Review

In the 1930s Walt Disney found first fame through the innovative and hugely popular Silly Symphonies series of short films that offered both a showcase and testing ground for new technologies, techniques, and approaches to narrative explored by Disney and his team of animators and later used in feature films. A milestone among the series, The Old Mill is best known today for its introduction of a technology pioneered by Disney; the multi-plane camera that used moveable image fields to create a hitherto unobtainable depth of field. The film is equally important, however, for its introduction of a realist approach to the depiction of animal life and movement that marked a turn away from the anthropomorphic approach to animals more typical in the American cinema of the period. While many of the Silly Symphonies take place in an enchanted, fantasy world without humans, here the absence of the human is marked by the eponymous abandoned building, whose reclamation by the animals is offered as an emblem of their unique being and different relationship to nature, the seasons, and cyclical time as opposed to narrative time. (Haden GUEST | Director, Harvard Film Archive)

More +Less -