Flowers and Trees

The forest awakens and rubs the sleep from it's eyes. The trees, birds, insects and even the bats emerge from the arms of Morpheus in varying humours ready to start their day. One of the trees is enraptured and serenades his intended with some hastily improvised harp music whilst his friend orchestrates a chorus of chirping and the sunflowers present a perfectly choreographed dance. She's gracious enough, but having none of it until pursued by a grisly old stump who has evil designs on her delicate boughs! A duel ensues and with a fire soon ablaze, all must flee for their very lives to find a pond or a stream and hope for some rain. A fine combination of Schubert and Rossini accompanies this enjoyable animation that shows us a bit of the fickleness of affection but also, more seriously, the effects fire can have on nature and of it's recuperative powers afterwards!

After years of experimentation and development to deliver the primary colors of green, red and blue onto one film-strip, the Technicolor company finally arrived at the moment theater-goers were breathlessly anticipating. Walt Disney's 29th installment in his "Silly Symphony" series, July 1932's "Flowers and Trees," became the first film to be shot and projected by Technicolor's new 'three-strip' process to the public, showing cinema's first true realistic colors onto the screen.

Technicolor's camera, introduced in 1931, captured the entire color spectrum, a goal its researchers had been working on since 1924. Labeled 'Process 4' by insiders, three black-and-white film strips wound their way through the camera, using a prism to separate the primary colors, and then were fused in the lab onto one strip for playback on any projector. The technology was a gigantic leap from the company's previous 'two-strip' process of capturing only yellow and green.

Technicolor felt an animated short was the simplest way to present its newly enhanced color process. Disney was in the middle of making the black-and-white "Flowers and Trees" when the two companies connected and agreed the cartoon would be the first to introduce the public to Technicolor's advanced technology. But in its early stages, the process was prohibitively more expensive to produce than black-and-white cartoons. As an incentive, Technicolor gave Disney a three-year exclusivity in the animation field for its vivid, true-color film, expiring on September 1935. It was a gamble on Walt's part since if the cartoon failed to generate a profit because of the high costs, his studio could potentially be bankrupt.

Fortunately for Disney, "Flowers and Tress" became an enormous success. His "Silly Symphony" series, monopolizing the three-strip color process for cartoons for three years, easily made money for Walt and company. The entire film industry was impressed. Producer/director Merian C. Cooper, in production with 1933's "King Kong," said he saw "Flowers and Trees" and claimed he never wanted to make another black-and-white picture again. He was instrumental in getting the first three-strip Technicolor feature film, 1935's "Becky Sharp," produced.

Technicolor slowly rolled out their new cameras and film stock to Hollywood studios for live action. Some studios inserted short Technicolor segments embedded into their black-and-white feature films while others produced full-color two-reeler shorts before the arrival of "Becky Sharp." The years Disney animators worked with color proved to be invaluable when Walt began production of cinema's first color animation feature film, 1937's "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs."

Indeed a very nice work of art on this one! I enjoyed it immensely. I'm certain you will too. It is definitely worth every bit of the few minutes to watch. More than flowers and trees though, even though that's just the title.

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.

This is one of many so-called "Silly Symphonies" that Walt Disney Pictures made in the 30s and they were very, very popular. Given how much cartoons have changed, this film wouldn't play nearly as well today as it did then. Cartoons in the 30s tended to be rather schmaltzy and lacked the insane humor and pacing of classic cartoons of the 40s and 50s. Remember that at the time this film was made, Bugs Bunny, Tom & Jerry (the MGM ones--not the earlier series by the same name) and Tex Avery's shenanigans were still in the future. So, while audiences in later years might have been a bit put off by the style of film that FLOWERS AND TREES represent, in its time it was big...real big. Big enough to earn an Oscar as Best Animated Short.

The film consists of classical style music accompanying scenes of anthropomorphic (people-like) trees and flowers dancing, frolicking and eventually being attacked by the dreaded fire. As I said, most of it very sappy but I did like the adorable mushrooms (Disney seemed to have a knack for this--see FANTASIA for more great mushrooms). However, the artwork is tops for the time and it is diverting. It's also the first three-color Technicolor short to win the Oscar--but it's also very old fashioned and will probably bore many viewers.