Sunday, November 5, 2017

Happy 80th Anniversary to The Old Mill: The Disney Silly Symphony That Paved The Way For Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs


A great number of Disney animated film fans remember 1937 as the year that Snow White and The Seven Dwarfs - Walt Disney's first and truly sublime feature-length animated film - was released. But not as many people know about Walt Disney's The Old Mill, a superb short film released in the same year, on this day 80 years ago. Over a month before Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs opened to heartfelt applause at the Carthay Circle Theatre, this humble, overlooked film tested and proved many of the incredible advancements in animation featured in Snow White, and became an amazing motion picture and work of art in its own right. To celebrate the 80th anniversary of The Old Mill, I'll take a look at its history, and how it went on to pave the way for one of Walt Disney's greatest successes.

The Old Mill, Walt Disney's Silly Symphonies, and Snow White

(Kevin Slavin on Flickr)
In 1929, a ghoulish danse macabre captivated audiences of Walt Disney's newest project. The Skeleton Dance was the first in a series of bold experiments in animation initiated by Disney called the Silly Symphonies. These animated short films were a showcase for Disney's newest innovations in film technology, story development, and character animation. If the Disney animation studios had a new technology to experiment with or a new story idea to try out, a Silly Symphony was their experimental apparatus. For 10 years, the Silly Symphonies were produced by Disney for this purpose. Most of these films featured a completely unique story, and almost all were set to a wonderful musical score, classic or contemporary, hence the name "Silly Symphonies". In 1932, Flowers and Trees, a delightful film about the anthropomorphic trees and flowers in a springtime forest, became the first commercial animated film to feature three-color Technicolor, a remarkable improvement over the two-color films of the time, and went on to win the inaugural Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film. In 1934, the Three Little Pigs became the first major success of the Silly Symphonies, thanks to an incredible advancement in Disney's storytelling: the story department, a department of storyboard animators solely dedicated to the purpose of story development. By creating emotionally gripping stories that wouldn't let audiences off the hook, Disney produced many more wildly successful films long after the classic Three Little Pigs, which went on to win another Academy Award for Disney.

But perhaps the greatest achievement in the history of the Silly Symphonies were yet to come. In 1937, final production for Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was in full swing. This full-length animated film promised to be truly groundbreaking, attempting something that had never done before in the United States, featuring truly spectacular advancements in film and story production. But, it also was an incredibly risky project, one that was already being called "Disney's Folly", and was predicted by many in Hollywood to be an absolute disaster. No matter how confident (or not) Walt Disney was in his project, there needed to be a good test of the techniques and technologies that were to be featured in Snow White. Thus, The Old Mill, a new Silly Symphony, came to be.



DISCLAIMER: I DO NOT own this video; Disney does. Used for purely educational purposes.

The Old Mill became one of the biggest successes of the entire Silly Symphony series, and won yet another Oscar for the studios (a Silly Symphony won the Academy Award every year between 1932 and 1939!). It achieved great heights thanks to the unprecedented ideas and technology used in its creation.

A relatively simple story of a community of animals inside an abandoned mill weathering a powerful summer storm was brought to great heights by the subtle but effective introductions of the creatures that call the mill home, and the wonderful build up of the story to the raging climax of the thunderstorm that threatens the lives of all the creatures living inside the mill. The moment when the sails of the windmill break free from their rope restraints and the mother robin and her egg-filled nest are nearly crushed between the spinning gears of the mill is a heart-stopping and powerful moment, a great testament to the emotional connection the story developers created between the audience and animated characters on a screen.

A greatly-developed story was not the only reason for The Old Mill's success by far. The multi-plane camera, an astounding tool that used a camera and multiple layers of animation cells that could move on platforms separate from each other to provide near perfect perspective in zooming in or out shots, was used by Disney for the first time in The Old Mill. Among the many other great advancements in animation that brought The Old Mill to life were the highly realistic designs and animations of animals, plants, and water, from ripples in a pond to splashes, reflections, and pouring rain. The latter would combine with incredible animated clouds, lighting, wind and thunder sound effects to form a terrifying thunderstorm that temporarily resurrected a long-abandoned mill to horrifying life and then stopped it forever. Lighting, color, and rotation of detailed three-dimensional objects would also aid in bringing a new level of realism, depth, and emotion to The Old Mill.

 
(Tom Simpson on Flickr)


All the lessons learned in the creation and success of The Old Mill would be put to use just a month later. The powerful connection between audience and film would happen again when audiences joined Snow White in hopeful wishes, flights of terror and silly songs of celebration, each scene perfectly timed and sequenced as similarly emotional scenes had been in The Old Mill. A terrible thunderstorm like the one that ravaged an old mill on a summer night struck down the Wicked Witch to her horrible death. The wonderfully realistic yet softly caricatured forest animals that aided Snow White had a predecessor in the inhabitants of The Old Mill. And the lighting, colors, multi-plane camera and rotation of 3-dimensional objects that had created amazing scenes for The Old Mill was used in even more spectacular ways in the story of Snow White.

This December, in honor of the 80th anniversary of what I like to call "Disney's Triumph", I plan to write about perhaps the greatest film Walt Disney ever made, sharing my thoughts and exploring the long and deep connection me and many others have with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. But next time you think of Snow White, the Seven Dwarfs and the amazing film that tells their story, I hope you remember the tale of an old and not-so-abandoned mill that made it possible.

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