Birds in the Spring

A Walt Disney SILLY SYMPHONY Cartoon Short.

The BIRDS IN THE SPRING are kept busy building nests & hatching their eggs. One particularly adventurous young fledging wanders from home, tangles with a frightful serpent and brings back a swarm of angry bees. Papa Bird has a forceful way of showing his displeasure...

Not much plot in this little film, but it did give the Disney animators an exercise in animating comic birds.

The SILLY SYMPHONYS, which Walt Disney produced for a ten year period beginning in 1929, are among the most interesting of series in the field of animation. Unlike the Mickey Mouse cartoons in which action was paramount, with the Symphonys the action was made to fit the music. There was little plot in the early Symphonys, which featured lively inanimate objects and anthropomorphic plants & animals, all moving frantically to the soundtrack. Gradually, however, the Symphonys became the school where Walt's animators learned to work with color and began to experiment with plot, characterization & photographic special effects. The pages of Fable & Fairy Tale, Myth & Mother Goose were all mined to provide story lines and even Hollywood's musicals & celebrities were effectively spoofed. It was from this rich soil that Disney's feature-length animation was to spring. In 1939, with SNOW WHITE successfully behind him and PINOCCHIO & FANTASIA on the near horizon, Walt phased out the SILLY SYMPHONYS; they had run their course & served their purpose.