Woodland Café

Woodland Café
Directed by	Wilfred Jackson
Produced by	Walt Disney
Music by	Leigh Harline
Color process	Technicolor
Production; company	Walt Disney Productions
Distributed by	United Artists
Release date	March 13, 1937; 1948 (re-issued)
Country	United States
Language	English

Woodland Café is a Silly Symphonies animated Disney short film. It was filmed in Technicolor and released by United Artists in 1937 and was re-issued by RKO Radio Pictures in 1948. While it contained no on-screen credits, Wilfred Jackson was the director and Leigh Harline was the musical director.[1]

Plot

The setting is a nightclub staffed and frequented entirely by bugs. The cartoon is broken into three sections.

In the first, the patrons are shown arriving, putting their hats, gloves, and canes to the check-in counter, before getting to their tables and being served; the lighting is provided by fireflies; a jazz band is playing a number - with a brief instrumental battle with a tuba player and a trumpeter, a cellist shooing the leaf-eating bugs from chewing on his big cello, a trombonist having an itchy backside as he improvises a way to continue playing, and a drummer playing his full set, two groups of dancers with the male species almost ready to tussle with each other, a group of trombonists and trumpeters alternately their part of the music before the whole band followed up; and a centipede waiter served out some cherry wine to the patrons from a singular whole cherry.

The second features a performance of a French Apache dance as a good-girl fly resists the advances of a bad-boy spider until he gets caught in his own web and tangled himself up. The fly is now plays the bad girl at the end of the dance.

Finally, everyone jams the dance floor, including the old bee and his red ant partner as they were smoking the floor, even the snails dancing the section a little slower, as the orchestra plays (and sings) "Everybody's Truckin'" in the style of Cab Calloway on their instruments made of flowers.

Production

One of the bugs eating the cricket's cello has red pants like Mickey Mouse.

In the edited version, part of the "Apache Dance" and "Everybody's Truckin'" were cut out due to racial stereotypes.

Reception

Motion Picture Herald wrote on June 26, 1937, "Gay and tuneful is this richly imaginative visit to a bug night club. Equal to the brightly tinted tones in which the comic business has been dressed in the sparkling mood of animated fun and nonsense which the subject creates. Simply an enumeration of some of the hilarious and musical moments that occur in this odd rendezvous of frolic and frivolity, the incidents depicted will perhaps have a stronger appeal for the adult and the teen-age spectator."[2]

Voice cast

Chorus voices: Clarrie Collins, Jimmie Cushman, Marie Dickerson, C.B. Johnson, James Miller, Thelma Porter, Eddie Printz, Duke Upshaw[1]

Home media

The short was released on the 2001 Walt Disney Treasures DVD box set Silly Symphonies.[1]

gollark: ***gaaah***

gollark: Make sure that the first function yields enough.

gollark: It... shouldn't.

gollark: ```python#!/usr/bin/env python3from PIL import Imageimport mathimport sysdef chunks(l, n): for i in range(0, len(l), n): yield l[i:i + n]def from_bit_list(bl): i = 0 for ix, v in enumerate(bl): i |= v * (2 ** (7 - ix)) return iim = Image.open("out.png")id = im.load()(w, h) = im.sizebits = []for x in range(w): for y in range(h): bits.append(id[x, y])bits = [1 if x >= 1 else 0 for x in bits]byts = [from_bit_list(bytegroup) for bytegroup in chunks(bits, 8)]sys.stdout.buffer.write(bytes(byts))```Here it is. It's really rather awful.

gollark: With the companion program.

References

Merritt, Russell; Kaufman, J. B. (2016). Walt Disney's Silly Symphonies: A Companion to the Classic Cartoon Series (2nd ed.). Glendale, CA: Disney Editions. pp. 188–189. ISBN 978-1-4847-5132-9.
Sampson, Henry T. (1998). That's Enough, Folks: Black Images in Animated Cartoons, 1900-1960. Scarecrow Press. p. 217. ISBN 978-0810832503.

External links

Woodland Café on IMDb
Video on YouTube

This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.

[symphony1-1] Merritt, Russell; Kaufman, J. B. (2016). Walt Disney's Silly Symphonies: A Companion to the Classic Cartoon Series (2nd ed.). Glendale, CA: Disney Editions. pp. 188–189. ISBN 978-1-4847-5132-9.

[Enough-2] Sampson, Henry T. (1998). That's Enough, Folks: Black Images in Animated Cartoons, 1900-1960. Scarecrow Press. p. 217. ISBN 978-0810832503.