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Thanks for the memories!

hyped garbage

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A film with more than the usual spoiler issues. Talking about it in any detail feels akin to handing you a gift-wrapped present and saying, "I hope you like it -- It's a thriller about a diabolical secret experiment."

This is one of the shorts in the Silly Symphonies series produced by Disney. There will be spoilers ahead:The opening shot is a pan in on a china plate. It goes from a static shot to animation and the story starts. It involves the daughter of a Chinese mandarin and a young fisherman. First, we see servants of the mandarin serving him food, then musicians and dancers entertaining the mandarin.The daughter enters the short in a dance sequence and then follows a butterfly outdoors. The action cuts to a nice sequence of the fisherman using a bird to bring in fish. The girl falls in the water and is rescued by the fisherman. They start chasing the butterfly together.The butterfly flies into the house and lands on the chair in which the mandarin is snoozing. The fisherman tries to catch the butterfly, only to roughly grab the mandarin instead, who wakes up in very bad temper. The two begin to fight as the daughter tries to stop them.Eventually, the daughter and fisherman escape in a rickshaw, with the mandarin soon in pursuit. The mandarin meets up with a dragon, which eliminates one threat only to become a greater threat to our happy couple. They vanquish the dragon in the end and go off on their own (with the bird) on the boat.All of the characters are Chinese and are mildly stereotypical. This short is available on the Disney Treasures Silly Symphonies DVD set and both the short and the set are worth getting. Most recommended.

This is an amazingly strange and dated little Silly Symphony cartoon from Walt Disney. It begins quite oddly--with the camera going in for a closeup of a Chinese plate. As it gets closer, suddenly the scene changes to an amazingly patronizing and stereotypical view of China of old. It's kind of like a China of the Charlie Chan variety--Chinese in name only as lots of cute stereotypical Chinese folks dance about and have fun. And, like a typical Silly Symphony, there is a baddie that comes in and tries to spoil the fun--and the little Chinese guy needs to fight him to get back his girlfriend. It's all very odd--and very un-Chinese. I'd really love to show this to some Chinese folks to watch their reactions--I am pretty sure they would NOT be very positive!! It's all an obvious relic to our past and the way we viewed 'strange people from strange lands'. In addition, it's really not that good a cartoon either--though the animation is the best for its time, as are all the Disney shorts from this era.

I first saw this Disney short on Youtube a few months ago. I've become enraptured with it ever since. Everything about it I find great, but what I really love most about it is the Chinese musical score featured in it. It's one of my favorite compositions used in a Silly Symphony and I think one of the best. I never paid much attention to Chinese music before this, but this instrumental Chinese song grabbed me like no other. Maybe it was just all in a matter of finding what I'd consider to be the perfect tune in that sub-genre of world music that actually appealed to me. Despite the Chinese stereotypes, I read somewhere that this was one of the few (allegedly) racist Disney shorts that actually aired on the Disney cartoon anthology show The Ink And Paint Club. It must not have been that supposedly bad enough to ban it, the stereotypes must be slight only if that's the case, at least I can't find anything bad in it, not sure what that would be. Anyway, a delightful short in which we get a different look at the country China: From the plate and what takes place on it. I don't know for sure if this is one of the first cartoons in which we get to see things come to life, but if it is, then it's certainly among the pioneers and is groundbreaking for its time, not to mention imaginative. I like the Chinese boy coming to the aid of the Chinese girl (too bad the father had to be such a ruffian) the chase scenes, and the boulder being rolled into a dragon's mouth and in its stomach. One of my favorite Silly Symphonies.

A Walt Disney SILLY SYMPHONY Cartoon Short.THE CHINA PLATE on the shelf has much to tell, if you examine the picture on its face carefully. There you'll find the story of a dreadful old mandarin who forbids the love of his daughter for a simple fisherman...An interesting black & white cartoon, which alternates between action/reaction antics & the plot of the romantic story. The animation is stylized to look somewhat like a blue willow pattern plate. Quite a few racist elements in the story.The SILLY SYMPHONIES, which Walt Disney produced for a ten year period beginning in 1929, are among the most interesting of series in the field of animation. Unlike the Mickey Mouse cartoons in which action was paramount, with the Symphonies the action was made to fit the music. There was little plot in the early Symphonies, which featured lively inanimate objects and anthropomorphic plants & animals, all moving frantically to the soundtrack. Gradually, however, the Symphonies became the school where Walt's animators learned to work with color and began to experiment with plot, characterization & photographic special effects. The pages of Fable & Fairy Tale, Myth & Mother Goose were all mined to provide story lines and even Hollywood's musicals & celebrities were effectively spoofed. It was from this rich soil that Disney's feature-length animation was to spring. In 1939, with SNOW WHITE successfully behind him and PINOCCHIO & FANTASIA on the near horizon, Walt phased out the SILLY SYMPHONIES; they had run their course & served their purpose.