Noah's Ark

This is a super-strange and highly creative short from Disney--and it looks nothing like a Disney production. That's because it is NOT hand-drawn animation but stop-motion! Well, evidently, the Oscar people liked it, as they nominated this film for Best Animated Short.

The story is a pretty traditional retelling of the story of Noah's Ark. However, it includes peppy music (Dixieland, jazz and rock 'n roll) and VERY weird animals. That's because there is no attempt to make them look realistic! The animals consist of various objects, such as funnels, bottles, eggs, pipe cleaners, corks, pencils and other strange materials. It's weird but also pretty cool how they were able to use the materials the way they did. You just have to see it to believe it.

A Walt Disney Cartoon.

After a musical voyage, the rather peculiar passengers on NOAH'S ARK find a safe refuge.

This highly imaginative cartoon is told almost entirely using stop-motion animation. What makes it especially unusual & fun is that the characters, human and animal, are constructed out of odds 'n' ends: corks, pipe cleaners, pencils, forks, hair pins, etc. giving the well known Biblical tale a sense of whimsy. Then, there's the female hippo that sings the blues...

Jerome Courtland is the narrator; among the other voices can be heard those of Paul Frees (as Noah) and Thurl Ravenscroft.

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 storm of naysayers, 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 always pay off.

I really can't find any fault with this atypical Disney cartoon, which is directed by Bill Justice and presented in the stop-motion format. Noah and his sons, his wife, their wives, and the various animals, are made out of various objects including clothes pegs, pipe cleaners, and so on, and although unusual, this works well.

Primitive shots of a model ark rattling around on the high seas can be forgiven in the hippo's torch song, the elephants, the ostriches, the crocodiles, the porcupines, the cats, the dogs, the mice, and the horses brought above the ark. All have their own personalities and are memorable.

Good to watch alongside the Silly Symphony which presented the same story ('Father Noah's Ark') some twenty years earlier, just to see how inspiration can strike animators in many different ways.

Unusual, charming and unique in the Disney portfolio, 'Noah's Ark' is definitely worth a look.

This cartoon was nominated for an Oscar in 1959. The animation style is stop-motion, almost a Puppetoon type of animation. This is the only cartoon from Disney that I recall ever seeing. It certainly is not your typical Disney cartoon. The music is all over the board-there's even some pretty good blues in here. Worth chasing down to see at least once. Runs infrequently on the Disney Channel during "Vault Disney" in the wee hours of the morning.

Walt Disney gives the Noah's ark story some fun treatment here as he and his sons have to construct and water-tight boat then populate it with a pair of just about everything from an aardvark to a zebra. A torrent ensues and Noah decides to have a dance to take everyone's mind of things - and that's when we get a niftily constructed ditty from "Harriet Hippo" warning never to mention thermidor to a lobster. Then the rain stops and Mount Ararat beckons. The subject matter gives the animators pretty much carte blanche to use everything from a clothes peg to a ball of cotton wool to represent the construction, effective storm sequence and finally the creatures who make the journey. The whole thing is sung in rhyme, and for the most part that works quite well delivering an engagingly jolly representation of the old testament tale of God when he is a bit narked. Curious they all seem to have made it home afterwards, too!