The 1920s and the 1930s found studios changing the landscape of animation with some landmark short films that would later set the precedent for many more animated shows and feature films. From Steamboat Willie (Mickey Mouse’s debut) to The Skeleton Dance, Walt Disney had a monopoly over such shorts, churning out one production after the other.
However, despite the technical brilliance, some of these animations haven’t aged well given they were products of their time. For instance, the Paramount release Chinatown, My Chinatown incorporated several problematic Chinese stereotypes. Around the same time, other shorts like Lullaby Land are simply weird for their time, playing around with some surreal themes.
The Skeleton Dance (1929)
The Skeleton Dance is arguably one of the most popular shorts of the black-and-white era, immortalized by its titular dance sequence. Animated by Ub Werks and directed by Walt Disney, the 6-minute-long film was also the first Silly Symphonies feature.
It revolves around four skeletons just dancing, frolicking, and making ‘spooky music’ around a graveyard. With synchronized moves, the dance grows intimate as the skeletons incorporate each other’s bones in their routine. They use each other’s bones to create music and eventually get mingled with each other resulting in an amalgamation of bones that rests in a grave.
Chinatown, My Chinatown (1929)
A highly-racist film, Chinatown, My Chinatown can be viewed as a time capsule for its period.
Stereotypical accents. Gong music. Nonsensical gibberish doubling as Mandarin. A Chinese man eating not just food but even a shirt with chopsticks. Another Chinese man ironing the shirt; laundromats were mostly run by Chinese immigrants back then. A fight between the two men with their ‘pointy hats’ as weapons. The short film ticks off all the East-Asian stereotypes of the 1920s.
Flowers And Trees (1932)
Quite dark for a ‘Silly Symphony’, this Disney short features a tree falling towards the human vice of jealousy. A wrinkly, hollow tree grows envious of a younger tree who seeks to propose to another female tree. This eventually prompts the hollow tree to trigger a forest fire that puts all other surrounding animals in danger.
Thanks to the birds poking holes in the sky, torrents of rain touch the ground and extinguish the fire. Even though the day is saved and the tree couple goes ahead with their matrimonial romance, it turns out that the hollow tree perished in the fire that he started. While Flowers and Trees carries a good-enough moral with it, the hollow tree’s fate somehow still feels quite tragic.
Dentist Love (1925)
Dynamite is a weapon that’s often used for comedic purposes in cartoons ranging from The Looney Tunes to Tom and Jerry. However, considering the younger audiences, none of the characters actually explode or get dismembered after a dynamite blast. Dentist Love tends to walk down a more realistic road.
Starring the comic strip character Krazy Kat, the film finds a rat extracting a hippo’s tooth. When the rodent is unable to pull off the task, the cat takes over and engages in several dental experiments. As everything else fails, he stuffs dynamite in the hippo’s cavity and lights the fuse. The tooth finally gets extracted although the cat’s client goes through a fatal fate.
The Mad Doctor (1933)
By the 1930s, Mickey Mouse was a well-established character with his hilarious antics but never before did a Mickey Mouse short bear strong horror overtone.
In The Mad Doctor, the titular doctor abducts Pluto to fuse him with a chicken. The end result of his experiment would help him understand if a puppy can be hatched out of an egg. As Mickey overcomes deadly booby traps to save his pet dog, The Mad Doctor overpowers him and attempts to cut him up with a chainsaw. The third act reveals that the protagonist was dreaming all along. Despite the plot twist, the short was deemed to be too scary for kids and was banned in the UK and .
Hell’s Bells (1929)
Even though Disney seems to play safe in creating a children-friendly environment for their ventures, the Silly Symphonies-era was a tad bit bold in comparison
Hell’s Bells, one of the Symphonies, opens with a montage of animals like bats, and spiders being consumed by the fire of hell. Back in Hell, a few devil minions entertain their master, Satan who proceeds to feed one of them to a three-headed dog (a clear nod to Cerberus). Unwilling to go through the same fate, a devil finally manages to kick Satan off a cliff as he gets burnt in the same fire as the opening scene. Even though the sequence is played out in a goofy manner, the hellish imagery seems like a major break from the usual Disney tropes.
Animal Olympic Games (1928)
A wholesome Japanese short, Animal Olympic Games’ premise gets clear from its title. The animation just revolves around a series of sporting events in which various animals participate.
Monkeys specialize in gymnastics on horizontal bars while the running competition is inter-species in nature, with a duck winning the race by outrunning a hippopotamus, a camel, and a bulldog. Kangaroos and pigs fight each other in what seems like a boxing duel while bears and hippos compete for gold in swimming. It was animated and directed by auteur Yasuji Murata who’s known for pioneering the cutout technique in stop-motion animation.
Lullaby Land (1933)
A fantasy-themed Silly Symphony, Lullaby Land can be seen as a surreal trip from an infant’s perspective. Picture the scenes of the marching hammers from Pink Floyd’s The Wall. Now, replace the hammers with potty chairs and one would understand the essence of Lullaby Land.
In this short, a baby gets teleported to a magical realm where pacifiers grow on trees, and diapers and potty chairs engage in military marches. The naïve child then ignores all safety hazards as he smashes watches with hammers and sets everything on fire with giant matches. If an animation like this was released today, it would have easily faced the scrutiny of parental organizations.
Bimbo’s Initiation (1931)
The 1930s were such an experimental era that even famous cartoons could blend horror and surrealism in strange ways. In Bimbo’s initiation, the cartoon pup Bimbo falls down a manhole and stumbles upon a cult of hooded figures who force him to them.
Bimbo keeps on avoiding them until he finally discovers that each of the is a clone of Betty Boop. The film ends with these clones dancing for no reason. The nightmarish atmosphere combined with the strange humor arguably makes Bimbo’s Initiation one of the most remarkable Fleischer Studios shorts.
Symphonie Diagonale (1923)
This German silent short is a work of art in itself, yielding multiple interpretations through its intricate black-and-white decisions. Virtually plotless, the film builds up from a titled figure comprising of several lines and curves that keep on changing in regular intervals. These diverse shapes might represent an ear, a piano, a panpipe, a harp, depending upon the viewer’s perspective.
Symphonie Diagonale is a landmark work in surrealist cinema with its Art Deco-like designs and hypnotic pace.
