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100 Years Of Disney Surrealism: More Than Just Fairy Tales And Princesses

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The Walt Disney Company started exactly 100 years ago on this date as the Disney Brothers Studio. While there are plenty of more conventional celebrations happening, we thought it would be fun to walk around the stranger corners of the studio’s history and highlight the most surreal moments in the Disney canon.

Surrealism isn’t probably the first word one associates with Disney, but before the company was firmly established as a purveyor of safe, family-friendly entertainment, the studio’s reputation rested on exciting feats of imagination. A press release for the Museum of Modern Art’s 1936 exhibit “Fantastic Art, Dada, and Surrealism” dubbed Mickey Mouse “the world’s best-loved Surrealist,” and Salvador Dali named Walt Disney one of the three American surrealists (alongside Cecil B. DeMille and the Marx Brothers).

For a taste of Disney at its most insane, take a look at this sequence from the underrated feature The Three Caballeros (1944). Josh Meador animates the mind-blowing bit where Donald Duck’s anatomy violently distorts to the rhythm of the music.

Surrealism has been a part of Disney’s DNA since the very beginning. The Disney cartoons of the silent era are overflowing with reality-bending sight gags, as in this delightful scene from the Oswald the Lucky Rabbit cartoon Bright Lights (1928).

The Disney shorts of the 1930s aren’t as bizarre as the Max Fleischer and Van Beuren cartoons of the same period, but they contain their fair share of dreamlike whimsy. The classic Disney cartoon Thru the Mirror (1936) is a great example of the cheerful creativity of these early shorts; Bob Wickersham’s animation of Mickey Mouse’s body segments enlarging at different speeds is wonderful.

Walt Disney was ahead of his time with Fantasia (1940), surely one of the most innovative and experimental movies ever released by a major studio. The film’s uncompromising art-for-art’s-sake ambition lost tons of money in its initial release, but teenagers and college students flocked to the film in the 1960s for its psychedelic qualities. This bit from the “Night on Bald Mountain” sequence, directed by Wilfred Jackson, is almost overwhelming in the way it hurls visual fireworks at the audience. I’m surprised the nudity in this scene got past the Production Code.

The most famous example of Disney surrealism is the gleefully deranged “Pink Elephants on Parade” sequence from Dumbo (1941), in which our hero gets wasted on booze and hallucinates transmogrifying pachyderms. This iconic sequence sums up why cartoonists should have creative freedom over cartoons. Imagine trying to pitch this scene to a committee today as part of a movie about an adorable elephant; it would be shot down immediately for being nonsensical and disturbing and not advancing the plot. So, thank goodness no committee was around to stop Norm Ferguson, Howard Swift, and the rest of the team from unleashing this unhinged work of genius onto the world. What word other than “genius” could describe an elephant formed entirely from multi-colored elephant heads?

During World War II, the Disney artists lent their boundless creativity to the war effort. In the satirical masterpiece Der Fuehrer’s Face (1943), Donald Duck has a nightmare about being a Nazi, and the numbing conformity of living under a fascist regime drives him ballistic, leading to a hallucinatory freakout. The film won the Oscar for Best Animated Short, and the anti-Adolf title song became a hit with wartime audiences. Director Jack Kinney recalled, “We heard that Hitler burned every copy he could find. We loved that.”

The all-time weirdest Disney movie is The Three Caballeros (1944), produced in conjunction with the United States’ Good Neighbor policy towards Latin America. Throughout its runtime, the film spirals deeper and deeper into madness until any semblance of a narrative spine has been obliterated. This Norm Ferguson-directed sequence where Donald Duck goes on a lust-fueled reverie is a good example of the film’s lunacy.

One of the oddest Disney cartoons is Duck Pimples (1945), an off-kilter spoof of pulpy detective stories directed by Jack Kinney. Short clips don’t do justice to the film’s stream-of-consciousness structure, in which various freaky characters pop in and disappear (sometimes literally), and backgrounds transform with each new appearance. The film’s peculiarity can probably be attributed to co-writer Virgil “VIP” Partch, a brilliant gag cartoonist who never wrote another Disney short. I particularly like the femme fatale character Pauline, who was drawn by three absolute titans of animation: Fred Moore, Marc Davis, and Milt Kahl.

Jack Kinney was the Disney director most willing to push the envelope in terms of zany Looney Tunes-style comedy. Kinney’s series of How-To cartoons with Goofy went increasingly haywire with each entry, finally reaching their pinnacle with Hockey Homicide (1945), which might be the funniest cartoon Disney ever produced. The film’s climax becomes so furiously manic that Kinney starts tossing in irrelevant stock footage to add to the chaos, including a snippet of Monstro from Pinocchio!

