Disney’s Dances

<This essay began as a shorter review in the “Financial Times” in October 1989. It then grew into this essay for “Dancing Times”, where it was published in December 1989. Robert Gottlieb included it in his 2008 anthology of dance writing, Reading Dance (Pantheon).>

While Mickey Mouse is using a crane to haul Minnie onto his steamboat, a goat on deck eats up Minnie's fiddle and her music-sheet. What to do? Minnie tries cranking the goat's tail, Mickey opens its mouth, out pours music, and we're off! Mickey treats all the animals aboard like consenting percussion instruments, too. He plays a cow's teeth like a xylophone; he even prods a litter of six piglets busy at the sow's teats for the sound of their squeals. And then he turns the sow over, and uses her grunts as the next part of his score. This is in Steamboat Willie (1928), the first film in which Mickey burst onto the screen. It was the first fully musical talkie, and it's still glorious.

If there can be choreography without human movement, then Disney's animated cartoons surely contain some of the most blissfully inventive choreography of the century. Everybody knows that. I hadn't realised, however, how deeply dancing and dancing to music pervaded Disney's sensibility. But from September to November the National Film Theatre showed a season of Disney's work, from the earliest Mickey Mouse shorts and Silly Sym-phonies, right through to the films made by the Disney Studio after the master's death; and I was able to catch some of them. Jiminy Crickets!-as we dwarves say when hit by the shock of beauty.

Mickey Mouse - a born vaudeville artist - soon bursts into dance. Actually, Minnie beats him to it— in a slinky Latin solo with a rose between her teeth in Gallopin' Gaucho (1928), just before Mickey pulls her into a hilarious tango. (Plane Crazy and this were Disney's first sound films, but Steamboat Willie, his third, was released first.) At the fair in Karnival Kid (1932), Mickey the hot-dog seller espies "Minnie the Shimmie Dancer," as she's billed, doing her hoochy-coochy dance. It's got to be love. For The Picnic(1930), the two mice bring a wind-up gramophone with their hamper, crank it up, and away they dance over the meadow, spinning and tapping, the Fred and Adele Astaire of the rodent kingdom. And what good dancing. Their tap is much more characterful than Ruby Keeler's or Eleanor Powell's or Ann Miller's or, dare I say it, Gene Kelly's. Less dated, too. And their Gallopin' Gaucho tango is so funny because its jokes are in its dancing Mickey pressing Minnie tight to his rodent breast as they stride their deep tango strides forever and a yard.

It's symptomatic of this post-modern age that we find high art in the popular entertainment of a bygone era. But, then, people always rated Disney high. Remarkable that when the great dance critic Edwin Denby first reviewed (in 1938) Balanchine's masterpiece Apollo, he called it "a ballet worth seeing several times because it is as full of touching detail as a Walt Disney." And he wrote in 1943 that "In the present film technique Disney's animals have been more successful than human dancers in giving a wide range of dance expression to movement," a judgment astonishing to us today in view of our reverence for the sublime achievement of the nine Fred and Ginger RKO movies made between 1933 and 1939. We know today that Astaire was the musicals' most wonderful person ever. But in 1936 Graham Greene, like others, called Astaire "the nearest we are ever likely to get to a human Mickey," and he meant it as a compliment. Mickey and Astaire were heroes of the Depression, and they remain two of the era's most shining examples of the resilience of the human spirit cocky and sweet, dreamy and defiant.

With Disney's characters, as with Astaire, dance is just plain natural. While Mickey and Minnie dance away in The Picnic, the bees and flies that devour their food start to dance too; and so, in Karnival Kid, do Mickey's hot dogs. And the Silly Symphonies are as full of musical motion as the Mouse series. It was a thrill to discover Monkey Melodies (1930), with its irrepressible simian pair dancing through the jungle and finally playing an eternal pat-a-cake as they hang from a branch by their tails. Disney animals just have dance in their bones - the famous first Silly Symphony (1929) was The Skeleton Dance - and dance is a life force for his insects and flowers also. Flowers, in fact, are ballet: they form rings and dance on pointe, like a Petipa corps. In Trees and Flowers (1933), his first colour film, they do grands pliés to start the day, and in The Goddess of Spring (1934) they do unison pirouettes en attitude. The goddess herself, by contrast, is a Revived Greek dancer, in sandals —what used to be called "a small Isadora-and-soda."

