Disney's 1934 "The Goddess of Spring" tells the tale of Persephone and Hades

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Originally published at: Disney's 1934 "The Goddess of Spring" tells the tale of Persephone and Hades | Boing Boing

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Also recently retold in the excellent musical Hadestown

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It stands the test of time much better than the original animation of the Fuller Brush Man scene in 1933’s Three Little Pigs which was made the year before.

Yeah, it was actually just a wolf dressed as a human, but that’s not the reason that it was so problematic that they reanimated the scene in the 1940s.

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It’s on Disney Plus, or was a month ago. That’s one of the fun things about that service: those old cartoons that will be in public domain over the next ten or twenty years.

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Those noodle arms were just too distracting.

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I am really confused here. On my screen I can see that:

  • they are singing in French, which threw me for a few seconds, I mean it was quite unexpected,
  • then, Hades is subbed by a kind of gurning Mephistopheles, no hint of godly majesty just a guy in red tights,
  • the dispute is settled by an agreement between the two parties, which is pretty civil I guess, but misses most of the story,
  • everyone is singing alla time, ow my ears.

It’s really strange yes it is.

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There are certainly a lot of familiar future Disney themes and tropes in that short. It’s as much prototype as it is experiment.

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Here is a version in the original English … much more… understandable(?)

curious that they didn’t try to include the matter of the 3 or 6 (depending on the version of the legend) pomegranate seeds eaten by Persephone while in Hades to explain why the seasonal cycle must recur [shrug]. also wonder if the Lugosi version of Dracula coming out in 1931 helped the style around Hades cape and such…?

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I can’t decide if Mephistopheles is wearing leather or rubber

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well this is clearly just a blatant rip-off of the forbidden zone

(no link because blackface)

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Oh yeah, that whole underworld segment was vintage Disney - the jazz music, dancing, and shadowy characters in complete contrast to the operating singing and prancing wee folks above. :unamused:

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It’s pretty amazing to contrast this with Snow White and see how much better the animators at Disney became in three years. You can see here how hard it was for them to un-learn the rubber hose limbs, how they struggled with drawing animals and realistic faces, how the fauns and imps have no weight to them, how bad they still were at drawing cloth…

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Huh; I saw the rubbery limbs and thought it was an intentional decision, something to highlight Persephone’s more-than-human aspect

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I’m parroting some YT videos on animation and The Animator’s Survival Kit here: Early cartoons used a lot of these “rubber hose” limbs, as they’re relatively easy to draw and animate. Walt Disney had greater ambitions for what he considered the Artform of animation, and pushed his animators to develop a more realistic style. You’ll also see them mostly abandoning the concept of “squash & stretch”, i.e. morphing an object’s proportions to emphasize an action. In stead, they developed a technique of “breaking” joints (that is, bending joints and limbs in ways that they realistically can’t, while maintaining the body’s proportions. The way Goofy walks is a good example of this).

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I do appreciate this. But my preferred Spring invocation remains:

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I’m curious to know if Grim Natwick was the animator for the goddess - he did Betty Boop and Snow White - but those noodley arms really aren’t his style.

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he got much better traction in later years with ham

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I must remark on the extremely coarse scan conversion here. The scenes with a lot of action are just so much video hash – unwatchable.