Studio: Walt Disney Productions
Distributor: United Artists
Produced by: Walt Disney
Short Synopsis
Persephone, the Goddess of Spring, lives in a garden of eternal spring, where flowers dance around her and little elves attend her throne. Pluto, god of the Underworld, drawn as a red, horned, operatic devil, bursts out of the earth and carries her off. The elves try to defend her and fail. In the Underworld, Pluto crowns her his queen, and a chorus of imps welcomes her with a fiery song and dance. Up above, without her, the world freezes: snow covers the garden, and the creatures shiver and mourn. Below, Persephone weeps on her throne. Pluto, moved by her unhappiness, offers anything to make her smile, and they strike a bargain: she will spend six months of every year above ground and six months below. She returns to her garden, the snow melts and spring returns, and the story explains the cycle of the seasons.
Why It Matters
- The Underworld sequence, with its flames and leaping imps, is the most spectacular part, while Persephone herself is the film's real experiment. Disney's animators were skilled with animals but inexperienced with realistic human figures, and her stiff, uncertain movement shows them struggling with exactly the problem they had to solve.
- That struggle is why the film matters. It was made partly as practice for Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, using rotoscoped reference of live performers to work out how to animate a believable young woman. Several of its animators, including Hamilton Luske, went on to the feature, and lessons from Persephone shaped the Snow White who followed.
Notes and Trivia
- Unlike most Silly Symphonies of the time, it is operatic rather than comic, and it has often been described as melodramatic.
- Pluto's design draws on the traditional stage Mephistopheles rather than classical Greek imagery.
- See also: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), The Pied Piper (1933).