Two Silly Symphonies: Day #364 - The Flying Mouse (1934) & Elmer Elephant (1936)
Viewed December 30, 2006
Well, one last time, I sat down to watch some shorts, since I had waited so long to watch my movie of the day. This time, I watched the shorts available as extras on my DVD of Dumbo, both titles that would seem to have influenced the film about the elephant who could fly. The Flying Mouse and Elmer Elephant each have similarities to Dumbo: the first has the theme of an animal not meant to being able to fly and the other shows the value of overcoming ridicule (with an elephant in the lead, to boot).
The Flying Mouse is a typical Silly Symphony, with a simple moral about appreciating who you are. A young mouse dreams of flying and is granted his wish after performing a good deed for a fairy (who looks like a butterfly). Once he has the wings, he finds he no longer fits in anywhere except among other flying rodents (i.e. bats). He gets into a lot of troublesome situations and realizes his mistake in chooses a life that alienates his family and friends. Not exactly an earth-shatteringly convincing argument, but entertaining nontheless.
Elmer Elephant is much better. Elmer, who has a crush on Tillie Tiger, attends her birthday party, where he is mercilessly mocked by the other animals while Tille is away. Leaving dejected, he meets a friendly, older giraffe, who points out that it’s not important what others think of you if you are happy with yourself. Then, when a fire breaks out, Elmer and the giraffe rush to the rescue, showing not only Elmer’s personal strength, but also the practical value of his long nose. This one resonates a bit better, as almost everyone has some experience of being humiliated in front of a large group of people and wishing for an opportunity to not only prove them wrong, but come out on top in the end. That Tillie is shown to have always liked him (she doesn not participate in the mocking) means that her faith in him is justified, rather than her having a change of heart as is so common in these kinds of things.
Both of these shorts show the Disney studio when they were at the peak of the popularity of their shorts series, before they began to focus on their feature films. While neither is strong enough to be considered one of the great classics of the era, they still show that even the simple, workaday shorts, devoid of any of their marquee characters can still be immensely entertaining.