{"id":56309,"date":"2020-02-05T00:01:45","date_gmt":"2020-02-05T08:01:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cartoonresearch.com\/?p=56309"},"modified":"2020-02-02T18:32:37","modified_gmt":"2020-02-03T02:32:37","slug":"hearts-and-flowers-part-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cartoonresearch.com\/index.php\/hearts-and-flowers-part-1\/","title":{"rendered":"Hearts and Flowers – Part 1"},"content":{"rendered":"\"\"\n

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Valentine\u2019s Day approaches. In past articles, we\u2019ve already thoroughly covered the subjects of love and matrimony – even with a few visits by Dan Cupid himself. So, rather than concentrate on the hearts, it seems appropriate to celebrate the season with the start of a retrospective on the involvement of flowers as a central figure in the animated cartoon – mankind\u2019s dependable standby when inspiration runs out as to what to present as a gift for the little woman.<\/p>\n

This animation trail may be slightly less comprehensive than some others, as I\u2019m not sure if I can recall every early instance where a flower came to life in early cartoons. As likelihood of overlap on past trails of romance will also unnecessarily heighten by trying to catalog every instance where a boy gives a girl a flower, I\u2019ll try to keep this down to situations where flowers either become characters in and of themselves, or play central plot points in more detailed photoplays than mere standard lovey-dovey romances.<\/p>\n

As far as I can tell from surviving silent cartoon lists, the concept of having flowers take on animate lives of their own didn\u2019t instantly become an animation cliche. Early silents actually tended to \u201croot\u201d in more real-world scenarios, and while it was fair game, at least since Paul Terry\u2019s Aesop\u2019s Fables, for all manner of animal and insect life to cavort as if human, flowers seem to have usually been around just to be picked, or to serve up nectar to passing bees.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>The break in such realistic trends seems to have come from the collaboration of Walt Disney, Ub Iwerks, and Carl Stalling. The newly inaugurated \u201cSilly Symphony\u201d series was a surprise hit, and the studio was looking for ideas to keep it going. But you surely couldn\u2019t continue a series by making every episode a dramatic Gothic like The Skeleton Dance<\/em> or Hell\u2019s Bells<\/em>. What then? Silly Symphony #2, El Terrible Toreador<\/em>, believed to be conjured up out of some leftover Oswald bullfighting ideas left unproduced at Universal, seems today a bit out of place for the series – perhaps a bit too much plot, not enough music, and looking much like a refugee from the Celebrity Productions which Iwerks would soon create for a rival studio. The \u201cformula\u201d, however, which would carry the series through its first years, seems to have crystalized in a quartet of musicales which Iwerks and Stalling dreamed up to commemorate the four seasons of the calendar: Springtime, Summer, Autumn<\/em>, and Winter<\/em> (with something of an afterthought coda in the additional episode, Night<\/em>). <\/p>\n

Taking a cue from the popular trend of \u201cAll singing, all dancing\u201d musicals which were flooding Hollywood (and saturating the public to a point nearly beyond tolerance), Stalling conceived that, even more than in the Skeleton<\/em> startup, everything – yes, EVERYTHING – should take on a life to perform choreographed dance steps or musical squeaks and squawks. And as for plot? To Iwerks\u2019 Hell<\/em> with it! The result was six minutes each of non-stop salon music by an appropriately \u201ctoony\u201d clinky-clunky combo, heavy on the wood blocks for percussive effect to render synchronization tasks simpler, with a well-animated visual array of animals, plants, and bugs becoming unexpected masters of lock-step terpsichore to various light-classical motifs. Though primitive to today\u2019s eyes, the then-unexpected euphoria of such situations must have had something of a hypnotic spell upon moviegoers, as the series continued to be in demand. Fortunately, Disney was not one to merely settle into a routine, and gradually increased the complexity and subtleness of his presentations, so that the fascination didn\u2019t fizzle out as quickly as two-strip Technicolor dancing girls.<\/p>\n

Right from the start, Springtime<\/strong> (10\/24\/29) presents us with a bouquet of what may be the screen\u2019s first dancing flowers – a sunflower chorus line kicking up their heels (or should I say roots), with the center flower bowing in extreme close-up to the camera, to reveal two beetles similarly cavorting among its petals. An introductory shot preceding this brief dance shows the flowers alongside a flowing stream, with two trees accompanying them with rhythmic sways.<\/p>\n