To Spring

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer is a very lost player in the short cartoon market. This market is essentially dominated by the Looney Tunes and the Merry Melodies shorts, coming from Warner Bros. But MGM is also able of releasing hidden gems, like "To Spring", an astonishing story about the most beautiful season of the year.

In the environment depicted here, spring isn't caused by natural cycles, but is fabricated. And by who? By little male elves who live below ground. Each spring, when the snow begins to melt, they start working. They begin by felling rainbow rock columns, then reducing them to rubble and using this rubble to turn it into color fluids, which will be moved up to the ground and bearing grass, flowers... In other words, spring! The first half of the cartoon depicts spring's fabrication, but the second part is a little bit different. Old Man Winter comes back and he tries to extend winter by destroying the elves' work. So from this point, we assist to a battle between the elves and Old Man Winter.

The music heard here is deliciously wonderful. The melodic parts stick in the head like an ink spot on a paper sheet. The second part melodies are thrilling and they perfectly fit with the action. This is just fantastico, Giorgio! The animation sequences are also a delight. The colors are well mixed and every little detail is shown into a massive, epic environment. The concept itself is brilliant. The elves are attracting characters, so is Old Man Winter, who effectively portrays the cold and ruthless feelings of the white season.

There's also a strong message included here. The battle seems lost for the elves at the end, until a single late arriving elf jump into the action and it leads to the elves' victory over winter. So the point is: only one single person can make the difference.

In conclusion, "To Spring" is a remarkable lost classic from short cartoon era. What is even more remarkable is that this cartoon's director made his debut here. And who is "To Spring"'s director? It's a certain William Hanna...

The animators here.get out their palettes and produce a remarkable visual animated feature. It is an explanation about how an army of elves defy old man winter and drive him away. The literally produce spring. My only criticism is that it is somewhat endless, with things repeated several times with an old codger's voice dominating.

Notable for the directorial debut of William Hanna(who would go on to win seven Oscars for Tom and Jerry and launch the Hanna-Barbera studio), To Spring is beautifully odd and very captivating, a cartoon that any animation or spring fan should see.

Two components make To Spring especially good. One is the music, which not only sounds like great music but couldn't have fitted more perfectly. Grieg's To the Spring is a beautiful, lyrical piece and is arranged, for orchestral arrangement(it was originally written for piano), beautifully in this cartoon. Mozart's Non Piu Andrai from Le Nozze Di Figaro surprisingly works very well as a work march, for an aria that's usually done humorously. Old Man Winter's music, with its low bass range and resonantly sinister singing(sounds like Tudor Williams but am not sure), brings a real foreboding element to the cartoon's conflict, while the Time for Spring poem/lyrics really stick in your head(evident in that the 'Time for Spring I Say' line has often been quoted between fans of the cartoon) without being too repetitive.

Even more impressive is the exceptional animation, 30s cartoons rarely had animation this colourful and vivid, and this is including the output of the Disney Silly Symphonies(that are still outstandingly well animated). The colours are incredibly beautiful and lush, the backgrounds are deep in detail and filled with imaginative moments and the characters move convincingly without being too stiff or creepy. It's not just however how the animation looks, but how it's used too and the amount of imaginative detail put into the landscapes. Absolutely nothing looks static here, everything looks so smooth and the parts with more colour being added to the landscape and especially the battle between the elves and Old Man Winter are really quite inspired in terms of visuals.

To Spring is well-written, instead of being over-complicated it keeps things simple without being juvenile or simplistic. The characters carry the cartoon nicely and are engaging and well-voiced, though To Spring is not one of those cartoons where depth or character development should be expected(this was true of a lot of cartoons from the 1930s as well), the elves are oddly charming and Old Man Winter is a fun but also mildly scary antagonist.

I do agree that the story does not fare as well as everything else, it takes time to get going and you shouldn't expect anything surprising at all. Then again most cartoons from the 1930s were short on plot, but still worked. To be honest as well, that To Spring was short on plot didn't matter hugely, because the cartoon was never dull, the conflict was very convincing and the charm, bewitching weirdness and how imaginative it was more than compensated too. Springtime in the history of cartoons has never been depicted more oddly or rarely beautifully, the origins of the season actually being much easier to swallow than a lot of other cartoons based on Spring. So while To Spring does not have the most exceptional of narratives, the cartoon is high in atmosphere, imagination and mood and it's done brilliantly too.

Overall, a great cartoon and under-appreciated. Odd but incredibly beautiful and imaginative, To Spring is light on plot but high in charm, soul and imagination, and the music and in particular the animation are outstandingly good. 9/10 Bethany Cox

This Harmon & Ising Happy Harmony cartoon gave MGM the opportunity to make use of the Technicolor process that, until recently, had been monopolised by Disney, so it is full of deep, rich colours. The film tells a fanciful tale that would soon be considered outdated with the arrival of the likes of Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck. Winter is losing its grip on the land, signalling a gang of wizened, bearded elves living underground to start preparing the colours that will transform the countryside from a chilly white blanket to a rich canvas of colour. It's a quality little film, obviously made with great care – but it can't stand up to the likes of Foghorn and Yosemite

Wow, what a visually mesmerising animation, the attention to detail is just amazing. To me it's a real little animated visual wonder! I read a lot of talk from people who remember it fondly from their childhood and old video tapes. I never saw it when I was a kid, I was just lucky enough to discover it on my own recently, and it was certainly cartoon love at first sight! I could feel right away that it was an animation with a very rare and special kind of old quality and I just love the dazzling beauty in all that is to be seen right from the intro to the end... The realistic scenic landscapes, the animals the flowers and the trees, then everything in the underground caverns like the rock formations, the stalactites, the water dripping down over the clock - there's such phenomenal skill at work that was put into all of it. I also found the animation and effect used with the bellowing malign spirit of Winter to be very impressive. He sure sounded a lot like Bluto from Popeye! It offers quite the novel take on how the seasons are made, with those wonderful industrious gnomes striving endlessly in their subterranean grotto to mine ore of every shade of the rainbow to harvest in big, boiling pots of brilliantly vivid colour to power the arcane machinery with the sorcerous ability to paint the land with the new seasons and put the old ones to rest. And in the closing scene I adore the exceptional beauty as all the colours the gnomes have harvested brighten up the world once more in green leaves and bright cherry blossom blizzards. The music and the action perfectly flow together and create a sense of rhythm and pace that make the show breeze by like a dream. I think it brings to life a little of the rich folklore of gnomes - not dwarfs, there is actually a difference! To me these underground mining folk are closer to the original grandeur of the original grittier legends, as opposed to the lovable characters they forever made of them when the great Disney classic Snow White came along. I'm so glad I found this. How very much there is to be found in some of the earliest animations... So creative and wonderful, what a classic. It brings the promise of Spring, and also of hope. It's a gem!