Studio: Walt Disney Productions
Distributor: Columbia Pictures
Short Synopsis
The film opens on a lake, where swans honk in harmony as they swim, and a black swan gets her head stuck in an old shoe. Along the shore a peacock struts and spreads his tail, and a duck takes him down a peg. Lyrebirds play their tails like lyres; toucans, hummingbirds, cuckoos and cardinals fill the trees with song and squabbles; a woodpecker is tapped on the head by an annoyed caterpillar, chases it and eats it; three horned owls croon together. A hen chases a worm with her chicks in tow. Then a hawk circles overhead. The hen hides her brood under her wings, but one black chick has run the other way, and the hawk snatches it. A swallow calls up its flock through a funnel like a bugle, and the swallows go after the hawk like a squadron of fighter planes, mobbing it, stripping its feathers until it falls. They catch the chick in mid-air and bring it safely back to the hen.
Why It Matters
- The aerial battle is the set piece. The swallows peel off and dive in formation like First World War fighter pilots, one using its tail as a propeller, and the sequence turns a gentle nature film into an air war.
- It is an early example of the Silly Symphonies moving from pure musical novelty towards storytelling with real jeopardy. The rescue structure, a lost young creature saved by the community, became a familiar Disney pattern, and the variety of birds here, each with its own movement and joke, shows the studio's animators studying animal motion more closely.
Notes and Trivia
- It was the sixteenth Silly Symphony.
- A Brazilian catalogue description of the film sums it up simply as a flock of birds uniting to rescue a chick from a hawk.
- See also: The Skeleton Dance (1929), Flowers and Trees (1932).