Chao 1
Andrea Chao
Dr. Bradbury
Thesis Proposal
The Invention and Dramatization of Disney’s “Sentimental Victorian Realism”
As Amy Chan has pointed out, Disney’s transformation from a vaudeville-inspired modernist to a purveyor of “sentimental Victorian Realism” did not happen overnight, but was a gradual process that was shaped by socioeconomic and ideological factors as well as by the constraints and possibilities of animation art and technology. It took the Disney studio some five years to develop the aesthetic expertise and film technology that culminated in the great feature-length films of the late 30s and early 40s, and it took nearly that long for Disney, the man to abandon the populist sympathies that had shaped the early Mickey Mouse cartoons and to fully identify with the middle class. Since Amy’s study will track this transformation in terms of the Mickey Mouse cartoons, I will focus my thesis on the product line that eventually replaced the Mickey Mouse cartoons as the center of the Disney Studio’s labors: the Silly Symphonies.
In my first chapter, I will trace the evolution of the narrative and aesthetic components with which the Disneystudio animators constructed the “sentimental Victorian Realism” of the “mature” Disney style, which, as I will argue in my second Chapter, was finally assembled and showcased in the 1937 Silly Symphony, The Old Mill. Throughout, my argument will be that while the Disney Studio’s innovations drew upon the cutting-edge of film technology, they were invariably exploited to conservative ends, but because technological innovation tended to outpace the trend of Disney’s conservatism, early applications of these innovations were, more often than not, surprisingly critical of the middleclass. With The Old Mill, however, the pace of ideology has finally caught up with innovation, and both are wholly committed to recuperating the “sentimental Victorian realism” that will reach full fruition in the feature-length cartoon, Pinocchio. This 1940 film will be the subject of the third and final chapter of my thesis, but as my analysis of this film classicis still rather tentative, I will confine my discussion today to the subject of my first two chapters, which are the break-through films in the Silly Symphonies series.
The Silly Symphonies debuted in 1929, the year after the Mickey Mouse cartoons acquired sound. As the title of the series suggests, Disney’s interest in the series was motivated primarily by the desire to exploit the entertainment value of the new technology of sound film stock. To this end, he hired fellow Midwesterner Carl Stalling, who helped pioneer the click track and later went to have a huge influence ion the success of the Warner Brothers cartoons, to compose and arrange the symphonic music that made up the bulk of the Silly Symphony soundtracks. Judging from the content of the cartoons in the series, the bulk of which had pastoral settings and melodramatic plots, it is clear that Disney was also motivated by the desire to enhance the cartoon’s cultural capital by imitating the more prestigious,albeit much more sentimental,cultural forms of the 19th Century. Unfortunately, apart from the first cartoon in the series, The Skeleton Dance, the Silly Symphonies did poorly at the box-office, in large part because the success of the Mickey Mouse cartoons had cultivated a strong public appetite for character-based cartoons with plots based on vaudeville gags.So poorly did the films fare at the box office that in 1932 when United Artists agreed to become distributor for the Disney cartoons, they refused to distribute the Silly Symphony cartoons unless Disney added the name “Mickey Mouse Presents” to the title cards.
It was not until the appearance of Flowers and Trees, which was the fourth cartoon in the series to appear in 1932, that the Silly Symphonies become a commercial and critical success. Although this film is often described as the first color cartoon, this is not in fact true. Almost two decades earlier animation pioneer Winsor McCay had hand-colored some of the cartoons he had shown on vaudeville tours. Nonetheless, Flowers and Trees was the first cartoon to use a three color process called Technicolor. Ironically, the use of color was not part of Disney’s original plan for the film and was only added at the last moment to make the cartoon more appealing to distributors who had expressed disappointment when they were shown trailers to an earlier black and white version of the same film. One can sympathize with the distributors, for apart from the novelty of color, the film has little to recommend itself in terms of either the quality of its animation or its plotting and characterization. Indeed, the animators attempt to mimic a pastoral style and to stage its melodramatic plot is rather crude even by the standards of the time. Nonetheless, this single innovation of using a three-color process to animate films ensured the cartoon’s financial success, for it was shown for months after its initial appearance and earned the Disney Studio its first Oscar.
If Flowers and Trees was a disappointment in other respects, the popular and critical success of the film proved to Disney that investing in technology made market sense, and to ensure his competitive edge, he signed an exclusive contract with the Technicolor company and used the Silly Symphonies as “a platform for experimenting with processes, techniques, characters, and stories in order to further the art of animation” (Wikipedia). From 1932 on, there is hardly a year in which the series does not introduce a major innovation in art and by 1933, with the appearance of Three Little Pigs, the Silly Symphonies had become the cutting edge of animation art, virtually dominating the Academy Awards until the end of the decade, when Disney terminated the series in order to focus the studio’s efforts on the production of feature-length animate films and popular character-based cartoon shorts like Donald Duck.
