Disney's animated series of films, such as "The Lion King" and "Mulan" and other classics, are popular and passed on by word of mouth, and Disneyland, founded by Walt Disney, is a fun mecca for children. So what was the original DreamWorks Disney like?
Disney classic image
The Golden Age of Hollywood cinema in the 1930s was the first era of a completely conscious effort to forge cultural legends. Among Hollywood producers of that period, there were people who, more than anyone, were committed to creating cultural myths — cartoon producer Walt Disney. Disney won an Academy Award for all animated short films between 1932 and 1939. His first animated feature, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), was named Best Picture of 1938 at a film critics' poll held by The Film Daily.
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
No filmmaker has been so successful in attracting the general public and elite audiences since Chaplin's early comedy shorts. While providing entertainment for the masses, Disney has a knack for intellectuals to discover joy and meaning. The image of the protagonist of the film he created, cast in a popular mold, can embody a full range of fantasies and nightmares, and he is so endearing precisely because he can be loved and ridiculed at the same time. The cinematic man of the same era – again, with the exception of Chaplin, who made only three films in this decade – was unparalleled.
Disney and his animators inherited the tradition of Mérières' s stunt photography, Chaplin's pre-World War I comedy shorts, and the film's magical metamorphosis. They face a different challenge and opportunity than those who work on the subject of human society: their artistic premise is nothing more than fantasy. They can create a fantasy world unlike any world of experience, leading the viewer into uncharted territory, as long as the viewer has imagination or guts. Blank sheets of paper gave them a chance to reshape the world.
Walt Disney
Mickey Mouse and the beginning of fantasy
The Mickey Mouse series of films that Disney began producing in 1928 has achieved so much so amazingly is that they have built a world of their own fairly completely. Disney's brilliant use of sound immediately attracted public attention and led him to success, becoming a leader in the field of animation. The first Mickey Mouse film to be officially released was Steamboat Willie (1928), at a critical time when the film industry moved from silent film to the era of sound, and Dutoni's bold innovation in blending visual and sound effects gave animated shorts unprecedented popularity and aesthetic significance. But his vocal success should not obscure the rich, complex world of drawing in film.
Steamboat Willie
Disney's interpreters invariably describe the early Mickey Mouse films, and the Silly Symphony series from 1929, as rough —whether it's the level of sophistication, the storyline, or the behavior of the characters. The basic starting point of this criticism is technical, and over time Disney and his animators have become more and more mature. They meticulously draw pictures and colors, and the combination of sound, painting, and story is also perfected, and even three-dimensional depth is created by adopting new technology multiplane cameras. These put them ahead of the bigger studios.
Around 1932, Disney cartoons began to change. In 1933, a whole new image of the world began to emerge. The Disney cartoons that followed were fairy tales, many of which were moral stories. They unfold in a linear, narrow chronological order. They have a beginning and an end, and everything that happens in between has consequences. There are no rules, no squares, you better learn them, otherwise be careful. Don't be too imaginative, don't be too curious, and don't be too willful, or you'll get in trouble — although there's always time to learn lessons, and the end result is as desired. This idealized world was first seen in Disney cartoons, and in the culture of the late 1930s, it was two years earlier than live-action feature films to express the spirit of society and re-strengthen old-fashioned values. Perhaps because the latter takes a long time to plan, produce and roll out.
Mickey Mouse survived in both worlds, and he represented every era, but not without major changes. Aside from the likes of Chaplin (some think Mickey mouse was based on him), Mickey, unlike other 20th-century film characters, has a whole new imagination and multi-faceted image that expresses what we think is the best trait of humanity—sweet emotions, real pleasures, mischievous and lively nonsense, but he doesn't start out emotionally.
Early image of Mickey
In the beginning, he was a full-fledged rodent with slender limbs and smaller physiognomy than later, anthropomorphic versions. In Plane Crazy, the first film in the Mickey Mouse series to be made, it was a silent film at the time, with sound later added, released publicly after The Steamboat Willie, he was also barefoot and bare-handed. In Steamboat Willie he puts on his shoes and soon has white four-finger gloves. He's a little shy, a little egotistical, with a self-satisfied smile—the same smile that Edward Robinson showed in Rico, the immigrant gangster played in Little Caesar two years later. Unlike Rike, however, Mickey did not come to the end of his life. "Mickey was our problem kid," Disney later said, "he was so famous that we were limited in what we had to do to him" as he became respected, peaceful and gentle, responsible, and ethical. So Donald Duck added to Thetoni's role to add old vinegar and bile-like sourness and bitterness to the film.
