Cabaret de nuit

A Walt Disney SILLY SYMPHONY Cartoon Short.

This cartoon portrays a typical evening at the WOODLAND CAFÉ, that popular insect hot spot. A wide assortment of ugly bugs are kept entertained by apache dancers (a spider & a fly) and dancing to Big Band music.

A delightful little cartoon. The Disney animators show their versatility once again in their depiction of all things buggy. The film is also a spoof of Swing in general & Cab Calloway in particular.

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.

"Woodland Café" is a film that I am sure the Disney Corporation would like to forget about, as it hasn't aged well. Well, at least in some ways it hasn't aged well. The animation is terrific...as is the Technicolor. But the idea of making a Cotton Club for bugs starring 'black' bugs as entertainers simply is a dated stereotype...one that many today would find offensive.

By the way, the dance between the spider and the lady bug is called 'The Apache Dance'...a French dance popularized in Bohemian cafés. It is supposed to parody a fight between a pimp and one of his working girls and it is an odd choice for a kids film.

Overall, well animated but strange and easy to skip. Not bad...just not all that good either.

This short is an example of The Mouse at their best! There was a time when Disney was, without a doubt, the best there was. 1937 was a good year for Uncle Walt and his studio. With Snow White and the Seven Dwarves and shorts like this one, it was a banner year. This is a quintessential example of Silly Symphonies-a near seamless blend of music to animation. Good to see it in-print. Well worth getting. Most highly recommended.

Only in the golden age of animation would you see bugs portrayed as swingin', jivin', jazz-lovin' critters. Woodland Cafe, which was sadly among the last 10 Silly Symphony cartoons to be produced, is one of the finest cartoons I have ever seen, with it's swingin' beats, it's cool characters (they don't really need to say much to make the short fun), and the way that it's just all-around fun. Notably, if you ever somehow see it on TV (it'd take a miracle for that to happen, mind you), there is some selective editing here and there; unlike most cartoons it's hard to really pick out exactly what is edited out, except for a scene with a ladybug smoking behind a curtain. All in all, this is one of the best cartoons of the series.

Seductive for the fine - amusing portrait of a period. Not surprising but seductive for clear references, for precise irony and for imagination.