Studio: Walt Disney Studio (Silly Symphonies)
Distributor: Celebrity Productions
Produced by: Walt Disney
Short Synopsis
Spring comes to a wood and everything in it dances. Trees sway, flowers open and bob, butterflies and birds circle to the music. Three flowers do a chorus-line routine and part to reveal two ladybirds dancing. A caterpillar divides itself into a line of separate segments, which a blackbird in a top hat eats one by one before flying home to his mate, whose four eggs hatch into chicks that squawk in harmony. A storm blows up; a tree scratches itself and is struck by lightning in the rear. Two crickets shelter under mushrooms, emerge when the rain stops, and hop straight into a frog's mouth, and the frog, enlarged, dances and plays a row of turtles as a xylophone. A spider swings on its thread and plays its web like a harp. A series of frogs of increasing size swallow one another in turn until only the largest is left, and a heron arrives to finish the sequence.
Why It Matters
- It is the first of the Silly Symphonies' four seasons, and the template for the series' nature cartoons: no story, only a cycle of creatures animated to music, each gag growing out of the last. Film Daily thought the drawing "about the best that has ever been seen in the animated field", and the frogs swallowing frogs is the kind of gag the series kept for years.
- The film's US copyright has run its full term; it is public domain. It was followed by Summer, Autumn and Winter in 1930, the four films making up the cycle that showed the studio could sustain a series on music and nature alone.
Notes and Trivia
- Iwerks is credited as director; he left Disney three months later to start his own studio.
- The caterpillar that splits into segments became a stock Disney gag.
- See also: The Skeleton Dance (1929), Summer (1930), Autumn (1930).