Studio: Walt Disney Productions (Silly Symphonies)
Distributor: Columbia Pictures
Produced by: Walt Disney
Short Synopsis
Pan, the goat-legged god, plays his pipes in a forest, and the creatures of the wood come out to dance: the trees sway, the flowers bob, the animals form rings and the whole glade keeps time with the music. A storm gathers; lightning strikes a tree and starts a fire, and the flames spread through the forest as living things, dancing and leaping from tree to tree as the animals flee. Pan does not flee. He plays, and the flames, charmed like the animals before them, fall into step behind him and follow his pipes in procession, out of the woods and down to the lake, where he leads them into the water and they go out in steam. The forest is saved, and Pan plays on.
Why It Matters
- The flames charmed by music and led into the water are the best idea in the early Silly Symphonies, a Pied Piper story with fire for rats, and the animation of the dancing flames, each one a figure with arms and a grin, is the direct ancestor of the forest-fire sequence in Bambi and the living fire in Fantasia's Pastoral; Gillett stages it with real sweep.
- The film is the last Silly Symphony of 1930 and so one of the last Disney films to enter the public domain in the United States, on 1 January 2026, as a 1930 publication. It closes the black-and-white series' first phase; the next year brought stories and characters, and 1932 brought colour.
Notes and Trivia
- Pan returned in the Pastoral Symphony sequence of Fantasia, with a chorus of fauns.
- The fire-as-living-creature gag was a Fleischer speciality; Disney's version is more orderly.
- See also: Winter (1930), The Skeleton Dance (1929), Fantasia (1940).