Il brutto anatroccolo

A great short animation offering to Hans Christian Andersen text new touches, significances and nuances.

A remake , seductive for colors but especially for the echo in contemporary crisis , from social exclusion to need of love and the apparences, selfishness, migrants and the truth more significant than the misery of previews details.

So, I saw it after good decades and I saw it from different perspective , first in context of its time, then in the context of our time , dizzy , confuse and looking for sense.

So, easy to define it as loving and just precious. So, the ugly duckling and the steps to find its happiness.

A Walt Disney SILLY SYMPHONY Cartoon Short.

A gawky UGLY DUCKLING, only moments after birth, is hectored & harried from the family of ducks he was born into. Will he ever find happiness & learn his true destiny?

This is a pleasant cartoon, with the plucky personality of the protagonist firmly front & center; the by-play between the duck parents is also amusing. Based on the Hans Christian Andersen classic, it is a remake of a 1931 black & white Symphony. The SILLY SYMPHONIES ended with this film, but they went out with a bang - like 6 of its predecessors, THE UGLY DUCKLING was awarded an Oscar for Best Animation.

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.

Disney's track record for adaptations of works of literature is decidedly mixed. This version of Hans Christian Andersen's, "The Ugly Duckling" is one of the most successful ones and quite deservedly won another Oscar for Uncle Walt. It's a beautiful short on all counts-animation, backgrounds, artwork, scoring, eveything-Disney at it's best. When Disney was at their best, no one could touch them. This short does justice to one of the most well-known fairy tales of all time and almost makes up for what they did to Felix Salten's "Bambi". Almost. This one should be in-print and runs on The Ink and Paint Club. An absolute masterpiece and anyone who loves animation has got to see this one! Recommended.

'Ugly Duckling (1939)' was the final film in Disney's "Silly Symphonies" series, and was also their only remake of a previous Symphony. Wilfred Jackson's 'The Ugly Duckling (1931)' was a rather primitive black-and-white adaptation of Hans Christian Anderson's famous tale, which drastically altered the original story to make (at least in my interpretation) a rather touching plea for racial tolerance. Jack Cutting's 1939 film is considerably more polished, animated in vivid Technicolor that speaks to the extraordinary degree of prestige that Walt Disney's company enjoyed throughout the 1930s. It is also considerably more faithful to Anderson's story, following the "ugly duckling" around the pond as he attempts to find his place in society. Unlike the 1931 duckling, which was somewhat grotesquely, Cutting's version is cute and likable, if a bit gawky compared to his ostensible siblings. Nevertheless, either bird, however handsomely they are drawn, will immediately capture your heart with their wide-eyed innocence, amplified tenfold by the persecution that they much endure for simply being "different."

The duckling's hatching causes much consternation at the adult ducks' nest, with the father understandably anxious that his wife has apparently given birth to a youngster that quite obviously didn't inherit his genes. After being unceremoniously banished from the duck family, the "ugly duckling" strikes out alone, desperate to find somewhere where he can be accepted for who he is. Glancing down into his reflection on the pond surface, in one of the short's most touching moments, the duckling sees his own reflection, hideously distorted by the water ripples, and breaks into tears. Fortunately, a happy ending is just around the corner, and the duckling's lonely honks of despair are answered in kind by a family of swans, who immediately take our hero under their wing, so to speak. Unfaultable in terms of animation, music and characterisation, 'Ugly Duckling' is a touching celebration of accepting and savouring one's own differences, and was justly awarded with an Oscar for Best Animated Short Film, Disney's seventh Silly Symphony to do so.

The last of the "Silly Symphonies","The Ugly Duckling" demonstrates the heights that Walt Disney and his artists had reached by the late 1930s and early 1940s. In just eight or nine minutes, and without a word of dialogue, we are presented with Hans Andersen's wistful fairy-tale. Exquisite drawings by animators including Milt Kahl and Eric Larson (both of whom would provide major contributions to the feature-length "Bambi")and lush watercolour layouts by David Hilberman combine with elegant camera movement and a lilting score by Albert Hay Malotte to create a miniature jewel of animation. The scene where the little duckling plays affectionately with the wooden decoy duck because it is the only thing in the world not to reject it, is one of the saddest in all cinema. The great Warner Bros animator Chuck Jones acclaimed "The Ugly Duckling" as one of the greatest short subjects ever made - and indeed, it is.