The Silly Symphonies were such a rich and important series for Disney in the 1930s, yet many fans today remember them only for their benchmarks: The Skeleton Dance for launching the series, Flowers and Trees for technicolor, Three Little Pigs for “Whose Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?”, The Old Mill for the multi-plane camera… These are all worthwhile facts, but they often reduce these great works of animation art and entertainment to a footnote. Most Disney fans know of The Goddess of Spring as the short where the Disney animators experimented with a realistic-looking character, in preparation for Snow White. While that may be true, The Goddess of Spring is so much more. In an operetta (with a demonic jazz interlude) by Leigh Harline, the story of seasons is beautifully animated – with the Disney animators pulling out all stops and delivering images that continue to resonate in animation today.

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