Disney's cartoon adaptation of the tortoise and the hare

Disney's The Tortoise And The Hare

Summary and Overview of Disney's Cartoon Short: "The Tortoise and the Hare" (1935)

Most people today may not remember a time when a movie ticket, a box of popcorn and a balcony seat represented an entire day's entertainment for young people in America, but motion pictures in the early 20th century featured a number of "extras" that are not found in today's movie theatres, such as the quality cartoon shorts produced by the Disney studios. Max Hare and Toby Tortoise are just part of the Disney cartoon cast, of course, but these early characters are enduring because they possess universal appeal based on a number of positive factors which form the basis of this study. In Disney's 1935 Academy Award winning cartoon short, "The Tortoise and the Hare," Max and Toby face off and prove once and for all that the race does not always go to the swiftest, but rather sometimes to the meek but diligent as well. These moral lessons aside, "The Tortoise and the Hare" is just fun to watch because of the high quality of animation, overall production values and rich musical scores that characterized even early Disney productions, and these issues are discussed further below, followed by a summary of the research in the conclusion.

Review and Analysis

Disney's "Tortoise and the Hare" was just one of many such "Silly Symphonies" that were produced during the first half of the 20th century. These productions were in response to the growing international interest in and demand for Mickey Mouse-related cartoons and merchandise. According to Nowell-Smith (1997), "Fuelled by a keen merchandizing campaign patterned after Pat Sullivan's exploitation of Otto Messmer's Felix the Cat, the Disney studios created 100 cartoons starring him in the ten years from 1928 to 1937. In the process they managed to homogenize the character-Ub Iwerks's original Mickey from Plane Crazy and Steamboat Willie had wiry limbs and a wicked personality that could torture cats and ladies, while the later Mickey became rounder, milder of temperament -- and virtually exhausted his possibilities."

While the possibilities for Mickey were exhausted by this time, the potential for other characters were just beginning and the Mickey Mouse cartoons resulted in a number of spin-offs of secondary characters such as Pluto, Goofy, and Donald Duck who later starred in their own cartoons until the mid-1950s. Indeed, as Nowell-Smith points out, "The best of the later Mickey Mouse cartoons, such as the 1935 Band Concert or the 1937 Clock Cleaners, derive as much energy from Donald and Goofy as from Mickey." It was during this period that the Silly Symphonies genre was introduced, much to the delight of contemporary and modern audiences alike. In this regard, Nowell-Smith reports that, "Equally fortunately, Ub Iwerks initiated a second parallel series of sound cartoons with his 1928 Skeleton Dance: the Silly Symphonies, which explored lyrical and whimsical themes in folklore and nature. Free from the gag formula of regular cartoons, Silly Symphonies gave the Disney staff the opportunity to experiment and expand their animation skills, and they won Academy Awards regularly."

Among the award-winning Silly Symphony productions during the period from 1932 to 1939 were many that are likely familiar to 21st century audiences, including.".. The full-color Flowers and Trees (1932), Three Little Pigs (1933) with its diverse personality characterization for animal protagonists, the Tortoise and the Hare (1935), Country Cousin (1936), the Old Mill (1937) with its atmospheric multiplane depth effects, Ferdinand the Bull (1938), and the Ugly Duckling (1939)."

The plot of the fable, "the tortoise and the hare" is well-known to children around the world, and even Korean folk tales contain a "tortoise and hare" fable that underscores the fact that in some cases, the slow but sure contestant wins the race. The plot of the fable concerns the fact that because the hare lost the race, the reader makes the assumption that, "Don't do whatever rabbit did because it causes a negative outcome"; clearly, the hare's irresponsible, overconfident and show-off behaviors are responsible for this negative outcome. Consequently, part of the moral of "the tortoise and the hare" is "Don't be irresponsible and overconfident, and do not show off to girls."

By contrast, the other half of the moral message of the "tortoise and hare" fable is discerned from the positive outcome experienced by the tortoise. "Since the turtle is rewarded," Lounsberry and her colleagues advise, "the reader looks for the behavior responsible for this good result. The other half of the moral is something like, 'Good things happen to those who keep plugging away.'" as one Disney chronicler reports, "Max is flashy, cocky and very arrogant; Toby is shy, kind and gullible. Both became embroiled in a competition to see who was fastest. The Aesopian tale proved Max's cockiness was his downfall, while Toby's surefooted, steady endurance made him the winner."

