Silly Symphonies

Silly Symphony is a series of 75 animated short films produced by Walt Disney Productions from 1929 to 1939. As their name implies, the Silly Symphonies were originally intended as whimsical accompaniments to pieces of music. As such, the films usually had independent continuity and did not feature continuing characters, unlike the Mickey Mouse shorts produced by Disney at the same time. (Exceptions to this include Three Little Pigs, The Tortoise and the Hare, and Three Orphan Kittens, which all had sequels.) The series is notable for its innovation with Technicolor and the multiplane motion picture camera, as well as its introduction of the character Donald Duck making his first appearance in the Silly Symphony cartoon The Wise Little Hen in 1934.

Silly Symphonies won the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film seven times.

The series also spawned a Disney media franchise that included the newspaper comic strip Silly Symphony, the Dell comic book series Silly Symphonies, as well as several children's books, many of which were based on Silly Symphony cartoons.

Within the animation industry, the Silly Symphonies series is most noted for its use by Walt Disney as a platform for experimenting with processes, techniques, characters, and stories in order to further the art of animation. It also provided a venue to try out techniques and technologies that would be crucial to Disney's plans to eventually begin making feature-length animated films. Among the innovations developed and/or improved upon in the series are Technicolor film-making, true and believable character animation, special effects animation, and dramatic storytelling in animation.

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