Welcome To Silly Symphonize

Welcome to Silly Symphonize, a blog all about Walt Disney's Silly Symphonies cartoon series. The Silly Symphonies have always been my favorite cartoons because they are so full of charm. The melodies are always fun to listen to, and the characters are memorable. What draws me most to this toon series is the stellar animation.


Beginning with The Skeleton Dance and ending with The Ugly Duckling, the Silly Symphonies represents 10 years of fantastic animation coming from the Disney company. Walt Disney and composer Carl Stalling created the series to focus on music, and the onscreen action would be set to the soundtrack. This new way for Disney to create a cartoon eventually led to 1940's Fantasia, the ultimate "Silly Symphony" if you will.


The best thing about the Silly Symphonies was the absence of any real central character. The Disney artists were free to use their imagination in any way, and this freedom led to technological breakthroughs in animation like the multiplane camera and special lighting effects used in The Old Mill.


Disney was able to experiment on the Silly Symphonies. If a cartoon came out wrong, who cared? At least Disney would have the ever-popular Mickey Mouse to fall back on.


As a result the first color cartoon was a Silly Symphony (Flowers and Trees), a new character named Donald Duck premiered in a Silly Symphony (The Wise Little Hen), and Disney's first realistic human characters were used in a Silly Symphony (The Goddess of Spring -- used as tests for 1937's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs).


Explore these pages and find out more about Walt Disney's Silly Symphonies.