Disney’s “package features” of the 1940s aren’t discussed very often, but they contain some overlooked gems. The “After You’ve Gone” segment in Make Mine Music (1946), directed by effects whiz Joshua Meador, boasts terrific layouts, eye-popping colors, and a swinging soundtrack by Benny Goodman.

There’s also a standout bit of surrealism in the Jack Kinney-directed “Bumble Boogie” segment from Melody Time (1948), which is set against a jazz rendition of “Flight of the Bumblebee.” The ever-shifting visuals perfectly match the energy of Jack Fina’s boogie-woogie piano stylings.

One of my favorite Disney scenes is Clyde Geronimi’s “Blame it on the Samba” from Melody Time (1948), which is just so creative, colorful, hypnotic, and funny. Ub Iwerks’ groundbreaking effects work combining Donald Duck, José Carioca, and the Aracuan Bird with live-action organist Ethel Smith still looks stellar 75 years later.

Charles Nichols’ Pluto cartoons were generally subdued compared to the more raucous Donald Duck and Goofy shorts, so I have no idea where the outlandishly Freudian Plutopia (1951) came from. The film takes place in Pluto’s dream world, where a servant cat (voiced by Jim Backus of Mr. Magoo fame) takes sadomasochistic delight in being injured. The cat’s giddy reactions to being abused are so wrong and so hilarious. If any Disney cartoon could be described as sick, it’s this one.

Any discussion of Disney and surrealism would have to include Alice in Wonderland (1951). Walt Disney actually viewed this film as a failure, feeling it lacked heart and concluding, “The picture was filled with weird characters you couldn’t get with.” With all due respect to Walt, it’s exactly for this reason that Alice has always been one of my favorite Disney features; the film forgoes the typical love story in its fearless commitment to nonsense and introduces a host of unforgettable characters who might be crazy, might be operating on some sort of backward-logic, or might simply be messing with Alice’s head.

Ward Kimball (who animated Jiminy Cricket, Lucifer the Cat, the Mad Hatter, the March Hare, the Cheshire Cat, etc.) may have been Disney’s most brilliant animator; he was certainly the most eccentric. Walt Disney even said, “Ward is one man who works for me I am willing to call a genius.” The aliens devised by Kimball for Mars and Beyond (1957), an episode of the Disneyland tv series, are some of the wildest cartoon designs ever put to film.

And Ward Kimball’s Oscar-winning short It’s Tough to be a Bird (1969) climaxes with a crazy collage sequence that resembles a Monty Python sketch more than your average Disney film. Watch till the end for an amusing cameo.

Although Walt Disney’s tastes ran more conservative than other well-known figures of animation’s golden age like Tex Avery and Chuck Jones, he deserves kudos for allowing his artists to delve into offbeat territory. Walt was even planning a Disneyland attraction called the Museum of the Weird, which was sadly scrapped after Walt died. Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day (1968) was the last short produced by Walt Disney, and it features a nutty nightmare that serves as an amusing throwback to “Pink Elephants on Parade.”

Since Walt Disney’s death, the studio has been less receptive to surrealism, and when some off-brand oddness manages to sneak through, Disney higher-ups have tended not to be big fans. When the studio hired a young Tim Burton in the 1980s, Gary Trousdale recalls that execs “didn’t know what the hell to do with Tim. They were scared of him. So they just stuck him into an office.” He directed two shorts and a tv special before Disney fired him for “wasting company resources” with his darkly strange films. Burton’s tv film Hansel and Gretel aired for the first and only time on Halloween night in 1983 on the Disney Channel and then wasn’t seen for decades, leading to speculation that it never existed. But it resurfaced for the Tim Burton MoMA exhibit in 2009, and now you can find it online in all its twisted glory. It’s got puppets, stop-motion effects, cross-dressing, kung fu battles, and cookies that quote Rod Stewart lyrics. What more could you want?

Another oddball Disney short buried by the studio is Darrell Van Citters’ ultra-rare Fun with Mr. Future (1982). This live-action/animated hybrid was created by the team originally assigned to work on Who Framed Roger Rabbit before the job was given to Richard Williams’ studio in England. Mr. Future was screened in Los Angeles, but Disney has never once aired the film on tv or released it on video, dvd, or streaming. Thankfully, restorationist Garrett Gilchrist has uploaded a copy online. The live-action footage is amusingly kooky, while the snappy animated scenes tackle crazy futuristic concepts like personal computers.

Disney was having a bit of an identity crisis in the 1980s. One key example is Return to Oz (1985), a live-action fantasy for children that might just be the most terrifying movie ever made. The film was produced amidst multiple executive changeovers, and director Walter Murch was fired and re-hired throughout the process. The deliciously dark fantasy that resulted contains gorgeous stop-motion animation by the great Will Vinton (and this isn’t even one of the more frightening scenes in the movie).

