"A Silly Symphony"

Synopsis

A small mouse saves a butterfly from a spider's web. The butterfly turns out to be a fairy who gives the mouse one wish : to be able to fly. But his wish turns out to be not quite what he bargained for.

Characters

The Flying Mouse

The Flying Mouse's Mother

Fairy

Credits

Director : Dave Hand

Animation

Bob Kuwahara

Bob Wickersham

Fred Moore

Jack Bailey

Norm Ferguson

Videos

United States

Cartoon Classics : Limited Gold Editions : Silly Symphonies

Italy

Paperino e la Sua Banda di Paperi (1)

Paperino e la Sua banda di Paperi (2)

C'era Una Volta un Topo

Television

The Ink and Paint Club : #23 : The "Other" Mice

The Ink and Paint Club : #53 : Silly Symphonies at the Zoo

Laserdiscs

Japan

Once Upon a Mouse

DVD

Disney Treasures : Silly Symphonies

Region 1 : United States

Region 2 : France

Region 2 : Germany

Region 2 : Italy

Region 2 : Sweden

Region 2 : United Kingdom

Region 1 : United States

Dumbo

Dumbo (Big Top Edition)

Region 2 : Italy

Dumbo

Technical Specifications

Color Type : Black and white

Animation type : Standard

Sound mix : Mono

Aspect ratio : 1.37 : 1

Negative format : 35mm

Print format : 35mm

Cinematographic process : Spherical

Original language : English

Released by United Artists Pictures

Click here to submit a comment of your own.

I don't know about you, but bats and mice both make me a little nervous.

Well done, interesting cartoon - but not among my favoites. Contains the song "You're Nothin' But A Nothin'" which was released on sheet music. The main reason this isn't among my favorites is the way I perceive the "hidden philosophy." The cartoon is telling me that you shouldn't strive for something you badly want. Also don't do a good deed, you'll be punished for it. Why should this poor mouse get nothing but grief as a result of wanting to fly and saving a fairy's life. She could just as easily given him butterfly wings or bird wings. I just don't like the attitude of this short - as I perceive it.

I didn't care too much for this short. I kind of felt sorry for the poor mouse when he gets his wings so that he can fly, but it doesn't turn out to be what he wanted. He gets teased by some bats and his own family mistakes him for a bat and dashes into their pumpkin house. The fairy in this short looked a lot like the Blue Fairy from "Pinnocchio."

I liked this short. The moral of it is to be yourself and not something you are not.

Another way of looking at the moral for this short is "don't bother trying to improve yourself or be something unique, since other people won't like it." He had WINGS, for crying out loud!

We are an old couple in our 80's and can barely remember this cartoon. We had some help in finding the exact cartoon when we could not remember the source of the song "You're Nothing but a Nothing." We had gone around the house humming the tune and singing some of the words that we remembered. It was driving us crazy. None of our acquaintenances could help. We inquired from ASCAP and a really nice guy was good enough to direct us to this web site. Still haven't found the lyrics, but we're a lot wiser than we were before. Two old people made happy.

I saw this cartoon on the Wide World of Disney as a 4/5 year-old child, in 1961 or '62, and it has haunted me most of my life. He just wanted to fly, and really, what child didn't. But that song, "You're nuthin', you're nuthin', you're nuthin' but a nuthin', you're not a thing at all!" was horrific to my 4/5 year-old mind. Of course he was something! Anyone could see he was  something ... Anyway, that song lodged in my brain, erupting whenever I felt insecure about some new thing I was doing. I guess the moral of the story was supposed to be "be content with who you are--don't try to be something you're not," but I felt like the moral of the story was rather "Know your place. Don't strive for your dreams--you'll never fit in anyway."

