Saturday, April 19, 2014

A Silly Symphony Of Rats In Revue


Disney Tells The Pied Piper (1933) in Technicolor

A Disney Silly Symphony with human characters and rats, rats, rats. The latter are abundant as to reflect over-hours animators spent getting them drawn, crowd scenes, be they rodent or whatever, evidence of production value in cartoons, and no one delivered in that respect like Disney. Animals were a bulwark for those who drew, people another matter. Mastering the human form was tough even unto Snow White, a four-years-later sticking point at which Disney had reached artistry's summit otherwise. I've never quite understood what makes a person so much tougher to animate than a dog or a duck, that just showing how little I know. Are our features so much more complex than that of animals? I know cats who are lots more expressive than some people I know. Nice how Disney didn't flinch from grim aspects of fairy tales: In this instance, the Piper makes off with village children and doesn't bring them back. The Symphonies must have startled then-audiences with bursts of three-color preceding B/W features. Disney was exclusive using improved Technicolor for cartoons at this point and we can but imagine impact it had.

1 comment:

  1. Donald Benson explores what happened to those kids The Pied Piper led away ...


    Note the careful storytelling: Disney's version makes clear the kids are being used as cheap labor; when the Piper leads them away the townfolk are not so much distraught as just annoyed. And he even cures the little lame boy before he enters the land of ice cream.



    For a different take entirely, see Walter Lantz's "Pied Piper of Basin Street", where a trombonist lures the local teens with swing music. It's wildly uneven, even for a simple gag cartoon. It's on one of the DVD sets.


    For the record, the original poem explains where the kids ended up:
    And I must not omit to say
    That, in Transylvania there's a tribe
    Of alien people who ascribe
    To the outlandish ways and dress
    On which their neighbors lay such stress,
    To their fathers and mothers having risen
    Out of some subterranean prison
    Into which they were trepanned
    Long time ago in a mighty band
    Out of Hamelin town in Brunswick land,
    But how or why they don't understand.

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