Birds of a Feather

A Walt Disney SILLY SYMPHONY Cartoon Short.

It is a beautiful day, and the BIRDS OF A FEATHER of the forest & farmyard are romancing their mates and tending to their young. That is, until a rapacious raptor comes on the scene & carries off a baby chick...

This black & white cartoon is another example of how important music (often classical) was to the Symphonies.

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.

I do enjoy the Silly Symphonies, having grown up with most of them, and I even would call some of them masterpieces. Birds of a Feather is not one of the masterpieces to me, but it isn't a piece of whatever either. For the first half of the cartoon the action is cute yet uneventful. The second half picks up the pace, and while not exceptional by all means there is signs of a story. I did like that in a sense, but in terms of the cartoon itself it was rather uneven, Birds of a Feather preferably should've been plot less the whole time or had a story throughout, two halves that had one or the other didn't completely mix for me. Some of the sequences of the first half are also rather slow-moving and basically just birds dancing and chirping to the music. However, the music is truly lovely, the birds are cute and the dancing while not much standout-worthy is well-choreographed. But the best asset was the animation, fluid and smooth with some very well done sequences, such as the opening part with the swans on the lake, the- different-bird-on-every-limb sequence, the birds flying in formation and dive bombing the hawk, how the peacock displays its feathers and the sophisticated idea of a group of baby chicks weave in and out of the mother hen's legs. Overall, nothing really special, but the animation and music are worth looking out for. 7/10 Bethany Cox

This black & white Silly Symphony cartoon is exactly the sort of cartoon I completely hated as a child. Instead of edgy or funny characters, it was chock-full of cutesy animals--tons of sweet birds. In addition, it had LOTS of music--with the animals all swaying to the music. In other words, it was practically plot-less. Only later in the film when a clichéd 'evil' bird attacks is there any action, as the nice birds all band together to thwart evil. Sheesh! What a boring cartoon!! Although I adore early Disney cartoons, occasionally they came up with a lame one here or there...and this is certainly one of them. Unfortunately, this sort of saccharine was pretty popular with other cartoon makers in the 30s--particularly the Harmon-Ising cartoons. When I was a kid, they showed them on TV a lot and all my friends and I hated them. Fortunately, they have mostly been shelved in favor of better toons. Don't you and your kids deserve better?

By the way, I noticed a score of 10 for this cartoon. While I totally respect the other reviewer's right to score it this high, they give 10s to all Disney cartoons. I, on the other hand, am more demanding and grouchy when it comes to these shorts. I've given a few 10s and 9s to some Silly Symphonies--so I am not impossible to please!

Hiya! So this pretty average Silly Symphony naturally features birds of various kinds as they glide, swoop, peck and strut their feathered stuff around a lake and through the trees to a merry music theme, and all is happy until a fearsome bird of prey snatches one of the chicken chicks, of which they must all swiftly work together to rescue before it's too late! The first part of the short is very simple and routine stuff with birds doing bird things to a repeating musical beat that has a nice rhythm and has a kind of a chorus with a bird chirping three times, all cute but nothing special, but it does pick up and get better in the second half when all the birds are swarming and dive bombing the mean hawk who was only out for a bite to eat! I thought the animation of that scene was the best in the short, it was very fluid and fast moving, remarkably similar to how a real large flock of birds look when they're way up in the sky. It did have a strong finish but that wasn't enough to make this short good for me. These earlier Silly Symphonies are basically all the same, a group of whatever are happy and then a menace of some sort appears that they gotta overcome and then they're happy again, not a bad recipe at all for the impressionable young minds of yesteryear but in my opinion in retrospect the Symphonies like these only really serve to remind you of everything they did so much better just a few years later on with shorts like The Ugly Duckling, and Birds in the Spring to name a few similar. To me a big part of the enjoyment of this series is seeing the craft of the animation slowly evolve and grow as you progress through it. This one's okay but it's nothing too great and it's definitely no gem of the series, the music verges on repetitive and the birds are a bit too cartoony, they hadn't got the hang of them yet. Yet another enjoyable but uninspired mere stepping stone of a Symphony on the path to the true greatness that this wonderful series of animations had to offer, fly free you precious little Symphony! X

There's not much story to this very early black-and-white cartoon. It's just more of an animation showcase featuring birds going about their business - singing, preening, paddling etc.

One of the baby ducks even says "meep meep", long before Warner created the famous Roadrunner. A hawk (or vulture or something) swoops down to steal a chick for dinner, but as usual cartoons never portray the bloody carnage of real life so the bird eventually flies off with an empty tummy.

The sound design and music give the short a little extra dimension, though other than that it is way to primitive to have any sort of lasting appeal.