Disney regained critical and commercial dominance during the Disney Renaissance of the 1990s. One offbeat cartoon from this period is Runaway Brain (1995), in which Mickey Mouse switches brains with a giant monster. The majority of the film was made at Walt Disney Animation France, and when director Chris Bailey returned to the States with the nearly completed film, executives Peter Schneider and Thomas Schumacher hated it; there were cuts and revisions, and apparently, the film was used internally at the studio as an example of what not to do. Even today, you won’t find the film on Disney+. Given all of the controversy, it’s really not as edgy as all that, but I assume execs didn’t like seeing Disney’s corporate mascot depicted as a rampaging monster, even in a clearly silly context.

Disney has sometimes used its subsidiary Touchstone Pictures to release risky projects like Who Framed Roger Rabbit and The Nightmare Before Christmas so as not to tarnish the Disney brand. Henry Selick’s quirky stop-motion feature James and the Giant Peach (1996) was surprisingly released by Disney proper, despite being nearly scrapped mid-production by studio chief Michael Eisner (who complained, “Who wants to see a film about a boy and a bunch of bugs? We can’t spend $30 million on this!”). After the film’s soft box-office performance, Disney shut down Skellington Productions (the studio behind Nightmare and James) and nixed Henry Selick’s next movie, Toots and the Upside Down House. Too bad, as James and the Giant Peach is an imaginative delight. Storyboard supervisor Joe Ranft bragged, “There’s truly a psychedelic undertone to it. We have a lot of surreal images.” This dream sequence in particular feels more like an arthouse film than a Disney movie.

It’s a mystery to me why Disney has hidden away Redux Riding Hood (1997), a great little cartoon by Steve Moore at Disney Television Animation in which the Big Bad Wolf uses a time machine to fix his mistakes, with absurd results. The film was screened in California and even received an Oscar nomination, but then Disney shelved it with no explanation, and it hasn’t been released in any capacity since. The same crew also completed a cartoon spoofing the three little pigs, which isn’t available anywhere (even director Steve Moore has said he doesn’t have a copy). The humor in Redux revolves around midlife crises, marital strife, and caffeine dependency, so maybe it was deemed too adult for Disney, although it’s all completely G-rated. That’s Michael Richards (Kramer from Seinfeld) voicing the wolf.

Another great short Disney doesn’t seem to know what to do with is Lorenzo (2004), a cartoon about a cat whose tail comes alive to torment him. The idea was devised by legendary Disney story artist Joe Grant all the way back in the 1940s, and Mike Gabriel picked it back up as a potential segment for the canceled feature Fantasia 2006. Walt’s nephew Roy E. Disney was a champion of Lorenzo, and Gabriel was given creative freedom to write, direct, and design the film himself. The short follows Disney’s grand tradition of lush hand-drawn character animation, but the stylized environments, dark comedy, and morbid ending are unusual for the studio.

Disney’s most overt foray into surrealism is Destino (2003), a collaboration between Walt Disney and Salvador Dali that began in 1945. Disney and Dali were good friends, and Dali worked with studio story artist John Hench for eight months on storyboards for the film. It was left unfinished due to Disney’s post-WWII financial troubles, but Roy E. Disney resurrected the project for the aborted Fantasia 2006, with Dominique Monféry serving as director. The dreamlike visuals perfectly match the achingly lovely soundtrack, recorded in the 1940s with Mexican singer Dora Luz on vocals (the same lady whose head emerged from the flower in The Three Caballeros).

I don’t associate modern-day Disney with surrealism, but Paul Rudish’s wacky Mickey Mouse shorts for the Disney Channel are an exception. These cartoons offer a fresh and stylish take on the mouse but are crammed with enough absurdist sight gags to rival the Oswald the Lucky Rabbit cartoons from a century earlier. Paul Rudish explained, “The formula has always been, we love the early Mickey Mouse cartoons from the ’20s and ’30s. We want to capture that kind of vibe, that kind of zaniness, that kind of surreal pantomime and physical humor. But we didn’t want to copy or replicate a cartoon from 1932. We wanted to step off from those sensibilities, then with the natural quality of being a modern artist, use all the tools we’ve learned along the way.”

Anyway, my hope for Disney in the next hundred years is that we see fewer live-action remakes and more opportunities for individual artists to express their idiosyncratic personalities. To finish things up, here’s Mike Jittlov’s stop-motion/pixilation short Mouse Mania (1978), created as part of a “Mickey’s 50th” tv special about a man who seeks therapy for his Mickey Mouse obsession.

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