Woodland Café (1937)

A cleverly animated and fun cartoon featuring of bunch of insects and bugs out on the town one night, singing and dancing, as well as watching a live theater featuring a villainous spider and a damsel-in-distress fly. The fireflies serving as light bulbs are also a clever touch.Grade B-

More like a woodland nightclub.This short features bugs on a night out in a tree filled with centipede waiters, grasshopper bands, and spider theater villains. The entire short is fueled by the music, which is typical of the Silly Symphonies brand, but while it initially showed a little bit of promise it got boring in the middle. Without a single character to focus on and to tell a story with many Silly Symphonies end up being quite forgettable.The animation is bright, colorful, and imaginative, and it even has a bit of dialogue/singing from the Jazz-singing grasshoppers. There's not much to it other than this.

As someone who loves or at least really likes a vast majority of the Disney Silly Symphonies, Woodland Cafe was always one of those that fascinated me as a kid and I still have a lot of affection for it now. The definite highlight for me was definitely the music, although I have always found the music consistently great in the Silly Symphonies I don't think I have seen a Silly Symphony in a while that has had music as upbeat and catchy as Woodland Cafe. The dancing and choreography are just as fun and energetic, really makes you wish you were there too doing the same thing. The animation is wonderful, with beautifully coloured backgrounds and the bugs are equally vibrant and engaging. It is difficult to pick a favourite scene(or even a couple) when everything just grabbed your attention all the way through, though the scenes when a waiter pulls a stem off a cherry and pours the juice out into glasses for an elderly bee and with the show between the female fly and the male spider always did stand out. I have seen the issue of the stereotypes being raised on numerous occasions. I won't deny it, the characters are stereotypical, but considering that the cartoon is a spoof on the "Harlem" musicals of the time and that I didn't find them offensive at all(in fact they were somewhat affectionate to me), that wasn't a problem. So in conclusion, a cartoon that I have always found fascinating and still love to this day. 10/10 Bethany Cox

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.