Just so...so bad

Did you people see the same film I saw?

I really wanted to like this movie. I feel terribly cynical trashing it, and that's why I'm giving it a middling 5. Actually, I'm giving it a 5 because there were some superb performances.

While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

Disney's first Silly Symphonies cartoon made with three-strip Technicolor is a trippy bit of business that won the first Oscar for animated short. Basically the plot to the cartoon is that the trees, flowers, mushrooms, and forest creatures are all exercising and dancing and whatever when a fight breaks out between two male trees over a female tree. Yeah I just typed that. From there things get even weirder as we get arson, bird rainmakers, and a character burning to death! It's bizarre but in an awesome way. The animation is excellent for its time. The Technicolor pops as much today as I would imagine it did when it was first released. Disney has really done a marvelous job at maintaining and restoring their old cartoons. The music is upbeat and cheerful. It's a charming old short that's just offbeat enough to appeal even to today's audiences, I think. By the way, early in the short when the mushrooms first pop up through the ground, take notice of what they look like and tell me the animators didn't slide a little dirty joke in there.

So impressed was the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences with this animated film that they created an award for it - Best Cartoon Short Subject! From the standpoint of present day this eight minute gem doesn't appear that sensational but it was pretty impressive for it's time. This was one of Walt Disney's 'Silly Symphonies', which came to be a training ground of sorts for his artists until the studio developed into feature length animated films. I'd say they were a fairly creative unit.The cable listing for this picture stated that it was about a young sapling that falls in love with a sycamore tree. I don't know that I would have figured out the sycamore part on my own, 'he' looked like just about any other tree you could come up with. There's a villain here in the form of a gnarly old tree stump who tries to steal the sweetheart tree from the sycamore. He starts a forest fire which seemed like overkill to me, but it did lead to another creative element when a flock of birds formed a cloud seeding operation to douse the fire.I've recorded a few more Silly Symphonies from the Turner Classics channel, and based on this cartoon I'll be looking forward to watching the rest. The passage of over eighty years hasn't diminished their entertainment value as they're a treat for young and old alike.

It can be said simply enough but should bare repeating that without a work like Flowers & Trees, Snow White would have been much harder to make. While that film doesn't take all its cues from this Silly Symphony about the good tree, his lovely lady tree, and the villainous tree coming between them, I think the music cues and how the creatures of the forest all come together is a major part of it. Disney's moves in this classical period - hell, up through the early 40's - had the hallmarks of being musical-filmed pieces, synchronized to sound with the tightest detail. But within these to-the-beat markers, there are the graceful nuances of visual poetry on screen: here are creatures and plant-life coming to life, acting as people do in such ways as to make them universal. You can watch this film anywhere over the world and people get what's going on; same was with Mickey Mouse, though here the aim is more to inspire some kind of awe over laughs.One can criticize this stuff - it's pretentious, it's full of itself, it thinks its so great. But what if it is just a splendid piece of artistic expression? There's a level of simplicity that I think found its way into a lot of those early Disney features, and the bedrock of that is here: no frills storytelling, clever visual flourishes, and here it borders on gags but one can take it a little more seriously. It's also the forerunner for Fantasia, of course; taking a piece (or in this case pieces) of classical music and finding a way to basically make the earliest films full of life and vitality - in brand-spankingly fresh Technicolor (and good lord does it look full of the synonyms you can think of for gorgeous).It's not simply one of the superlative shorts of all time but one of the great music 'videos', with a fleshed-out story, conflicts and danger with the fire that spreads (and the teamwork to put it out), and the sentimental side, but wholly and expressed with passionate audacity to go for it. There's not a trace of a modern smirk or wink to the audience, no one is being talked or looked down on, and that's part of the purity: here's the trees, here's the flowers, here's the birds, here are the things that make up this crazy little world that Disney's created. It's what it is: beauty realized in a new way that, for those that can take it in some context, heartfelt.

Wow, this is the first cartoon ever to be in colour and the first to get an Oscar. What a great landmark in animation history. I can definitely see why it earned such an award, I thought every moment was wonderful. I love this Silly Symphony. To me, certain earlier entries in the series such as the black and white Springtime and some of the more vibrant entries of the seasons themed shorts, while all having their good points, were very poor and severely hampered by the lack of colour. To me it's like they took what was best about all those somewhat failures and put it all together to make this beauty. It never bored me. I know exactly what Silly Symphonies I've found to be terrible and dated and this one definitely does not rank among them. I can see that they must have reused some of the ideas of the living flowers to much better effect later on with Alice in Wonderland. The only thing I didn't really like was the romance part of it. I felt that the whole damsel in distress thing was old.(maybe not then!) I thought that the alluring burlesque girl tree's "hair" made her look a bit like the Bride of Frankenstein! Anyway, I thought living trees were quite interesting and special enough on their own without needing any lovey- dovey stuff thrown in. But at eight minutes I guess there had to something for the tale to center on. Upon seeing the trees I immediately thought of the apple-tossing meanies from The Wizard of Oz! There's only one baddie in this though. Sometimes with these shorts, while most of them not directly being fairy tales, they do have themes and elements of classic fairy tales in them, and some of this one reminded me a little bit of the Brave Little Tin Soldier-with the evil jealous dead tree in place of the jack in the box. Hey, with ferns like that, who needs anemones!(ha-ha) I actually felt a bit sorry for the one bad tree, I thought it was mildly shocking when he lies dead at the end, killed by his own hubris as it were! Goodness, Disney sure played hardball way back in those more "innocent" times didn't they! I thought a much nicer and more memorable way to go would have been if the character would have been cured of his wickedness somehow, and made to look like the rest of the trees. But that's probably just me. I thought the owl that acted as a fire siren looked just like the same stupid owl from The Skeleton Dance. I like animated features that are all about nature, and I thought the whole theme of nature and of having it as the main star was a concept that they executed just beautifully. May it be evergreen forever. P.S. If you loved this I highly recommend a Merry Melody called The Blue Danube.