Oh I just love the animation of the opening scene with the nighttime blizzard of snow, it's so festive and beautiful and even though it's an image that you see time and again throughout the Silly Symphonies and early animated shorts in general I never get tired of seeing it. It always immediately set such a classic tone. Being the time that it was made I know it couldn't be helped, but a little colour really wouldn't have gone amiss here, a monochromatic toyshop doesn't exactly convey a whole lot of wonder and I think this would have been a much better short if it had been colourized, and it feels odd having a spider as the protagonist instead of just having it be about a shopful of toys that come to life at night, and the toys in this don't really come alive, it's so vague that you can't be sure. Except for the dancing dolls which I found slightly creepy especially the stereotypical black one that croaks out a typical "Mammie!" Anyway spiders just don't make for lovable characters, even ones as annoying as this one! This Symphony is enjoyable but I find it a little on the plain side, it's rather bare bones. The animators were still figuring out and honing their craft at this point, it was all still merely about animating things around the music as the spider goes into the toyshop to escape the cold and gets into so much trouble scaring himself with the toys and eventually some firecrackers that he decides he'd rather stay outside! I enjoy the Silly Symphonies better that have a little arc to them, like "The Cookie Carnival." But something that I love about all of these shorts is that you can often see very early signs of their later full length movie works, like for instance I find some of the interior of the toyshop similar to Gepetto's workshop in Pinocchio. This is good but there is better that this series of classic cartoons has to offer. Very vintage, and very cute!
Midnight in a Toy Shop
(1930)
A genuinely good cartoon spider causes a ruckus in a toy store!
2 January 2016