characters shape. Eisenstein was attracted to the elasticity of the animated survey and fascinated by the ever changing contours defining it as plasmaticness, a rejection of once and forever allotted form, freedom from ossification, the ability to dynamically pick out any form (Leyda, 198821) Disney was not the first to experiment with form. French animator and auteur, Emile Cohl had produced Fantasmagorie in 1908. Lasting two minutes, the hand of an artist draws a jest which shape shifts into a myriad of images, for fantastic or comic effect, invoking an ocular pleasement for both young and old. The hand of the artist illustrates the advantage of working in animation, with the characters obeying to the transformation at the nudge of the animator. Eisenstein writes that it is the sight of omnipotence that makes the image so appealing as it holds the ability to become whatever you wish turning stable forms into forms of mobility. (Leyda, 1988 21)Eisenstein frequently focused on the Silly Symphony, Merbabies (1938) in which the metamorphoses and juxtapositions of the characters ar central to the short. He exclaimsA striped fish in a cage is transformed into a tiger and roars with the voice of a lion or panther. Octopuses turn into elephants. A fish into a donkey. A expiration from ones self from once and forever prescribed norms of nomenclature, form and behaviour. Here, its overt. In the open. And of course, in comic form. (Griffin 56)Eisenstein delighted in watching inanimate objects and animals metamorphose in shape and substance and then used for purposes other than intended. Whereas Emile Cohl transformed one object into another , Disney demonstrated the humanisation of inanimate objects. Whilst still maintaining their properties, the animals were able to think and behave exchangeable humans. What was once a tall building is right off a building swooping down to avoid an oncoming plane, a maneuvers stolon becoming a long bony arm.Not only had Eisenstein prize the greatness of the Silly Symphonies but so had the States. From 1930, Silly Symphonies won an honorary society Award every year for their cartoon shorts laying the stepping stones for his feature length films. The shorts realizeed toward experimenting with sound, music and image, focusing less on gags but evoking mood and emotion. An analysis in Stage magazine described the Silly Symphonies as,a rare kind of art wherein musical theater and pictorial elements came together as a seamless whole. With the music in a bachelor chorale or a Mozart symphonyfrom the smoothness and precision of the manifest thing you hear, you are not aware of the for midable equipment of harmonics, counterpoint, and pure mathematics that its composer had to possess. So with les oeuvres Disney (Watts, 2002123). With another critic observing, not until a couple of eld ago were you ever permitted to see and hear a six-legged spider power hammer out Schuberts Liebestraum or a baby grand piano or a pelican rattling off the Anvil chorus from Il Travatore on the bony skeleton of a giraffeor Mickey playing a xylophone solo on a set of paradoxical teeth (Watts, 200274)The Silly Symphonies expressed music without specific or pass off characters, with the action of inanimate objects or anthropormorphic animals pitiable in synchronisation with the music. numerous of the shorts were built around a community of non-human creatures, joyful and celebratory, glorifying verdant life in opposition to the oppressions of the big city. Russell Merritt notes that Disney himself was barely adapting the formulas of American puppet theatre, which in turn had bee n influenced by turn-of-the-century fairyland operettas and stage musicals.Nor can the drawing, based on the style of American illustrators give care Harrison Cady, W.W. Denslowbe considered original art. alone in the world of commercial American cartoons, no one had seen anything same it (Kaufman, 20066). Working on board with Disney was the extremely talented animator, Ubbe Iwerks and composer and music director, Carl stall. It was Stalling who came up with the original idea for their first Silly titled, The anatomy move (1929). Entirely animated by Iwerks in black and white, and inspired by Edgar Allen Poe and gothic illustrators, The Skeleton leaping invites the spectator to an broken-down graveyard. The haunting visuals bouncing the spectator the widening eyes of a terrified owl, a full moon, wind blowing whilst the owl shivers and hoots, expanding and shrinking. A branch from a tree swoops down, looking for like a long, thin witchs arm. Bats flee from the belfry int o the camera, a spider appears and crawls away, a dog howls, two cats bicker spitting and fit out until out of the grave comes a skeleton.Atmospherics and mood is created with the visuals being stress by the music. Symbolic of a Halloween night (and later used as the inspiration for Disney Worlds Haunted Mansion) the images fright as well as amuse and approach horror and death in a comical way. Styled like a comic vaudeville routine, the skeleton bubbles with charisma. Metamorphosing in a comedic demeanor and dancing the Charleston, the skeletons dance in perfect synchronisation with Stallings score. What distinguished Stallings pull ahead were their playful, often brilliant comic non-sequiturs a radically disjunctive unify of serious music with cakewalks, ragtime, and soft shoes.the symphonies revelled in a musical openness ahead of its time, a non-hierarchical approach, in which all genres of music were considered equal- all joyfully embraced, nothing sacred. (Kaufman, 20068) As early as 1930, Paul Rotha wrote, To many writers at the moment, the Disney cartoons are the most witty and satisfying productions of modern cinema. Their headspring merit lies in their immediate appeal to any type of audience, simply because they are based on rhythm. They have been compared with the early one reelers of Chaplin, and the way in which they appeared unheralded, gradually to achieve an international acceptance is not remote that of the great comedians early work. (Kaufman, 20068)In contrast to The Skeleton Dance and with the new frontier of Technicolor (the new three- food color process for film), Flowers and Trees (1932) presented a moralistic story aboutwhat good triumphing over evil (a common theme within the Disney films). As morning breaks, nature awakes from its slumber. The trees stretch their branches and yawn, the flowers awake some brush their teeth, others commit their daily exercises. The mushrooms pop out from beneath the ground. The female tree has leaves like feather bowers and uses white flowers to powder her nose. The old tree stump is depressed and grey with crows nesting in his broken branches. As he yawns, bats fly from his mouth. The male tree pulls at some reeds to play the harp, another tree conducts as the birds sing along.Flowers and Trees pays homage to traditional culture. The magical story is tended to(p) by the music of Schubert, Rossini and Mendelssohn. These films work to the classical autobiography of a straight romance with a celebration of the community or courtship. There is a conflict, a kidnapping of some sort with the climax of the male virtuoso duelling and saving the day with harmony being restored. Rather than the bleakness of the move city street, animation allows an attractiveness, a transformed world, free from restrictions, restrain and control, inviting a new freedom. Eisenstein comments that Disneys works themselves strike me as the same kind of lay of comfort, an instant of relief, a f leeting touch of lips in the hell of affable burdens, injustices and torments, in which the circle of his American overhearers is forever trapped. (Leyda, 19887) This was not only for children but for anyone of any age proving that cartoons can appeal to both intellect and imagination.The Silly Symphonies were more original and more progressive and caused a innovation in the animated cartoon industry. Out of the 210 (find ref) Silly Symphonies, only some are remembered if at all, with only a few remaining famous. gip such as The Three Little Pigs, The Old Mill, Flowers and Trees and The Skeleton Dance are the most recognised with only the Big Bad wolf down and Donald Duck remaining well-k presentlyn Symphony characters. Disneys films were then a lyrical, limitlessly inventive revolt against the disciplinary regimes of the capital, against the big grey wolf who in America is behind every corner, behind every counter, on the heels of every soulfulness especially those of the wo rking class. (James, 2005271)As time passed by and the Disney Company expanded, Disney at last betrayed Eisensteins notions of utopian promise in the medium (James, 2005271). The Silly Symphonies enabled the studio to get their aesthetic experimentation, taking it in new directions and laying the foundation for the narrative formulas that made Disney so popular. He had mobilised the amplyest quality skills and developed new practiced innovations such as introducing synchronised sound, colour, special effects and the multi-plane camera. Eisenstein criticised the use of colour in the Disney films describing it as an amorphous, extraneous element that plays no part in Disneys amazing synchronous dance of lines and shapes, melody and rhythm. (find ref) Disney had finally abandoned the plasmatic that was presumable in the early Silly Symphonies and began leaning more toward the verisimilitude of graphic representation. wolfs now possessed human characteristics both emotional and ps ychological and his style abandoned its utopian potential, establishing realism as the norm in animation.85Animal bestiary ss were effectively experimental films progressing the form itself.86 Disney was moving closer to the revelation of the animal and progressing the form toward a hyperrealoism, which though diminishing some aspects of the freedoms of the animation language, began to ironically facilitate a way in which truly cinematic effects might be achievedNeed to add inThe Silly Symphonies were intended for the mass market and thus colour was used not only to present the real and express narrative development but also to provide transformations were it is as expressive and fluid as music.ever, Kristean Moen argues that colour can be seen as a site of instability and fluidity.introducing high art to animation. The name itself suggests a blend of both high and low culture and demonstrates the studios attitudes to high art.Exhibition book,89-The Disney animators also applied th e principles of work through and overlapping action. Never done, most things were like a cut out, moving in one piece. No one thought of the characters clothing following(a) through, sweeping out and dropping a few frames later, which it does naturally. Thats why d anuimation looked so different.The animators applied principles used in the theatre- secondary action, anticipation, staging and quantify to create believable perfomanc. 3 little pigs was a rbeakthough for the first time, characters who look alike demonstrated differing personalities through their movements. It now wasnt just how it looked by gow he moved and determined his personality.90-As the work of the animators became more polished, the performances grew more subtle AND NUANCED Until they rivalled the playing of live performers. the characters cease to exist as drawings but become live individuals.Although not directing many of the Silly Symphonies, they benefited from Disneys intervention and he was making an imation a sophisticated art form. Paul Wells argues nevertheless that by taking into account the contribution of Iwerks, it is possible to challenge the view that Disney can be wholly understood as a emblem around whom the key enunciative techniques and meanings of a film accrue and find implied cohesion. (Wells )Watts 108The Skeleton Dance dramatically enlarged the boundaries of enchantment and the uncanny for mainstream cartoon industry. From its earlier days metamorphosis had always been the mainspring of cartoon magic. Cartoon characters were made of separate that could change, bend out of shape, detach, grow or diminish. Landscapes were forever changing themselves. alone the ss moved awar from such surreal (not abandoning them altogether) and expanded upon atmosphericsMerit pg, 8 (rephrase)