The Song of the Birds

If you don't mind the ethical message and religious overtones thrown in your face, Song of the Birds has some really sweet stuff worth seeing. A young boy thrilled with his new gun shoots a baby bird. When the bird falls down dead, our dear boy is horrified with what he's done, and prays to God to make things right. I won't give away the oh-so hard to guess ending, but happiness abounds and a lesson is learned by all. Some might be turned off by the sappiness, but the animation is fantastic and the characters are all extraordinarily appealing.

The music and animation in Song of the Birds is very beautiful and

colorful, as almost always can be expected from a Fleischer

production. In this case, the production is in Technicolor, with

some gorgeous backgrounds (some in 3-D). Character design is

also very good. I personally find the film to be very dark. A baby

bird gets shot by a menacing little red-haired kid (like Junior of the

Betty Boop films, only innately evil). The birds all have a very

Gothic funeral for the little thing and the tyke is so tormented by

their harmonious wailing that he gets down on his knees and

prays for his wrong to be righted. And so it is. There's a "happy"

ending with one final shot that really makes you wonder.

In the late 20s and through the 30s, Disney won an awful lot of awards for its Silly Symphony line of cartoons. Unlike the more successful (and often more enjoyable) Mickey Mouse cartoons, these cartoons did not have recurring characters and they mostly involved music and singing. Many are amazingly artistic, a few are insipid. However, this spurred on copycats from other studios--and they seldom even came close to the Disney films. The worst thing about these copycats is that they often were ultra-cutesy and nauseating...and "The Song of the Birds" is certainly no exception.

First off, you won't mistake this Fleischer Brothers film with a Disney one for two obvious reasons. Disney held a monopoly on the use of Three Color Technicolor--the first true all color film process. Other studios making color films had to use various types of two color systems--such as Cinecolor and Two Color Technicolor. So, instead of a full spectrum of colors, the colors were all combinations of orange and green...and the cartoons look a bit odd as a result. Additionally, the animation, while comparable to most other studios clearly was not up to Disney standards.

The cartoon itself is an awful and preachy mess. A little bird fledges from the nest and a brain-addled little boy (who apparently can only giggle...perhaps due to a cerebral injury) shoots the bird. The kid is sorry and the mommy and daddy bird come and there's lots of tears and singing and...well...yecch!! Preachy nonsense if you ask me and the only reason it earns a 2 is that the animation isn't bad. Otherwise, this is a terrible film...one best shown to prisoners to punish them for serious rule infractions! Or, it can be shown to guys on Death Row to encourage them to either take their own lives or give up making appeals!! Sadly the 1930s was full of this sort of tripe--and most studios made a ton of them.

While some may find their cartoons thin on plot, cloying and too sugary sweet, to me Fleischer were responsible for some brilliant cartoons, some of them still among my favourites. Their visual style was often stunning and some of the most imaginative and ahead of its time in animation.

'The Song of the Birds' is not quite one of their best, but it still has a lot of what makes Fleischer's cartoons work for me and many others in the first season. It was "re-made" in 1949 as a Little Audrey cartoon with the same title, that cartoon is one of the best and most different Little Audrey cartoons and every bit as good as this, perhaps even better due to being more elaborate and even more moving.

Even in the weaker Fleischer cartoons, the animation was always very good (often even more than that) and actually saved lesser cartoons from faring worse. It is rich and colourful, with very meticulous and beautifully drawn backgrounds and well-rendered character designs that don't look too stiff. The music is courtesy of Sammy Timberg and, like with Winston Sharples in the Little Audrey cartoon, it is hard not to love the lusciousness of the orchestration here and how characterful, atmospherically dark and whimsical the music was without going overboard in either, even better was how well it fitted in the cartoon and how it merged with the action.

For Fleischer, 'The Song of the Birds' is a dark and mournful cartoon, and often heart-wrenching. Instead of being too over-sentimental and over-didactic, it's powerful stuff with its messaging conveyed simply and effectively with no trivialising.

The boy is charming enough and actually looks like he's learnt from his mistakes, as well as affected by them, at the end, while the birds break the heart. Structurally the story is thin but the atmosphere and emotions are incredibly rich.

In conclusion, very moving and wonderful cartoon. 9/10 Bethany Cox