One of these days, I’ll get around to a full-length article about the use of Disney shorts as a testing ground for the features—some time after I decide whether that goes into Byways or the regular column or not, because I feel like Disney’s not the only studio we can talk about there, and there are larger points to consider. Anyway, it’s most noticeable in the ’30s cartoons from before Snow White, because you can see things that were developed better or worse in certain cartoons and piece together a timeline of artistic development. They’ve definitely got human faces down better by “Goddess of Spring.”
Story not original to Disney follows. Rats (Marion Darlington and Harriette Haddon) infest Hamelin. Piper (George Gramlich) shows up and offers to free town of rats. Mayor (Allan Watson) agrees to pay a bag of gold. Piper pipes the rats away. Mayor refuses to pay Piper. Piper is angry. Piper threatens to pipe the town’s children away. Mayor laughs. Piper does so. Mayor is sorry.
An interesting difference in this version is that the Piper is not, in fact, piping the children away in revenge. In fact, this version of the Piper is just not happy with the idea that the children will grow up to be cruel, selfish, and petty like their parents. He pipes them away to a paradise. They will never grow up to get things they don’t deserve and fail to pay people what they’ve earned. That’s why this version of the story includes the Piper’s actually stopping to make sure the poor boy on crutches is able to follow over all the other children; imagine how much disdain the adults in that town likely had for him. After all, when the Piper starts his tune, the children are doing all the housework.
Frankly, another thing that may well be part of the pre-Snow White learning curve is that the rats here all look at least slightly like Mickey. It’s unsettling. This isn’t the ’50s suburbia where everyone looks at least slightly like Goofy; these are vermin. They are eating all the food in Hamelin. We don’t see them “widdling” in things, as Terry Pratchett so tactfully put it in The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents (seek this book out if you haven’t read it), but we can take it as read. And awful the people of Hamelin may be, and maybe you can argue that they deserve it, but it’s still weird to think that hundreds of little Mickeys are doing that.
Disney had been doing Silly Symphonies for four years at this point, and they’d been doing at least some of them with human characters since the second one. There is, let’s be blunt, no reason for the mayor’s face to be as weird and badly done as it is here. The art of animation isn’t linear, goodness knows; there’s no little up and down in the ongoing learning curve. That’s okay; of course there is. The Piper’s arms are actually pretty much like human arms!
Pay me what you think I’ve earned; consider supporting my Patreon or Ko-fi!