La Tierra de los Sueños

A Walt Disney SILLY SYMPHONY Cartoon Short.

A tiny dreaming tot finds he & his toy dog in LULLABY LAND, where powder puffs & rattles grow on the vegetation and potty seats march over the quilted hills. Then there's the small matter of the bogeymen...

This is an utterly charming little film, which entices the eye of the viewer to pick out all the baby motifs.

The SILLY SYMPHONIES, which Walt Disney produced for a ten year period beginning in 1929, are among the most fascinating of all animated series. 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.

A cute, round-cheeked baby's dream turns into a nightmare when he plays with the contents of a giant match box and is pursued by giant flames that when doused in water are transformed in a puff of smoke into a trio of bogey men that anticipate the Pink Elephants that go on parade a few years later in 'Dumbo'.

A hideous ginger baby is sung to sleep by his mother and imagines a surreal dreamland. The dream gradually changes from restful, to dangerous, to scary, and then back to peaceful. It's hardly a classic, and it features that hideous old Disney animation that is vivid yet aesthetically displeasing, but if you were to watch this late at night it would make you feel sleepy, so I guess it works in some weird way. There are no voices other than the disembodied singing and no recognizable Disney characters. It's directed by an uncredited Wilfred Jackson, who went on to direct Peter Pan, Cinderella, and Alice in Wonderland.

Does anyone else think that the little baby looks likes 1980s Commodore 64 character Jack the Nipper?

Walt Disney was on a role with these Silly Symphonies, letting his imagination run wild with clever and miraculous sequences of magic. Here, a baby is transported to Lullaby Land while dreaming, where we see a display of pacifiers, diapers, bottles, and blankets come to life. We also see anti-babies stuff such as scissors, knives, fountain pens, and matches, which haunt the kid and his doll dog as well.

It is nice to include some baby-themed characters in the cartoon as well, including the Boogeyman and the Sandman. Neat stuff here.

Grade B

Typical quality-animation from the 1930s Disney studio, but the baby-centric story is the big let down. The cartoon is full of diapers, safety pins, potties, a bare bottom, lullabies and sugary songs. There really is little of lasting interest here.

I've just been told by IMDb that I need at least 10 lines to get this review published. I can't really say much more about the cartoon. It's not worth too much extra comment. I will say, however, that on the DVD there is a section called "Leonard Slatkin Favourites" or something similar. This cartoon is not among his picks. Now, given that the CD is populated by minor Silly Symphonies (there are only two or three of the recognised classic Silly Symphonies), Leonard obviously thinks this one is fairly dismal.