The first four Mickey Mouse animated shorts were produced in 1928. The following year, Disney Studios produced 16 animated films, including a handful of films belonging to the Confused Symphony series. Since then, they have completed an animated short film about three weeks — starting with Steamboat Willie and ending in 1939 a total of 198 films, about half of which belong to the Mickey Mouse series and the other half to the Confused Symphony series, including all animated shorts without Mickey.
In Crazy Airplane, Mitch is a creative, free-spirited pilot who lives by a farm barn (Charles Lindbergh was the first to fly across the Atlantic on his own). He built the craft using every material available in his hand, whether from living or inanimate, and to power the plane, he twisted a dachshund like a rubber band and plucked a turkey feather as the tail of the plane. As soon as the plane was built, it became a living object, as it should be; the church spire automatically bent over to avoid being hit by the plane.
It turns out that Mickey's goal is not to become famous or achieve heroic careers, but to pursue female color. He built the plane just to make a good impression on his girlfriend Minnie and get her on board. There she couldn't escape if he courted her. However, instead of giving in, she jumped off the plane, grabbed one of the straps of her lantern pants, puffed up, and then she landed safely.
Crazy Plane
The audience first saw Mickey and Minnie Mouse in "Steamboat Willie", and the wonderful fusion of music and visual imagery added great magic to these supple and changeable images. A goat eats Minnie Mouse's score, and she quickly twists the goat's tail into a crank, shakes the crank, and the notes pour out of the goat's mouth into a song called "Turkey in the Saw." The scene is reminiscent of Chaplin in "The Tramp" grabbing and wagging the cow's tail and milking cows into the barrel. Mickey also played with different animals, making different sounds and merging into cheerful musical melodies, including pulling the tails of a group of suckling piglets back and forth, and then pressing the sow's nipples as keys.
Stills of Chaplin in The Tramp
The living and inanimate things invert the characters. In The Opry House (1929), Mitch began playing the piano, but the piano and stool kicked him out. The piano uses its own front legs to tap the keys to play music, while the stool dances on the side. At the end of the show, Mickey returned to the front desk, and the three bowed to the audience together. In Traffic Accident, Mitch's cab bites another car in front of him in order to squeeze into a parking space, and can go back like a puppy to lick the leaking rear tires, drink "Dr. Peps Oil" and then become drunk and crazy.
Mickey and Minnie Mouse
It's easy to ask for higher demands on these cartoons, but they were immediately so consistently welcomed that they became so much of a concern. In the enduring american humor, they are ubiquitous and extremely exaggerated and grotesque imaginations that constitute the mythological framework of American society. In addition, as animations, they are in a position that is farther away from the requirements of authenticity. Their fanciful nature frees the viewer's mind from the normal expectation of what the world will be. And the painting is very concise, completely without giving the viewer a blunt impression, which is another necessary aspect of opening the imagination. Disney's publicity agency later merged the words image and engineering to create a new word, Imagineering, that accurately described the role played by later cartoons—because all the effects were arranged, there was no room for the audience to use their imagination.
Fantasy style changes
Early fantasy cartoons were deeply committed to promoting the old American tradition of individual entrepreneurship and aggressiveness. However, they unleash their dreamlike fantasies to the extreme, and they accomplish all sorts of magical metamorphosis with unparalleled ease, moving the viewer away from the usual themes of individualism—hard work, self-denial, trying to climb up—and incorporating some of its deeper meaning into relief. In the real world, people turn themselves into tools and machines in pursuit of their goals, and machines do take over their own destiny, directing and controlling their original masters and leading them to places they don't want to go. From a profound perspective, these fantasy worlds are not so much creating these myths as exposing them.
The first signs of the demise of fantasy came from the rate of violence in Disney cartoons. By 1932, even in the highly original films Touchdown Mickey and Building a Building, the fantasy element was almost completely replaced by a spirit of tangible material violence. Pain and injury do not cause permanent damage to the cartoon, but it is no longer magical, but just a common trick.
"Mickey Score" and "Building a Mansion"
At the same time, the range of emotional expressions of characters and plots begins to expand. Joy and sadness, excitement and fear are more than before, but they all behave according to some emotional pattern, and creatures become more anthropomorphic than they are so versatile. These changes are highlighted in the first cartoon short film, Flowers and Trees (1932), made with Technicolor technology, which tells the story of an evil old tree trying to stop the love affair between a boy tree and a girl tree, winning Disney its first Oscar. In films like The Mail Pilot (1933), Mickey Mouse also began to succumb to traditional melodrama models, such as heroes and villains confronting each other, ending in a happy ending. The film ends with Mickey and Minnie hugging each other tightly, rather than the chaplin-style brief relationship of the past (although it should be said that chaplin's ending has become more and more emotional in silent films such as "Finding The Fairy" and "The Gold Rush").
