Silly Symphony (also known as Silly Symphonies) is an American animated series of 75 musical short films produced by Walt Disney Productions from 1929 to 1939. As the series name implies, the Silly Symphonies were originally intended as whimsical accompaniments to pieces of music. As such, the films usually did not feature continuing characters, unlike the Mickey Mouse shorts produced by Disney at the same time (exceptions to this include Three Little Pigs, The Tortoise and the Hare, and Three Orphan Kittens, which all had sequels). The series is notable for its innovation with Technicolor and the multiplane motion picture camera, as well as its introduction of the character Donald Duck, who made his first appearance in the Silly Symphony cartoon The Wise Little Hen in 1934. Seven shorts won the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film.
Many of the shorts were adapted into print mediums. Starting in 1932, a Silly Symphony newspaper comic strip was distributed by King Features Syndicate, as well as a Dell comic book series and numerous children's books.
The Silly Symphonies returned to theaters with its re-issues and re-releases, and tied with Joseph Barbera and William Hanna's Tom and Jerry's record for most Oscar wins for a cartoon series in the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film category.
The first five Silly Symphony shorts entered the public domain on January 1, 2025 with another 10 on January 1, 2026. The same will happen to subsequent shorts from 1931, 1932, and 1933 in 2027, 2028, and 2029 respectively.
Contents
Production
While Walt Disney and Carl W. Stalling, a theatre organist from Kansas City, were in New York to add sound to the Mickey Mouse shorts The Gallopin' Gaucho, The Barn Dance and Plane Crazy, Stalling suggested the idea of making a series of musical animated shorts that combined the latest sound technology with storytelling. At first Walt did not seem interested, but when they returned to New York in February to record the sound for a fifth Mickey Mouse cartoon, The Opry House, they also recorded the soundtrack for The Skeleton Dance, the type of short that Stalling had suggested and the first Silly Symphony cartoon.
Within the animation industry, the series is known for its use by Walt Disney as a platform for experimenting with processes, techniques, characters, and stories in order to further the art of animation. What The Skeleton Dance and Silly Symphonies did differently than any other cartoons that had been made previously in regard of sound, was that the music and sounds were recorded before the actual animated segments, instead of the other way around. The series also provided a venue to try out techniques and technologies, such as Technicolor, special effects animation, and dramatic storytelling in animation, that would be crucial to Disney's plans to eventually begin making feature-length animated films.
Shortly after the switch to United Artists, the series became even more popular. Walt Disney had seen some of Dr. Herbert Kalmus' tests for a new three-strip, full-color Technicolor process, which would replace the previous two-tone Technicolor process. Disney signed a contract with Technicolor which gave the Disney studio exclusive rights to the new three-strip process through the end of 1935, and had a 60% complete Symphony, Flowers and Trees, scrapped and redone in full color. Flowers and Trees was the first animated film to use the three-strip Technicolor process, and was a phenomenal success. Within a year, the now-in-Technicolor Silly Symphonies series had popularity and success that matched (and later surpassed) that of the Mickey Mouse cartoons. The contract Disney had with Technicolor would also later be extended another five years as well.
The success of Silly Symphonies would be tremendously boosted after Three Little Pigs was released in 1933 and became a box office sensation; the film was featured in movie theaters for several months and also featured the hit song that became the anthem of the Great Depression, "Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf". Several Silly Symphonies entries, including Three Little Pigs (1933), The Grasshopper and the Ants (1934), The Tortoise and the Hare (1935), The Country Cousin (1936), The Old Mill (1937), Moth and the Flame (1938), Wynken, Blynken, and Nod (1938), and The Ugly Duckling (1939, with an earlier black-and-white version from 1931), are among the most notable short films produced by Walt Disney.
Distribution
The series was first distributed by Pat Powers from 1929 to 1930 and released by Celebrity Productions (1929–1930) indirectly through Columbia Pictures. The original basis of the cartoons was musical novelty, and the musical scores of the first cartoons were composed by Carl W. Stalling.
Columbia Pictures
After viewing The Skeleton Dance, the manager at Columbia Pictures quickly became interested in distributing the series, and gained the perfect opportunity to acquire Silly Symphonies after Disney broke with Celebrity Productions head Pat Powers after Powers signed Disney's colleague Ub Iwerks to a studio contract. Columbia Pictures (1930–1932) agreed to pick up the direct distribution of the Mickey Mouse series on the condition that they would have exclusive rights to distribute the Silly Symphonies series; at first, Silly Symphonies could not even come close to the popularity Mickey Mouse had. The original title cards to the shorts released by Celebrity Productions and Columbia Pictures were all redone after Walt Disney stopped distributing his cartoons through them.
