Into the life of every diehard Warner Brothers cartoon fan a little rain must fall. One can spend a lifetime seeking the holy grail of seeing all 1,000 shorts and have a grand old time with each one—except when it comes to a certain group, the first Merrie Melodies of the early Thirties. Even the true fanatic can only take two or three in a row: animals and plants dancing, goods in shops after closing time coming to life and dancing, the inevitable arrival of a glowering villain handily thwarted via a Rube Goldberg-style chain of events.

The strange thing about these insipid little concerts is that at the same time, the studio was producing the Looney Tunes series starring a vaguely Negroid little Mickey Mouse knockoff named Bosko, which, while hardly for the ages either, had a snap and even edge rarely on view in the Merrie Melodies. Aficionados have long collected Bosko on video and DVD, while there has never been a collection of the Merrie Melodies, even bootleg. Where did the idea come from to devote equal time to a series about tap-dancing beetles and soup cans?

The answer is the Disney studio's Silly Symphonies. Merrie Melodies existed in the relationship to them that television's The Munsters would to The Addams Family: that is, they were a shameless ripoff, in fact by ex-Disney workers. This has traditionally been obscure to all but historians and cartoon buffs. Until some Silly Symphonies were released on video in 1990s, they had rarely been seen since airings on the Mickey Mouse Club in the Fifties, and only with their release in newly restored versions with commentary in the user-friendly format of DVD in 2001 have they been truly engaged by a wider public again.

Russell Merritt and J.B. Kaufman's Walt Disney's Silly Symphonies is a handsome study-cum-picture book on the whole series, released in conjunction with a museum exhibition of materials from the cartoons' production. The text is useful in charting just why so many early Hollywood cartoons were about dancing fauna and flora rather than, say, adults or abstraction as European cartoons have often been. The sources of Disney's style were, in the end, sources for everyone else as well.

The dancing squirrels and peonies were familiar to audiences who had been raised on pantomime stage shows in which people dressed as such things gamboled about. To someone in the early Thirties, The Wizard of Oz was most familiar as an ever-touring stage musical in which the Scarecrow and the Cowardly Lion were played by actors in fluffy suits with big prosthetic heads hiding their faces. This kind of thing was a staple of musical theater of the period, whereas today the equivalent, The Lion King—fittingly, a Disney product—is considered a novelty.

Of course, then, just as the first early talkie musicals were transcriptions of stage shows, the first musical sound cartoons would feature that which was translatable from current stage shows into a seven-minute format already associated with animals because of Mickey Mouse—cuddly things dancing.

Meanwhile, often the cartoons featured woodland clearings full of cooperating animals with round heads, large eyes, and sunny smiles. That trope was drawn from the magazine tableaus of Harrison Cady, very popular at the time. Thus the mise-en-scène of early musical cartoons, modeled on popular culture sources now utterly forgotten, has come to be thought of as a self-standing genre in itself, occasionally parodied on The Simpsons and elsewhere.

Yet unlike the experience of taking a class on the works of James Joyce, being filled in on these cartoons' roots does not serve as a lead-in to an argument for artistic significance. One is impressed by the first Silly Symphony, The Skeleton Dance of 1929, for how much Ub Iwerks' animating abilities had advanced in just a year since Mickey Mouse's sound debut Steamboat Willie, and contemporary audiences were, naturally, still enchanted at the sheer sight of animation synchronized to music.

But the Symphonies kept on plowing this field for the next few years, and while contemporaries continued to marvel, for we moderns, the trick gets old fast. The titles alone are indication of the formulaic nature of the series at this point: Springtime, Winter, The Clock Store, Busy Beavers. It's no accident that the first DVD set included few Sillies from this period.

The series got more interesting with Technicolor in 1932 and, just as crucially, an advance from mere delight in making things move to a beat—look at that!—to reinterpreting famous fables. Here was where Disney embarked on the pathway that would soon lead to feature-length epics, and from here on the series allows us to watch animators developing the abilities that would culminate in Snow White and the Seven Dwarves and Pinocchio.

Consider the vivid contrast between the 1931 version of The Ugly Duckling, a cute but crude barnyard affair looking every bit the product of people just two years past Steamboat Willie, and the 1938 remake. Seven years later, the drawing is lushly lifelike, the color is vibrant and considered, and the animation almost strains credulity, registering a full range of emotions—including subtler ones like hesitation and dawning realization.

To watch the protagonist as the father and mother duck argue about him takes one's breath away. He is at heart a happy fellow, looking up at what he thinks are his parents and waiting for the fun to begin, but a moment of uncertainty blows across his face as the argument hits a louder patch. Soon, though, the expectant smile returns—and all this is playing out in the background, as our focus is supposed to be on the parents. When the duckling later sees his reflection in the water distorted by ripples and breaks down sobbing, it's a scene worthy of an Oscar—this is the poor little guy's first day alive!

