In Sync, In Ink

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

Walt Disney was not the first producer to marry the animated image with prerecorded sound, but he was the first to fully explore the possibilities of that union – and to benefit from its potential. Among Disney’s breakthrough efforts were the 1928 Mickey Mouse short “Steamboat Willie” and the first entries in the musical omnibus series “The Silly Symphonies.” Those triumphs were animation’s equivalent of “Birth of a Nation” and “The Jazz Singer” combined, and audiences lined up around the block to see them. By adding music, Disney had made a proper business out of cartoons, just as Paul Whiteman had made a lady out of jazz.


Animators, who a few years earlier could barely give away the fruits of their labors, were now in demand. In 1930, Warner Bros. arranged with independent producers and former Disneyites Hugh Harman and Rudolf Ising (who were already producing the “Looney Tunes” films) to sponsor a series called “Merry Melodies.” The company’s condition: Each entry would be built around a song owned by one of Warner Bros.’s music publishing houses. This idea of using cartoons to promote songs was a complete turnaround from only half a decade earlier. But it was the beginning of the long relationship between animation and music – and between the music industry and the film industry.


Hollywood’s golden age of animation is being celebrated this month at the Walter Reade Theater. “I Love To Singa: Cartoon Musicals” consists mostly of shorts from the 1930s and 1940s, but there are also five full-length animated features, including 1940’s “Fantasia.” That landmark, which includes countless unforgettable sequences, represents the culmination of a long exploration by Disney and his animators of the link between music and image. The current series offers the rare chance to see the works that led up to it.


The essential show in the series is “Sillies and Other Symphonies,” a retrospective of short Disney classics that is being screened four times between today and August 31. This program moves from “Silly Symphonies” at their mid-1930s peak – the Broadway revue-like pageantry of “Funny Little Bunnies” (1934) and “The Cookie Carnival” (1935) – to shorts excerpted from longer anthology features of the 1940s, like “The Three Caballeros” and “Make Mine Music.”


Throughout these works, the call-and-response dynamic of sound and image is acutely developed. At times the music supports the narrative, but the most remarkable entries are those in which the music is the narrative. What animation had already done for mice and cats, it was now doing for melodies and lyrics, imbuing them with vibrant cinematic personalities.


“Music Land” (1935) is the best example of how animation captured the essence of music. Thoroughly realized on both the dramatic and conceptual levels, it depicts two warring tribes of musical culture – the Land of Symphony and the Isle of Jazz. The sax prince is imprisoned in a giant metronome, and he writes to his father on musical staff paper (to the notes of “The Prisoner’s Song”), asking for help. The King of Jazz is a Whiteman caricature – slightly behind the times for 1936, but who better to preside over the bridge between jazz and the classics erected at the finale?


The images, not the plot, make “Music Land” remarkable. The hero, a plucky alto, is essentially Mickey Mouse transposed into saxophonic form, and violins also play leading roles, prancing around to Mozart’s “Minuet in G.” During the war between the two nations, a titanic church organ blasts Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” and a blaring big-band brass section fights back with a series of Fletcher Henderson-like riffs, beginning with the “Bugle Call Rag.” All “Music Land” is missing, surprisingly enough, is an original song of its own.


The only time Disney – or anyone else – succeeded in surpassing the vitality of the sound image relationship in “Music Land” came 10 years later. The 1946 omnibus feature “Make Mine Music” includes the brilliant clarinetist Benny Goodman starring in two shorts, one set to the primordial jazz standard “After You’ve Gone” and the other to “All the Cats Join In,” an original Alec Wilder composition.


When I first saw “After You’ve Gone” as a beardless youth, I assumed it was one of Disney’s only abstract shorts. Now I realize it’s the most literal representation of the musical process ever put on screen. Not only are the four instruments of Goodman’s quartet – piano (Teddy Wilson), bass (Sid Weiss), drums (Cozy Cole), and clarinet – rendered anthropomorphically, so is the musical process itself.


A trade of phrases between Goodman and Weiss is depicted as a boxing match between a bear like bass and a feisty little clarinet. A Wilson run of arpeggios becomes a tumbling pair of fingers doing cartwheels on a giant keyboard line that stretches to the horizon and back. After a difficult run, the clarinet is shown parachuting down to earth; at one point, the other three instruments are flooded by a tidal wave of piano notes.


