Studio: Walt Disney Productions (Silly Symphonies)
Distributor: Columbia Pictures
Produced by: Walt Disney
Short Synopsis
Snow falls on the forest. When the wind blows the animals sleep; when it drops they come out, and the small trees and every creature of the wood dance and play in the snow. Animals skate on the frozen pond, singly and in pairs, with the falls and collisions that skating cartoons require. Some dance in couples and others in large groups, to the music, with snowballs, slides and icicles as props. When the wind rises again the animals hurry back to shelter, and the snow closes over the forest as the film ends.
Why It Matters
- Winter completes the cycle of the four seasons begun with Springtime a year before, and the skating sequence is the first of many Disney ice ballets, the ancestor of On Ice and of the Bambi scene; the film is slight, a dance and a weather change, but the animals' skating has the weight and slip of real ice, which the studio was learning to draw.
- It joined the American public domain in January 2026 with the rest of Disney's 1930 output. Reviewers by now treated the Silly Symphonies as a known quantity, and the series' next step, in 1932, was Technicolor, which Flowers and Trees introduced and which made nature cartoons like this one look like sketches.
Notes and Trivia
- The four seasons were later reissued as a set in Disney's television packages of the 1950s.
- Bert Lewis's score uses "Jingle Bells" and the "Skaters' Waltz".
- See also: Springtime (1929), Summer (1930), Autumn (1930).