This is the kind of casual virtuosity that has had animation buffs raving about the later Silly Symphonies since they were new, and there was plenty more of it, such as the awesome tracking shots and weather effects in The Old Mill, shot with a multiplane camera to give the illusion of depth. The vivacity and inventiveness of the animation of the humanized musical instruments in Music Land, made in 1935, are all the more impressive when we remember that cartoons at any other studio that year still looked, in comparison, almost as if they had been drawn by children.

Notice, however, that I am referring to the visual. The problem with the Silly Symphonies is that they rarely spoke, sang, or taught as compellingly as they looked. Like most of the Disney studio's output from the mid-Thirties until The Little Mermaid shook things up in 1989, the Silly Symphonies were cosseted by Walt Disney's insistence on a fundamentally conservative substrate, which limited narrative possibilities and spiritual inventiveness. The Silly Symphonies were only fitfully silly, and that was the problem.

The typical Silly Symphony involves a wayward individual finding out that there's no place like home, very much in the spirit of the Little Nemo comic strip popular at the turn of the last century, in which a little boy has elaborate dreams of hair-raising adventures in fantasy worlds only to wake up in bed in the last panel. Disney's didactic impulse derived from this sentimental vein of popular American culture.

Merritt and Kaufman, in line with academics' fondness for pointing out hitherto unacknowledged evidence of the "transgressive" in art, disagree, proposing that  "Disney never underestimates the pleasures and excitements of wandering off." This doesn't wash. The Big Bad Wolf in The Three Little Pigs, for instance, is not a compellingly evil character in the way that, say, Bluto in the Popeye series was. The appropriate comparison is with the copycat Bad Wolf characters in Warner Brothers cartoons, charmingly inept heavies with witty lines joyously imitated by generations of kids who grew up watching them on television. The same man, Billy Bletcher, voiced Disney's wolf and Warners' variations on him—but the Disney writers simply didn't give him much interesting to say.

Or, in a Three Little Pigs follow-up, The Big Bad Wolf, the Red Riding Hood character takes the dangerous long way to Grandma's instead of the safe short cut—but not out of any interest in "pleasures and excitements." Rather, the Disney folks made her a blank little cherub, merely filling her place in the storyline. Warner Brothers' first Red Riding Hood was a vainglorious Katherine Hepburn parody, and the second one was a bespectacled, klaxon-voiced adolescent ("HEY, GRANDMA—WHAT BIG EYES YA GOT!!!!") while MGM's Red was an anatomically realistic nightclub siren. These gals were most definitely out for "pleasures and excitements," in a way that Disney's little Campbell's Soup Kid version of Red was not.

Even the music in the Silly Symphonies is less "transgressive" than what was normal in Hollywood cartoons in the Thirties. They are stingy about pop, which was still thought of as a little naughty when people who'd been raised in the pre-ragtime era of marches and parlor ballads were alive and well. Rather than singing the whole 32-bar song that was "Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?" on sheet music and on records, the three little pigs only ever give us a quick eight bars—a chant rather than the full statement in song that a Bugs Bunny would have given us. In The Grasshopper and the Ant, the grasshopper's rendition of his mantra, "The World Owes Us a Living," is in a herky-jerky tempo that discourages foot-tapping, and is sung so conversationally that one can barely make out how the actual song went.

Thus it is no accident that in Music Land, the battle between the Land of Symphony and the Isle of Jazz ends with a nuptial rapprochement symbolized by a Bridge of Harmony. At other studios, in battles between "legit" and "swing," swing won. But Disney was the studio that—a few years on—would create a tribute to classical music like Fantasia. And if you think its dancing hippos were transgressive, I refer you to Warner Brothers' send-up of Fantasia, The Corny Concerto. There's no comparison.

Despite the analysis, filmography, and pictorial richness in Merritt and Kaufman's book, only diehard completists will be inclined to viewing all 75 of the Silly Symphonies themselves, never mind the Merrie Melodies. Starting in the late 1930s, Disney's cartoon short subjects began a slide into cultural irrelevance in favor of other studios' characters, who conjured the modern American spirit in an immediate and irreverent fashion that Disney found tawdry and alien. Once the other studios learned to at least approximate Disney in terms of visuals, Bugs Bunny and Popeye made more sense to Americans than Mickey Mouse or frolicking trees.

We all know what Donald Duck looks and sounds like from clips here and there, but how many people under about 45 have actually seen a Donald Duck cartoon, much less The Ugly Duckling or Music Land? Vintage Disney shorts are today broadcast on the Disney Channel, but have not gained currency the way the Looney Tunes and MGM's Droopy Dog have.

The book format is, therefore, the most appropriate for a celebration of the Silly Symphonies. Given that the cartoons' strength was the visual, a book full of stills and drawings is just right, an appetizer for taking in some of the cartoons themselves, especially the pick of the crop with their stunning hand-drawn animation. I'll still keep tending to my list of Warner Cartoons viewed (last count: 760), but Merritt and Kaufman's book has reminded me that at least a few Sillies deserve a viewing by anyone interested in the evolution of popular art in America.

John H. McWhorter is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. He is the author most recently of Winning the Race: Beyond the Crisis in Black America (Gotham Books). Among his other books is Defining Creole (Oxford Univ. Press).

Copyright © 2008 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
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