“All the Cats Join In” is nearly as amazing. Both the lyrics and the images depict youth culture immediately after the war, and the tune represents one of the few cheerful efforts of the normally morose Wilder. Just as “Rhapsody in Blue” was the first extended, classical-form work to approximate jazz improvisation, “All the Cats Join In” is the Hollywood cartoon’s most successful response to the concept of the jazz solo.


Here is a cartoon that improvises as it goes along, literally drawing its characters and settings and trying to control them. The hand of the animator is shown as a pencil with the difficult job of controlling the antics of a gang of rambunctious teenagers as they Lindy Hop along. The first segment builds to a sequence where the little sister character falls off the banister and bangs her head on the front door, perfectly timed to drumbeats by Cozy Cole. No less than a record by the King Cole Trio or Slim ‘n’ Slam, this is a perfect example of how musical and comedic timing are one and the same.


Other films worth watching in the “Sillies and Other Symphonies” program include the title-song sequence from “Three Caballeros” (1944), in which Donald Duck and company parody the kind of musical tit-for-tat that orchestrators used to call “Mickey-Mousing”; “Woodland Cafe” (1937), which gives us the nightlife of the bugs at an insectoid Cotton Club where everybody’s “Truckin'”; and “Cock o’ the Walk” (1935), which offers barnyard fowl in homage to Fred Astaire and Busby Berkely – this is pure poultry in motion.


The program’s coda comes from “Fantasia 2000,” which is represented by Eric Goldberg’s “Rhapsody in Blue.” This fascinating but not entirely successful attempt to wed Gershwin with the drawings of Al Hirschfeld followed on a wave of 1990s Disney blockbusters – “Lion King,” “Beauty and the Beast,” “Aladdin,” and “The Hunchback of Notre Dame” – that together revived both the traditional cell-drawn cartoon feature and the traditional Broadway style musical. Whether those films marked a new beginning or a last gasp for the animated musical remains to be seen. No matter the future of the forms, the blending of animation and music remains a potent one.



What’s On, Doc?


“Sillies and Other Symphonies” (August 19 at 3:30 p.m.; August 20 at 5:30 p.m.; August 21 at 3:30 p.m.; August 31 at 3:30 p.m.) is only the start of what the series has to offer.


The best-attended programs might well be two shows of Looney Tunes and Merry Melodies that are divided, wisely, not by era, director, or star, but musically, between jazzpop and the European classics. “Warners Cartoons Go Pop” (August 26 at 1 p.m. & 6 p.m.; August 27 at 3:30 p.m.) ranges from Broadway to big bands, and features “I Love To Singa,” the most popular musical cartoon of the television age. The second, “Warners Cartoons Go Classical” (August 26 at 8 p.m.; August 27 at 1 p.m. & 6 p.m.; August 28 at 3:30 p.m.), spotlights symphony and opera. You’d be surprised how many pompous conductors and sanctimonious singers get cut down to size in these one-reelers – especially considering how much directors like Chuck Jones, Tex Avery, and Friz Freleng so obviously love great music, be it symphonic or swinging.


And then there is “The MGM (Cartoon) Musical” (August 22 at 1 p.m.; August 23 at 1 p.m.; August 24 at 7 p.m.; August 31 at 8 p.m.). The MGM cartoons started with “Happy Harmonies” – their answer to “Merry Melodies” and “Silly Symphonies” – and peaked well before MGM’s classic series of Arthur Freed musicals. Just the same, there are some stunning examples of musical humor courtesy of Tex Avery and the Tom-and-Jerry team.


Other highlights include “Allegro Non-Troppo” (August 20 at 1 p.m.; August 24 at 3 p.m.; August 25 at 4:30 p.m. & 8:30 p.m.; August 30 at 1 p.m.), a wise-guy Italian answer “Fantasia,” and “Columbia Cartoons’ Musical Miscellany” (August 26 at 3:30 p.m.; Aug 27 at 8:30 p.m.; August 28 at 1 p.m.; August 29 at 6 p.m.), which features cartoons unlikely to be found on DVD anytime soon. In all, the series is marvelously thorough – the only notable absences are the jazzy one-reelers produced by the brothers Max and Dave Fleischer. And both curator Greg Ford and the Walter Reade’s Kent Jones explain that this is just Part 1 – more installments are coming in December. I hope they’re saving Betty Boop and Bimbo and Popeye and Olive Oyl as Christmas presents.


Until August 31 (Lincoln Center, 212-496-3809).


The New York Sun

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