Il vecchio mulino

A Walt Disney SILLY SYMPHONY Cartoon Short.

As evening draws near, the various creatures living in THE OLD MILL settle in for the night. Dark, fast-moving clouds, however, signal the arrival of a fierce storm...

Winner of the 1937 Academy Award, this lovely cartoon was important for a couple of significant reasons. It exhibited the quantum leaps the Disney artists had taken since the early Symphonies in the animation of animals - the mice and birds are particularly well drawn. The cartoon also debuted the Studio's new multi-plane camera, a complicated and very expensive machine which was able to render an astonishing illusion of depth. - notice the opening traveling shot which moves through the spider web.

The SILLY SYMPHONIES, which Walt Disney produced for a ten year period beginning in 1929, are among the most fascinating of all animated series. Unlike the Mickey Mouse cartoons in which action was paramount, with the Symphonies the action was made to fit the music. There was little plot in the early Symphonies, which featured lively inanimate objects and anthropomorphic plants & animals, all moving frantically to the soundtrack. Gradually, however, the Symphonies 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 SYMPHONIES; they had run their course & served their purpose.