Even though it was made less than a year after Flowers and Trees, Three Little Pigs represents a vast improvement in the quality of the animation art, much of which was based on 19th century illustrated versions. This film also represents a vast improvement in terms of story and plotting, and introduced “character animation” (the visual representation of feelings and thoughts as well as action),according to Chuck Jones, who was one of the early cartoon directors most responsible for developing this technique (cited in Wikipedia).Which brings us to a third notable feature of the film: the use of nursery rhymes. This was not the first time Disney had turned to children’s literature for his characters and story lines, but it was his first cartoon application of the genre to become commercially successful. Indeed, so successful was Three Little Pigsthat, beginning with this film, virtually every Silly Symphony and the lion’s share of Disney’s feature-length animated films produced in the 30s and 40s were based on children’s literature classics or a variation or sequel thereof.
In retrospect, it is tempting to interpret the generic and stylistic similarities between the Three Little Pigsand these subsequent films as an indication of ideological affinities, especially in light of the cartoon’s apparent promotion ofhard work and self-reliance, not to mention the fact that the cartoon’s title song, “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf”is reported to have become a“rallying cry for people trying to beat the Depression” (Smith and Clark 35). But this interpretation of the film does not bear up well under close scrutiny. For one thing, the two lazy pigs are given the vast majority of screen time and their personalities and antics are rendered with such affectionate playfulness that the characters invite our sympathy at least as much as they provoke our scorn. Indeed, even at the end of the cartoon, when the “Big Bad Wolf” is sent packing by the Practical Pig, there is little indication that the two lazy pigs have learned their lesson; they are simply having too much fun, and we with them, which leads me to suspect that if the cartoon has a moral lesson, it is more likely “all work and no play makes jack a dull boy” than “work now and play latter” moral of the original tale.
This lag between aesthetic innovation and ideological expression in the Silly Symphonies continues even as late as late-1935, when the Oscar-winning Three Orphan Kittensappeared. Despite it’s solidly middleclass setting, this film does little if anything to reinforce middleclass values. If anything, the middleclass home is represented as a site of racial exploitation and selfish acquisition. The orphan kittens who find their way into this home are entirely undisciplined, have no respect for property, and, as a consequence, wind up wrecking havoc, much to the annoyance of the black bearish housekeeper, who is prevented from expelling or punishing the kittens by a conspicuously spoiled middleclass child whose motive for saving the kittens is to use them like dolls. But if the film’s political sympathies hark back to the early Mickey Mouse cartoons, the film’s aesthetics are arm in arm with the feature-length cartoons of the late 30s. The whole film has a richness of tone and perspectival sophistication that bears comparison with the Victorian realists who inspired the Disney animators. But herein lies the problem for an ambitious innovator like Disney: he wanted more than to reproduce a Victorian realism, he wanted to surpass it. This he did with the multiplane camera.
No matter how skillful the Victorian realist painters were, they could not overcome the central problem of representing space on a two-dimensional plane: which was that the spectator was always placed at one fixed point in relationship to space represented no matter where he or she stood in relationship to the artwork. With the multiplane camera invented by William Garity for the DisneyStudio, Disney’s animators were able to simulate the experience of moving through the space represented. This optical illusion was made possible by the fact that instead of one layer of art, the multiplane process had up to seven, each painted in oils on glass, through which the camera was moved.
The first use of the multiplane camera was in the 1937 Silly Symphony The Old Mill, as many film critics and scholars have pointed out, but what they have failed to mention is that Disney did not just apply this new technology to this film, he showcased its superiority for representing the illusion of space, as we can see from this opening scene in The Old Mill.[1]Note that the cartoon begins with a long establishing shot of a static pastoral setting before allowing the multiplane camera to create the illusion of space, thereby reminding the viewer on the one hand of the limitations of the conventional modes of painterly representation, and on the other of the superiority of his animated films. Small wonder that this film garnered the Academy Award for Best Cartoon for 1937. With that I will end my presentation and leave the floor open for questions.
Tentative Bibliography
Dubery, Fred and John Willats. Drawing Systems. London: Studio Vista, 1972.
Furniss, Maureen. Art in Motion: Animation Aesthetics. Sydney: John Libbey & Company Pty Ltd, 1999.
Maltin, Leonard and Jerry Beck. Of Mice and Magic: A History of American Animated Cartoons. New York: New American Library, 1987.
Schickel, Richard. The Disney Version: The Life, Times, Art and Commerce of Walt Disney. New York: Avon Books, 1968.
Smith, Dave and Steven Clark. Disney: The First 100 Years. New York: Disney Enterprises, Inc., 1999.
Watts, Steven. “Walt Disney: Art and Politics in the American Century.”The Journal of American History. 82.1 (1995): 84-110.
[1]Richard Schickel gives plenty information on the life of Disney and the development of the studio in his DisneyVersion. He talked about the multiplane camera in several chapters, but only mentioned The Old Mill as the first film that used the technology and won an Oscar.