A Walt Disney Cartoon.
A brave Russian lad, with help from his animal friends, goes hunting the most fearsome beast in the forest.
Back in the 1930's the Disney Studios was visited by the Russian composer Sergey Sergeyevich Prokofiev (1891-1953) who performed on an old piano his new composition of Peter and the Wolf (1936). Walt was immediately charmed and determined to make it eventually into a cartoon.
A decade later, the result was a fine little film. Although quite a departure from the original's purely aural medium utilizing the listener's imagination, PETER AND THE WOLF works well as a narrated (by Sterling Holloway) cartoon. The animation is excellent, the characters vivid, the streamlined plot straight to the point. An attempt is still made by the animators to keep true to Prokofiev's design of using this tale as a child's introduction to the instruments of the orchestra. But too much analysis becomes arcane. The cartoon does not supersede the orchestral work. It simply gives it a new interpretation.
PETER AND THE WOLF was originally a segment of Disney's compilation feature MAKE MINE MUSIC (1946), but it quickly proved popular enough to act as a standalone short subject.
Walt Disney (1901-1966) was always intrigued by pictures & drawings. As a lad in Marceline, Missouri, he sketched farm animals on scraps of paper; later, as an ambulance driver in France during the First World War, he drew comic figures on the sides of his vehicle. Back in Kansas City, along with artist Ub Iwerks, Walt developed a primitive animation studio that provided animated commercials and tiny cartoons for the local movie theaters. Always the innovator, his ALICE IN CARTOONLAND series broke ground in placing a live figure in a cartoon universe. Business reversals sent Disney & Iwerks to Hollywood in 1923, where Walt's older brother Roy became his lifelong business manager & counselor. When a mildly successful series with Oswald The Lucky Rabbit was snatched away by the distributor, the character of Mickey Mouse sprung into Walt's imagination, ensuring Disney's immortality. The happy arrival of sound technology made Mickey's screen debut, STEAMBOAT WILLIE (1928), a tremendous audience success with its use of synchronized music. The SILLY SYMPHONIES soon appeared, and Walt's growing crew of marvelously talented animators were quickly conquering new territory with full color, illusions of depth and radical advancements in personality development, an arena in which Walt's genius was unbeatable. Mickey's feisty, naughty behavior had captured millions of fans, but he was soon to be joined by other animated companions: temperamental Donald Duck, intellectually-challenged Goofy and energetic Pluto. All this was in preparation for Walt's grandest dream - feature length animated films. Against a blizzard of doomsayers, Walt persevered and over the next decades delighted children of all ages with the adventures of Snow White, Pinocchio, Dumbo, Bambi & Peter Pan. Walt never forgot that his fortunes were all started by a mouse, or that childlike simplicity of message and lots of hard work will always pay off.