Postal Pilot
Disney's most popular and influential cartoon short film, Three Little Pigs, emerged at the climax of the style shift, blending important expressions of old and new styles. Painted in a full-color, idealized new style, it tells a familiar moral story; but as if with incredible foresight, Disney picks an open-ended story that leaves the viewer with the imagination to think freely about what it all means.
Three Little Pigs was released in May 1933 in the middle of Roosevelt's 100-Day New Deal, which launched a legislative campaign to get out of the Great Depression and boost national morale. Its cheerful theme song "Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?" 》( Who 's afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?) It soon became so popular that Disney couldn't even provide enough copies of the film to meet the audience's needs.
Richard Schickel said in "The Disney version" that Disney's retold of the story of the three little pigs who built the house and the hungry wolf had a basic conservative view that was in line with the producer's conservative political stance: the pig with traditional virtues, hard work, self-reliance, and self-sacrifice succeeded. But another explanation is equally plausible, and the pig that works best is the one that does not trivialize the facts of the crisis and uses modern materials and tools to build houses. There is no doubt that some contemporary audiences, such as Scoley, see the film as an ode to former President Herbert Hoover, but whatever Disney's intentions, the film was greatly welcomed by the public because it clearly showed the confident and targeted mental state of the people in the early years of the New Deal.
The Three Little Pigs
"Three Little Pigs" is one of the last Disney cartoons that the audience can freely interpret. Since then, Disney movies have always conveyed an unmistakable moral message. In Lullaby Land, a late 1933 production, a baby wanders in a (fantasy) world with his toy dog in a dream, surrounded by inanimate household objects. He entered a "forbidden garden" filled with flowers and trees made of kitchen knives, nail clippers, scissors, pens, hammers, razors, matches and pins. "Children are forbidden to touch," the watch growing on the tree sang aloud, "they will hurt you badly." "He was ignited by matches, and then captured by scary ghosts until the Sycophants came to his rescue.
The film conveys a message of survival, not through the traditional initiative and self-reliance, but through the observance of social rules, which is a completely different kind of conservatism. The rabbit in The Tortoise and the Hare (1934) is a smart, ambitious male who can run so fast that he can throw the ball himself and run over to catch it, shoot the arrow out on his own, and wait for the arrow to fly over like William Tell's son, but we all know who won the race. In The Flying Mouse (1934), the rat, which was bent on flying, also realized after setbacks: it scared away the birds it wanted to play with, and the shadows of its wings frightened its family, but it could not fool the evil bats. They chanted loudly, "You are nothing, you are nothing." The good fairy who gave it wings saved it and admonished it, saying, "You have learned your lesson. Be the best version of yourself, be yourself, and life will smile at you. ”
"Tortoise and Rabbit Race"
Even Mickey has been used to endorse new morals. In Pluto s Judgement Day (1935), he was so anthropomorphic that he became the owner of a family pet. He scolded Pluto for chasing the cat recklessly, and the poor dog lay asleep by the fire and began to have nightmares about the bad things it had done for him in hell. The scenes of hell depicted in the film bear interesting resemblance to Hell's Bells, which embodies a shift in the style of The Earthins. The film begins in a fantasy world, only to be realized at the end that it is just a dream, bound by the waking real world: they are not fantasies, they are not free from the shackles of time, they are only part of Pluto's imagination that the audience cannot touch.
Pluto's Day of Judgment
Such an account would not be complete without high praise for the extraordinary sound colors and animation skills of Disney's cartoon shorts produced in the late 1930s, as well as their continued creativity, the wonderful designs and concepts they continue to present. Films such as The Band Concer (1935), Music land (1935) and The Old mil (1937) have achieved amazing rhythms and effects. But people should also not lose sight of what their style represents, which requires a correct way of imagining (just as there is a correct way of behaving elsewhere). Now that the pathway to the fantasy world is closed, it's time for viewers to let go of their personal imaginations and come together to fulfill walt Disney's dreams.
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Film Creates America
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Author: [Beauty] Skla by Guo Kanjun translated
A history of American culture shaped by film,
The history of American cinema from a multicultural perspective.