In the latter film Disney wanted his studio artists to develop their skill at showing the human figure in motion. They never fully succeeded. His humans aren't as good - in Snow White - as his dwarves or - in Cinderella - as his cat, dog, and mice. That is, they aren't as characterful, as human. For oh! what human spirit his animals show. The animator Ward Kimball (creator, in Pinocchio, of Jiminy Cricket himself) explained, in London Weekend Television's 1988 documentary on Disney, how impressed he had been when first he saw the 1933 Silly Symphony Father Noah's Ark. "This wasn't just movement for movement's sake. Here was an effort to characterise." Characterization and storytelling: here Disney's own gifts became a crucial inspiration to the studio. At meetings, as he took his team through whichever film he was plan-ning, he became every character. "Bringing dream to life" was what he was about, and he did so by means of "movement, emotion, the flow of movement, action, and reaction." (His words.) In advancing his film d'action -surely Noverre would have admired him - he kept advancing film technique. A chronological Disney season is an unrolling adventure story of what film learnt to do. And sometimes it's his characters who dance (as in Astaire movies), and sometimes (as in Busby Berkeley's) it's his camera. In much of The Old Mill 1937), hardly a thing moves at all... save the camera itself; and there's the film's true poetry. Here was the first use of the multi-plane camera, with its marvellous travelling three-dimensional views, passing through the cartoon landscape towards and inside the mill.

The Goddess of Spring, like Three Little Pigs (1933), is all-singing - another breakthrough for the movies. These are mini-operettas, and they paved the way for Snow White (1937), another first - a cartoon operetta ninety minutes long. I'd expected to see this movie now with the National Theatre of Brent's 1984 version in my ears. (Hacking through imaginary Disney undergrowth on his way to awaken Snow White with a kiss, Brent's Prince suddenly exclaimed: Jo"This forest is full of sobbing rodents.") Well, the singing of Snow White herself is sub-Deanna Durbin. But this film is still a model of musical action. Its dances are only occasional - as in Astaire movies, it usually works from a song up into a dance — but they're highlights, as in the great housecleaning scene and the dwarves' yodelling number.

How much some of these films say about the musical scene of their day! Both jazz and classical music were hot stuff in the early era of talkies, and Disney was as alive to this as anyone. The Goddess of Spring is the Persephone story; the Hell that Pluto drags the heroine down to is a jazz kingdom. In Music Land (1935), there's a Land of Symphony and an Isle of Jazz. One tearaway saxophone from the latter falls for the former's violin princess. Warfare ensues, as wonderful as Balanchine's Nutcracker battle. The Ride of the Valkyries thunders away; the Symphony organ tilts over; its pipes are used as guns; music itself is fired as ammo. But, when the two sides are reconciled, they build a Bridge of Harmony. (A year later, Balanchine, Rodgers, and Hart worked on a similar marriage of ballet and swing in the title number of On Your Toes!)

In The Band Concert (1935), Mickey conducts the William Tell overture. (When Toscanini saw this, he made the cinema play it again.). His gestures are so huge, he has to pull his sleeves up after each one. Then a real storm arrives, along with the one in the music, to blow the band, still playing, sky high. Disney discovered here how to let music launch a vivid fantasy and prompt that fantasy's every development. What a discovery that is. It's the essence of Fantasia (1940). What Disney and the conductor-arranger Leopold Stokowski do to great classical music here is wolfsbane to musical purists, of course, even in the 1982 version of the film with its re-recorded stereo soundtrack. The sections of Stravinsky's Sacre du Printemps are reordered and set to a Darwinian account of the origin of species and of evolution; Beethoven's Pastoral is accompanied by beings from Greek mythology; Dukas's Sorcerer's Apprentice is Mickey. Stokowski made many reorchestrations to heighten the film's aural brilliance, and even in the '82 version where Mussorgsky's own Night on a Bare Mountain replaces the Rimsky reorchestration that was more standard in 1940 — you hear extra-swoopy portamenti, extra-rolled chords, all manner of exaggerations.

But Disney's imaginings have such poetic power and aural detail that I find they justify every Stokowski re-arrangement save the pulled-about Hollywood version of Schubert's Ave Maria: which Disney's haunting procession of pilgrims - lightening our darkness - nonetheless transcends. The film was made in America's big radio age of music appreciation, and Fantasia, bringing great music to ordinary movie-goers and suggesting the different kinds of visions that music can conjure up, was an audacious response to that. Its basic idea makes me always think at first of chapter five of Howards End, where Beethoven's Fifth takes E. M. Forster's characters in different ways; but really the procedure of Fantasia isn't a novelist's depiction of listeners' unprompted reactions to music, it's a choreographer's communication to his audience of what music prompts in him.

