March 05, 2004

Walt Disney Treasures -- Silly Symphonies

This two DVD set of 31 Disney shorts (over five hour's worth of cartoons) is a cornucopia of wonderful storytelling and animation, from Ub Iwerk's "Skeleton Dance" (a black and white clasiic in which skeletons in a graveyard play on each other like xylophones and rearrange their bones in grotesque forms) to the Academy Award winning "The Old Mill."

These cartoons are the polar opposite of The Simpsons -- if you turned the sound off on The Simpsons, you wouldn't understand what was happening. But you could turn the sound off on a Silly Symphony short and have no problem figuring out what was going on, thanks to the activity, gags, and pantomime. We've watched these cartoons dozens of times and we're still not tired of them.

Includes some interesting supplemental material, such as commentary by Leonard Maltin and Disney animation documentaries.

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