United Artists
In 1932, after falling out with Columbia Pictures, Disney began distributing his products through United Artists. UA refused to distribute the Silly Symphonies unless Disney associated Mickey Mouse with them somehow, resulting in the "Mickey Mouse presents a Silly Symphony" title cards and posters that introduced and promoted the series during its five-year run for UA. United Artists also agreed to double the budget for each cartoon from $7,500 to $15,000. The first short released by United Artists was The Bears and Bees.
RKO Radio Pictures
In 1937, Disney signed a distribution deal with RKO Radio Pictures to distribute the Silly Symphony cartoons, along with the Mickey Mouse series. RKO would continue to distribute until the end of the series in 1939. Disney would produce occasional one-shot films true to the spirit of the series, but were not labeled as such.
Home media
Several Symphonies have been released in home media, most of the time as bonus shorts that relate to something within various Disney films. For instance, the original Dumbo VHS included Father Noah's Ark, The Practical Pig and Three Orphan Kittens as bonus shorts to make up for the film's short length. In the UK, several Silly Symphonies were released in compilations under Disney Videos' "Storybook Favourites" brand. The three "Storybook Favourites Shorts" volumes released included among others, The Three Little Pigs, The Tortoise and the Hare and the remake of The Ugly Duckling.
On December 4, 2001, Disney released "Silly Symphonies" as part of its DVD series "Walt Disney Treasures". On December 19, 2006, "More Silly Symphonies" was released, completing the collection and allowing the cartoons to be completely available to the public.
Some Disney Blu-ray discs include Silly Symphonies as high definition special features. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs includes six, Beauty and the Beast and Dumbo both contain two and Pixar's A Bug's Life contains one.
The Silly Symphony shorts originally aired on Turner Classic Movies' period program block "Treasures from the Disney Vault".
Some Silly Symphony shorts are viewable on Disney+. A number of cartoons in the series have their intros modified by Disney for reissues, rendering the original film versions lost.
Soundtracks
Owing to the cartoons' popularity, in 1935 Ambrose and His Orchestra released "A Selection from Walt Disney's Silly Symphonies" medley as the B-side of their "When Day Is Done" single.
2015 saw the release of "The Silly Symphony Collection, (is) a first-of-its-kind box set from Walt Disney Records and Fairfax Classics featuring the complete restored soundtracks from all 75 Silly Symphony shorts from 1929-1939, with more than 8 hours of music over 16 vinyl LPs." It was limited to 5,000 copies and the dedicated website included a nine-minute restoration featurette, and news of two live concert performances set to the original shorts. The following year, the music for The Skeleton Dance and Three Little Pigs was extracted for a limited-edition 10" vinyl EP for Record Store Day.
List of films
All films released in or before 1930 are in the public domain.
Reception
Disney's experiments were widely praised within the film industry, and the Silly Symphonies won the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film seven times, maintaining a six-year-hold on the category after it was first introduced. This record was matched only by MGM's Tom and Jerry series during the 1940s and 1950s.
Legacy
The Symphonies changed the course of Disney studio history when Walt's plans to direct his first feature cartoon became problematic after his warm-up to the task The Golden Touch was widely seen (even by Disney himself) as stiff and slowly paced. This motivated him to embrace his role as being the producer and providing creative oversight (especially of the story) for Snow White while tasking David Hand to handle the actual directing.
Silly Symphonies brought along many imitators, including Warner Bros. cartoon series Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies, MGM's Happy Harmonies, and later, Universal's Swing Symphony.
Years later after the Silly Symphonies ended, Disney occasionally produced a handful of one-shot cartoons, playing the same style as the Silly Symphony series. Unlike the Silly Symphonies canon, most of these "Specials" have a narration, usually by Disney legend Sterling Holloway.
The 1999–2000 television series Mickey Mouse Works used the Silly Symphonies title for some of its new cartoons, but unlike the original cartoons, these did feature continuing characters.
As of 2021, three of the Silly Symphony shorts (Three Little Pigs, The Old Mill, and Flowers and Trees), have been selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress, for being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".
Comic adaptations
A Sunday Silly Symphony comic strip ran in newspapers from January 10, 1932, to July 12, 1942. The strip featured adaptations of some of the Silly Symphony cartoons, including Birds of a Feather, The Robber Kitten, Elmer Elephant, Farmyard Symphony and Little Hiawatha. This strip began with a two-year sequence about Bucky Bug, a character based on the bugs in Bugs in Love.
There was also an occasional Silly Symphonies comic book, with nine issues published by Dell Comics from September 1952 to February 1959. The first issue of this anthology comic featured adaptations of some Silly Symphony cartoons, including The Grasshopper and the Ants, Three Little Pigs, The Goddess of Spring and Mother Pluto, but it also included non-Symphony cartoons like Mickey Mouse's Brave Little Tailor. By the third issue, there was almost no Symphony-related material in the book; the stories and activities were mostly based on other Disney shorts and feature films.