Make Mine Music (1946) was designed as a popular-music sequel to Fantasia. When you see, in this, Disney's poetry of light, colour, and camerawork in Blue Bayou, you have to imagine how it would have sounded in its original form to Stokowski's arrangement of Debussy's Clair de lune. Instead it is marred by the soupy choral ballad to which this film fits it. Yet Make Mine Music includes Peter and the Wolf. Did you know that Prokofiev (a great movie-goer) wrote this famous score with Disney in mind? Disney had considered using it in Fantasia. With its young-person's-guide-to-the-orchestra score, it's very much in the spirit of the day; and it's shrewd in its storytelling. Frank Staff's 1940 ballet to it, revived in 1987 by Sadler's Wells Royal Ballet, is cute - and with Disney-like moments, too - but this Make Mine Music version surpasses it in almost every respect. Before you see the wolf, you see his prints; and then Disney can fill the screen with nothing but the wolf's face, glaring right into the camera. The story is a natural vehicle for Disney's flair at rapid seesawing between terror and comedy. When the little bird Sasha, in an excess of glee after baiting the huge wolf, gets concussed, the wolf has its revenge - laying out its tongue like a red stair-carpet leading from the ground into the huge pillared hall of its mouth; and Sasha is so dizzy, he marches right up and in.

Make Mine Music is certainly patchy. It contains some of Disney's most corny humour - Casey at the Bat and, despite good moments, The Martins and the Coys. There just aren't enough animals. (The most marvellous part of the film is "The Whale Who Wanted to Sing at the Met." Nelson Eddy — who never sang at the Met either — sings all the voices. For Willie the operatic whale can sing with not only one voice but three. In a dream sequence at the Met, he stands onstage— he's as tall as the proscenium arch — in tuxedo and mustachios, opens his mouth with its three sets of tonsils, and sings a trio rearrangement - tenor, baritone, bass - of the sextet from Lucia.) A "Ballade Ballet", Two Silhouettes, features ballet in its most Valentine-card mood, with Tatiana Riabouchinska and David Lichine dancing through a sugary dream kingdom—-while Dinah Shore sings a rumba number about "A perfect dream / Set to a theme / Lovely as you." Since the two stars are filmed in silhouette, you don't learn a lot about them from this 2-D reduction. Yet the film dances in perspective around them. The putti tug Riabouchinska's arabesque up and down; she runs on pointe up a path of clouds; and stars whoosh from her heel. Much better, though even more consciously fancy, is "All the Cats Join In," to a Benny Goodman jazz number. An artful crayon is seen drawing objects or wiping them out, and pages turn. But the kids in this little tale really do swing. (“When you dance with Bobby Sox,/ You dance at your own risk.") One dippy couple are joined snoozily together from the waist up; but their legs are just so crazy. And the girls are as lively as the boys: one girl picks her partner up, swings him upside down, and uses him as a Hoover.

But the sublime cornucopia of Disney dance remains Fantasia. When Disney heard one young artist sneering at ballet dancers, he arranged for him to watch the Ballet Russe from backstage. The artist, John Hench, came back with ballet-inspired drawings for Fantasia's Nutcracker Suite. (I derive this and much other information here from John Culhane's excellent 1983 book, Walt Disney's Fantasia.) Balanchine was around the studio when it was being made; and Riabouchinska, Lichine, Irina Baronova, and Marge Champion helped to model the steps. And when the hippo ballerina of the Dance of the Hours rises from the water, isn't this surely a tease directed at the 1938 movie The Goldwyn Follies, where Balanchine had Vera Zorina, in the Water Nymph Ballet, rise from a pool?

Disney and his studio didn't know much about music or ballet, yet they knew more than many choreographers will ever know. The Disney ear could distinguish between action music and dance music, and it prompted him to a wide range of idioms and dynamics in movement. Seldom in stage choreography do we see correspondence between sight and sound so frequent and vivid as in the Nutcracker, Sorcerer's Apprentice, Pastoral Symphony, and Rite of Spring sequences. Disney, innocently outrageous, often pursues a vision quite unlike the composer's and yet responds intently to musical detail: a wonderful paradox. Many stage choreographers this century have attempted the same, very few with anything like Fantasia's success. This film only triumphed at the box-office after its second re-release, in 1958, and it's possible that Disney's response to music had an impact on dance people at that time. At any rate, Disney's musicality has a fabulous naiveté that reminds me of Paul Taylor - whose 1956 Three Epitaphs shows a thoroughly Disney sense of shape-changing and timing, whose work has so often been about bugs, and who, in the early sixties, began choreographing to baroque music, Beethoven, and more. I can't guess what Disney would have made of Taylor's Snow White (1983), which I haven't şeen; but I think he'd have adored the innocence and nerve with which Taylor could interweave the two tales of a dance company in rehearsal and a Raymond Chandler-type detective in quest of a kidnapped baby and fit them - so snug! - to, of all things, Stravinsky's Sacre du Printemps. To very few choreographers is it given - how many sub-Balanchine ballets bear this out — to take us into the world of their music and into its workings. Disney and Taylor, like Fokine (the clearest example is Schéhérazade) before them, developed another species of choreographic musicality — using music as a detailed soundtrack for a scenario the composer never dreamed of.