The dialogue of the cartoon short is in keeping with the stereotypical images that are associated with the respective characters. For example, shabbily attired Toby Tortoise, with a patched and faded robe, being slow-moving and apparently a bit slow-witted as well, is invariably polite and cordial to his opponent, Max Hare, who is nattily attired in a brand-new plush robe resplendent with the colors (and somewhat reminiscent) of Superman's uniform (with "The Blue Streak" emblazoned on his robe), but who is rude and belligerent with Toby (whose robe is lettered with "Slow but Sure") in response (the respective racing uniforms for Max and Toby are shown in Figure 1 below).

For example, Toby falls for Max's well-known "psyche" gag where he is offered Max's hand to shake only to have him pull it back in a "thumbs-up" fashion not once but twice before the race even starts, and Max makes it clear from the outset who is going to win this race. The clearly established personalities of Toby Tortoise and Max Hare also contribute to this sense of who is going to win, but also help create a sense of an "under-tortoise" who deserves to win because he has the pluck even though the rabbit has the speed among viewers. These straightforward images of the bully and the bullied, the fast and the slow, the quick and the dull, are accompanied by a rich musical score (recorded by RCA Victor "High Fidelity" Sound System) and background scenery ("in Technicolor") throughout. According to Jacobs, the color in Disney's Silly Symphonies is seldom static: "As the characters fly, dance, run, or evolve into other shapes, the color too is animated, becoming sinister, gay, sanguine, or merely decorative, but always taking on a new hue with each of the emotional developments and moving with the images and sound."

Figure 1. Racing "uniforms" of Max Hare and Toby Tortoise.

Source: http://users.cwnet.com/xephyr/rich/dzone/hoozoo/images/toby2.gif

The musical score is symphonic (hence the "Silly Symphony" reference), and this emphasis on high-quality musical scores was one of their trademarks. According to Jacobs (1939), "It was Walt Disney's animated cartoons, and particularly his Silly Symphonies, that revealed how richly and imaginatively sounds could be manipulated and fused to intensify the image. Disney's films from the outset have been a resourceful exploitation of the sound medium. His music and sound effects give reality to the world of Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck, to its flowers and trees and animal life, and in their originality and ingenuity they have con tributed more than any other films to the development of the sound medium."

The structure of "The Tortoise and the Hare" follows that of all other Disney cartoons and Silly Symphonies of this period. According to Jacobs, Disney standardized the structure of the formal elements of these productions into a semi-dramatic pattern:

Two opposing forces are established: they come into conflict, there is a crisis, a chase, complications, a higher crisis, a last-minute climax, and a swift resolution. So skillfully does he manipulate his material that the similarity of the underlying structures of his different films is never obvious. His formal mastery frees him from any technical difficulties and leaves him only the problem of new ideas. With his theme selected, all he has to do is to divide it into the various parts -- beginning, middle, and end -- and allot so much time for each.

Although Disney's structure for this cartoon short and the others of this genre were relatively straightforward, Jacobs and empirical observations confirm that they were of a high aesthetic quality. In this regard, Jacobs emphasizes that Disney's images move rapidly and blend smoothly, rising from point to point without a wasted frame, moving on to an ever higher tension, increasing interest, arousing excitement, provoking laughter, building suspense, always advancing with remarkable fluidity and imagination to a last-minute crescendo and a final hilarious and unexpected resolution." In fact, "The Tortoise and the Hare" is so finely crafted and storyboarded that each scene represents an integral part of the overall storyline and forms a part of the coherent whole with absolutely no "fluff" allowed. As Jacobs advises, "It would be as impossible to cut a scene in a Disney film without destroying its flow as it would be to expect a man with one leg to walk as well as one with two. Succinct structural form marks all Disney's pictures and makes other animated cartoons, no matter how ingenious they may be, look pallid."

The narrative source of the production is consistently the characters themselves, and the film's style is a mixture of realism in terms of the lush and colorful scenery and a caricature of the protagonist and antagonist, Toby and Max, as the bullied and bully, the show-off and the showed-off, respectively. As Nowell-Smith points out:

The technical advances explored in the Silly Symphonies partly arose from a rivalry with the Fleischers, who, among all the other animation studios that survived into the sound era, consistently produced excellent cartoons in the early 1930s. Unlike the Disney product, which tended increasingly to an 'illusion of life' live-action imitation, the earlier Fleischer cartoons reveled in stylization, caricature, unrealistic transformations, elaborate repetitive cycles, direct address to the audience, and illogical developments which seem inherent, distinctive properties or potentials of animation.

In fact, there is an enormous amount of attention to "illusion of life" details evidenced from the open scenes with hundreds of characters, many of them actively animated in mini-race scenes and darting in and out of the stands and scurrying about in impromptu footraces while a beleaguered albino hippopotamus tries to keep order and direct traffic (even so, a stork on crutches is tumbled to the ground and the stork character appears more than once) (see Figure 2 below).