Studio: Walt Disney Studio (Silly Symphonies)
Distributor: Celebrity Productions
Produced by: Walt Disney
Short Synopsis
In a village of bearded dwarfs everyone dances as he works: sweeping, hammering, carrying. The dwarfs make music too, some of them striking the shoe-clad feet of a centipede and a grasshopper with hammers to get the notes, others playing saxophones and drums, with the Anvil Chorus from Il Trovatore as the main theme. Groups of dwarfs dance with barrels, leaping over them, and with beer glasses, which they drain before dancing on. Two dwarfs dancing on a flower fall into a barrel of beer beneath it, climb out drunk, and finish the film dancing drunkenly while the village keeps time.
Why It Matters
- It is the first appearance of dwarfs at the Disney studio, eight years before Snow White, and the bearded, beer-drinking, dancing little men are recognisable ancestors of the seven; the centipede-shoe xylophone is one of the more inventive instruments the series' early films dreamed up.
- Its 1929 copyright is expired and the cartoon is freely available in the United States. Variety found it "on the same lines of Skeleton Dance and Springtime, not as good, but almost", and noted that the studio was feeling the pinch of finding new routines for its musical formula, which was fair; the beer, a year into the series, is also a reminder of how freely pre-Code cartoons showed drinking during Prohibition.
Notes and Trivia
- The Anvil Chorus had been a staple of silent-film accompanists and was in every cinema organist's repertoire.
- Disney returned to the dwarf village at full length, and with individual characters, in 1937.
- See also: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), Hell's Bells (1929), Springtime (1929).