Midnight in a Toy Shop (1930) User Reviews

Early Disney Cartoon

[Ron Oliver · 7/10 · 26 August 2000]

A Walt Disney SILLY SYMPHONY Cartoon.

Driven by a storm, a large six-legged spider finds itself at MIDNITE IN A TOYSHOP. The nasty creature gets to witness what happens when the toys come to life and begin to frolic about.

With almost an invisible plot, this black & white cartoon was an exercise in form & movement, action & reaction.

The SILLY SYMPHONIES, which Walt Disney produced for a ten year period beginning in 1929, are among the most interesting of series in the field of animation. Unlike the Mickey Mouse cartoons in which action was paramount, with the Symphonies the action was made to fit the music. There was little plot in the early Symphonies, which featured lively inanimate objects and anthropomorphic plants & animals, all moving frantically to the soundtrack. Gradually, however, the Symphonies became the school where Walt's animators learned to work with color and began to experiment with plot, characterization & photographic special effects. The pages of Fable & Fairy Tale, Myth & Mother Goose were all mined to provide story lines and even Hollywood's musicals & celebrities were effectively spoofed. It was from this rich soil that Disney's feature-length animation was to spring. In 1939, with SNOW WHITE successfully behind him and PINOCCHIO & FANTASIA on the near horizon, Walt phased out the SILLY SYMPHONIES; they had run their course & served their purpose.

Nice enough but nothing extraordinary

[TheLittleSongbird · 7/10 · 15 May 2012]

I have always enjoyed Disney Silly Symphonies, and I did enjoy Midnight in a Toy Shop, though it is nowhere near the best I've seen. It is virtually plot less and the gag with the "Mama" dolls sadly doesn't work, it was jarring and could be seen as racist. The animation is fluid in alternative to jerky and the black and white does look beautiful, and while sparse at first the music is great. What drives Midnight in a Toy Shop though was the spider main character, a pleasant departure from the villainous characterisations of spiders in Summer and Hell's Bells and a very likable character and does very well driving the cartoon rather than the music. There are also two great moments, the Spider playing the piano with his body, unique and delightful that was, and at the end with the fireworks, a nice piece of continuity. All in all, nice but I've seen better. 7/10 Bethany Cox

The Spider Was Fun

[Hitchcoc · 6/10 · 14 April 2018]

A six legged spider is out in the snow and to get warm, goes through the keyhole of a toyshop. It's late so only the toys are there. It isn't long before many of the them begin (you guessed it) dancing. About ninety percent of these features have the characters dancing. There were a handful of nicely drawn things, but ultimately it was back to more prancing around. is it because unpredictable movements were much harder to animate. It would be fun to read some of the literature on these early cartoonists.

Cute and Fun Silly Symphony!

[VioletGirl37 · 7/10 · 22 December 2022]

This Silly Symphony begins with a lovely establishing scene of a spider trying to hang on to the outside of a toy shop in the midst of a blizzard! He manages to find his way inside and explores. I am surprised at what a cute and fun character they could make out of a spider! I probably did watch this while I was in the mood for such a thing (for the first time this morning!) and while as everyone else commented, it doesn't have an especially sophisticated plot, the end is foreshadowed, and I will say that the minstrel show in the middle seems like a pretty bizarre feature, the music and animation together made this an enjoyable watch for me! Definitely nowhere near the quality of the.masterpieces of Ub Iwerks (as I believe this would have been made shortly after his departure from the Disney studio), but still good fun! :)

Pretty Ordinary

[Hitchcoc · 6/10 · 10 December 2018]

It's interesting how many view this with more adulation than some. It is clever to use a spider who is caught in a nasty storm as the protagonist. There is no plot, other than the fact that he enters the toy shop and interacts with all that is there. We know when we see the fireworks sitting on a table out in the open, that they will become an issue. There is the usual need to treat a black doll with disrespect and have them use their one word vocabulary and say "Mammy." I wonder what Walt Disney himself thought of this kind of stuff. There are few good moments, but it isn't anything to write home about.

It is clear that the producer of this brief cartoon . . .

[cricket30 · 7/10 · 10 October 2021]

. . . was permanently traumatized by some sort of a run-in with an arachnid while eating his childhood curds and whey. Why else would he order his animating henchmen to churn out a series of films featuring spiders being terrorized and\or tortured, such as MIDNIGHT IN A TOY SHOP? One can imagine that this hater would have become a full-time exterminator if said Real Life spider had climbed down his water spout, thus depriving the planet of the voracious rodent who swallowed up the Muppets, Star Wars, Spiderman, etc.

A genuinely good cartoon spider causes a ruckus in a toy store!

[Foreverisacastironmess123 · 7/10 · 2 January 2016]

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!

Offensive

[kaicesbr · 1/10 · 14 July 2023]

Continuing my marathon of Disney shorts, as usual they are not available on Disney plus and I have to hunt on YouTube. Watching for the first time. I'll watch while I comment. Toy Story precursor perhaps? But much lower. There's still a racist scene. I can't rate more than 1 when they try to make something racist out of comedy. Seeing the comments on the youtube video is something scary, people saying they feel funny about something so racist. Conclusion: If it weren't for this scene, maybe I would give a score of 2 or 3, but with this scene, it can't be higher than 1. Please God have Silly Symphony really good.

Just average, with the ending telegraphed early on

[llltdesq · 6/10 · 26 September 2014]

This is a short in the Silly Symphonies series released by Disney. There will be spoilers ahead:

This short is basically a spider wandering into a toy store at midnight, bumping into some toys and playing with a toy piano and a record player, which provides the excuse for musical numbers.

The ending of the short is telegraphed in a scene fairly early in what is an otherwise plot free short. It's just a series of gags strung together by music. It feels like a short done because the contract with theaters specified a certain number of shorts and they were pressed for time, so they threw this together.

There's one gag with a dancing doll in blackface which repeatedly says "Mammy!" which likely would offend a number of people. But apart from that, there isn't much in this short which is even remotely memorable. For completists.

This short is available on the Disney Treasures More Silly Symphonies DVD set. The set is worth getting.

Probably one of the inspirations for Toy Story.

[OllieSuave-007 · 4/10 · 15 July 2018]

This is probably one of the inspirations for Toy Story - toys coming to life in a toy shop, instigated by a spider who slipped into the shop during a snowstorm. Not much of story here - just a bunch of toys going and moving about. No humor, not much entertainment - just a lot of noise.

Grade D

Not terrible but a mite offensive.

[planktonrules · 5/10 · 18 August 2011]

Before you can get to see "Cannibal Capers" and a few other 'special' cartoons on the "Walt Disney Treasures: More Silly Symphonies" DVD set, you are forced to watch an introduction by Leonard Maltin. He talks about the times in which they were made and how politically incorrect the films are. I am not against this, but hate how once you view it, you must ALWAYS view Maltin's speech again if you come back to any of the offensive cartoons. The same thing happens in some of the other Treasures DVDS--such as the second Donald Duck set.

This short has the innocuous title "Midnight in a Toy Shop" and so I was anxious to know what was politically incorrect about it. It begins with a HUGE spider sneaking into the toy shop--and I assume it's because it's snowing. Once inside, the spider bumbles into various toys, plays a piano and dances. And I continue waiting to see what's so offensive. Then, out of the blue, a black doll starts dancing and saying 'Mammy'. Well, it looks like I found the problematic scene after all! Unlike most Silly Symphony shorts, this one is practically plot less. While this is not unheard of, it keeps it from being a very good cartoon--as does the Mammy doll. It's not a terrible cartoon, but it has issues!