Babes in the Woods

Babes in the Woods (1932) is a fanciful reworking of the Hansel and Gretel story. No bread crumbs here, just a couple of wide-eyed Dutch children lost in a scary forest and a witch with a gingerbread house. This take on the story adds a village of dancing elves with red suits and beards (like tiny little Santas?) and a flying witch that swoops down from the sky on a broom propelled by spinning bristles. Though hardly as dark as the original Grimm Brothers story, this cartoon has its share of children's nightmares running through it, from potions that turn children into insects and animals that are caged up by the witch to a boiling cauldron waiting for its first victim. The film was produced as part of the Silly Symphony line of animated shorts that Walt Disney launched in 1929 with The Skeleton Dance. That was just two years after the debut of the first Mickey Mouse cartoon and one year after Steamboat Willie, the first Disney cartoon produced with a synchronized soundtrack. As the title suggests, the series was begun with idea of animating short films to musical pieces, set to the rhythm of the music and paced to the rise and fall of the dramatic movement of the score. Very quickly, however, it became a kind of animation workshop for Disney animators to try out different stories, techniques, and characters, and it was a great success. Disney produced 75 Silly Symphony cartoons over the course of ten years. Mickey Mouse was the studio's star but the Silly Symphonies was where Disney's ambitions were realized. The films were critically lauded and seven of them won the Academy Award for Best Short Subject (Animated) in the first eight years of the award's existence, beginning with Flowers and Trees (1932), Disney's first full color film. Babes in the Woods was the 32nd Silly Symphony animated short but only the third produced in full color. In 1932, Disney was the only animation studio creating films in the then-new three-color Technicolor process, and Walt Disney kept a monopoly on Technicolor animation by negotiating an exclusive deal for the three-color process in animation for two years. Babes in the Woods also marks the first animated fairy tale proper for Disney. Christopher Finch credits Swiss-born artist and animator Albert Hurter, who was trained in Europe, with inspiring the visual approach to the cartoon. As Finch writes, Hurter "spent his time developing visual ideas for future projects and improvising on themes which might trigger the imaginations of story men or animators. Neptune's court in King Neptune and the gingerbread house in Babes in the Woods reflect his influence." The influence went well beyond the Silly Symphony cartoons. The witch, a gnarled, cackling hag, could be an early draft of the wicked witch of Disney's first animated feature, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs) (1937), and her entrance in the elf village, which sends the elves scrambling to hide, anticipates the dramatic introduction of the Wicked Witch of the West in MGM's live-action The Wizard of Oz (1939). Babes in the Woods carries no creative credits other than Disney's name, which was already a stamp of quality by 1932, but according to animation historians, it was directed by Burt Gillett, who was a veteran of the Mickey Mouse series, and written by Ted Sears. Originally an animator working for Fleischer Studios, Sears had a long and rich career working with Disney beginning in 1931, when he was hired as the first head of the Disney story department. When Disney turned to animated features, Sears was an integral part of the screenwriter teams of such animated classics as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), Pinocchio (1940), Cinderella (1950), Alice in Wonderland (1951), and Peter Pan (1953), among others. Sources: The Art of Walt Disney, Christopher Finch. Abrams, 1975. Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination, Neal Gabler. Knopf, 2006. Disney's Art of Animation, Bob Thomas. Hyperion, 1991 IMDb By Sean Axmaker