A musical cartoon about a little mouse who wants to fly like the birds. A blue fairy grants him that wish, giving him bat-like wings, but he soon discovers that these don't bring him any luck: he is not allowed to join the xenophobic birds, not recognized by his relatives and called "a nothing" by a group of crooked bats. Luckily, the same fairy releases him from his wings and in the end we see our little hero running to his mother in the sunset light. This cartoon is one of many silly symphonies that seem to aim directly at kids and that are rather moralistic. This seems to be a strong trend in 1934 and it gradually led Disney away from brashy humour towards sugary goody-goodiness. This cartoon is quite humourless, yet beautifully drawn. The blue fairy is a good try at the human figure (if not near Snow White, let alone the blue fairy in Pinocchio) and the mice are drawn much more realistically than Mickey. Moreover, "The Flying Mouse" is another stunning example of character animation: our main hero acts out his feelings mostly in pantomime. We can feel his joy, his embarassment, his fear and his grief.

This short was on the same tape on which I saw "The China Shop" for the first time, along with a number of others (to name them all would go off topic, let's get back to this cartoon.) This short is very cute, and it has a very good moral: be yourself and don't wish to be something else. There are a few things I'd like to point out about the characters: The mice wear gloves like Mickey; but they dress in Donald Duck format (shirt but no pants.) The fairy looks slighly like the Blue Fairy in Pinnochio; but she loks even more like the godess Persephone from "The Goddess of Spring" Silly Symphony. In fact, she is pretty much just Persephone with wings. Lastly, the spider who holds the fairy captive (as a butterfly) looks a lot like W.C. Fields, don't you think? Now, I'd just like to say that when my sister saw this cartoon with me, we sang "Nothin' But a Nothin'" for a while.

I loved the scene when the mouse's sister's dress shrunk, but we don't see her at the end of the cartoon. But I know why: Well, the mother mouse dressed the sister mouse in a fancy dress so I think she went to a birthday and a sleepover party because if it was just a birthday party she would be in the end of the cartoon. This short does have a good moral in it. Moral: It is always best to be yourself.

(The following is excerpted from an interview with Dave Hand posted on Michael Barrier.com and is reprinted here with the authors permission.)

Once there was one idea I just thought was rather terrible, and I said so, and Walt fought me, and he got mad at me; and he could be rather unreasonable, at times. Of course, he was the boss, but he usually was very understanding. But not this time. So I took the idea—I didn’t want to—and went into the director’s room with it. Some time later, Walt came in and I said, "Walt, I still don’t like it." He said, "Oh, it’s a good one, Dave, you do it. Do it just the way we told it to you." So I did; believe me, I did. I worked hard to sell it to the animator, and he didn’t help. They’d just sit there and [say] "Yeah, yeah." Sometimes they wouldn’t know whether it was good or bad. The scene came out on the screen—we always had our previews, sneak previews—and the darned gag fell flat as a pancake. The next day—there was always a postmortem—I said, "Walt, I didn’t ever think that gag was any good." He said, "Jeez, Dave, you just didn’t do it right." So I mumbled to myself and thought, "You can’t win with Walt."

[The episode in question involved a scene in The Flying Mouse (1934). Hand described what happened in a letter to me in May 1975: "The mouse was being blown backward through the air, out of control. He was a sympathetic character in a sad plight. The ‘laugh’ gag was that his rear end would make a ‘bull’s eye’ into a large thorn sticking out of a rosebush stem. Now, for me, the idea itself was not funny—especially happening to a pathetic little flying mouse. But I had been previously overruled in story, so when the picture got to me, I decided to play the impaling idea down as much as possible. However, Walt caught up with me when I was getting it ready for the animator. We had more argument, and I lost. Walt insisted that I make the thorn long, dark, and sharp—and that the mouse’s rear end get buried clear up to the hilt. And further to this, that I have the music build up to a ‘screech’ accent. That poor mouse! The audience did not laugh at it, but it was one of the many instances where I found Walt to be surprisingly sadistic. He seemed to enjoy ‘hurt’ gags more than a lot of people."]