Disney is so ingenuous and ingenious in the Grandma Moses musicality of Fantasia that he doesn't, in his setting of the Pastoral Symphony, even depict Beethoven's most obviously descriptive moment — the cuckoo. But what he does provide at that moment instead two lone centaurs brought together by the pan-pipes of three cherubs resembles the Papageno-Papagena reunion in The Magic Flute, and seems to me no less fine. The drawing of the centaurs and centaurettes is too cute - it's one of the weakest things in Fantasia - but chances are you don't stop to think of that, because Disney's timing is so neat. A lily on the surface of the lake rises - it's on the head of a girl. Now you see her shoulders, her torso, rising from the water... and then this Venus Anadynomene rises a little further... and in the next moment you see: she's a centaurette! Beethoven's second movement has begun with tentative half-phrases in the strings; and, just as this heroine's equine lower half rises from the lake, one of those phrases opens out into full flowing shape as a melody. What an abundance of wit this movie shows! In all Greek mythology there is only one winged horse. Disney shows an entire Pegasus family, each a different hue, flying through the sky, alighting on water like swans.

Fantasia is among the most fecund of films. (Stokowski compared Disney with Diaghilev, which is not unjust.) It is one of those rare all-in-one works of art. By turns, it is abstract and figurative, terrifying and hilarous, intimate and cosmic; and it interconnects these things brilliantly. You see Stokowski conduct the orchestra; you see Mickey Mouse conduct the universe. The centaurette rises from the water in the Pastoral; so does the hippo ballerina in Dance of the Hours. Jupiter hurls thunderbolts in the Pastoral and then snuggles up in a cloud to sleep, and the world below is irradiated by the sun to reveal a new palette of Gauguin colours; Chernobog, the night demon of Night on a Bare Mountain, wreaks terror and evil on the world, only to return at dawn (like Myrtha) into his mountain and to be replaced by the Ave Maria dawn pilgrims, their pale lamps shining so touchingly through the enthrallingly deep, broad, travelling landscape.

And, amid these grand views of evolution, good and evil, despair and hope, the movie is at its most miraculous and musical in the tiny worlds of The Nutcracker Suite. Disney sent his artists not only to the ballet but to the studio's parking lot too-to get ideas from the weeds. "God is in the detail." Dewdrop tairies touching flowers (to the Sugar Plum solo); Chinese mushrooms; blossoms on the water (Mirlitons); a harem of water plants and goldfish (Arabian); thistles and orchids like the coachmen and nursemaids of Petrushka (Russian), autumn leaves, fairies, milkweed, frost and snowflakes (to the Waltz of the Flowers). Any good purist will turn away in horror, and any good dance fan will marvel at the numberless felicities. Such invention, such timing. It's not just that these Nutcracker dances are full of Diaghileviana, though that is part of their fun. (And Disney hears narrative cues in The Sorcerer's Apprentice so vividly that it resembles an early Stravinsky score written for Fokine.) And it's not just that Disney and his artists were adorable in treating ballet itself, though that's another delight. (It reaches a peak in the uproarious hippo-alligator-elephant ballet to Ponchielli's Dance of the Hours.) Somehow Disney with his cartoon figures takes us deep into what moves us most in dance, and sometimes he achieves it best in animation that has nothing to do with ballet. Fantasia is at its most heavenly in its autumn-to-winter treatment of the "Waltz of the Flowers." Leaves change color; pods open; seeds fly out and are borne on the wind; frost arrives; snowflakes skate on the ice. In a very Balanchine remark, Disney said of this film, "You will be able to SEE the music and HEAR the picture. "That's nowhere more entrancing than in the way this "Waltz of the Flowers" - without showing you flowers at all - gives you the swirling rush and self-renewal of this music. (Among extant choreographies of this waltz, only Balanchine's, I believe, surpasses it.)

Fantasia recalls Balanchine's choreography in its constant development and changeover of imagery, and it celebrates "the pure act of metamorphosis," which is what Paul Valéry in L'Âme et la Danse defined as dance's true essence. It is brimful and bubbling with the wonder of creation, in every sense. You laugh and you wipe away tears of wonder and its springs rejuvenate you.

@Alastair Macaulay, 1989