I'm planning to stream all 75 Silly Symphonies chronologically in a few days, so naturally they've been on the brain.

As such, I decided to do another Twitter thread looking at one of my favorites. This time around it's... Playful Pan!

I really like this opening shot. Pan's design is pretty crude, but between his flute-playing and the fishes' attention to it, there's an immediate charm to the cartoon that draws me in.

Pan takes us on a whimsical romp across the lake, timed perfectly with his flute music. This whole sequence (which lasts twice as long as the clip I'm showing) is a huge inspiration to me. This marriage of animation and music is a technique I always try to employ in my work.

Now on land, Pan's music charms the flowers too! I love the timing of this sequence. If you look carefully, Pan's not only pointing to the flowers in time to the music... his bouncing is timed perfectly to the tempo too! Fantastic stuff.

The music gets appropriately wiggly along with a worm's dance.

Simple but nevertheless cute gag of a caterpillar's individual segments separating and doing a goofy dance.

Some clouds join in, bounce their butts together, and... uh oh!

The slide whistle used to punctuate the lightning bolt sawing the tree in half is pretty silly, and it gets a good laugh outta me!

From a technical standpoint, it's actually pretty remarkable too for the time. While the motion is subtle, the sawed half of the tree falls and rotates in 3D space. It seems evident here that there was an effort to animate the tree somewhat realistically.

Some nice animation on the fire as the forest goes ablaze.

RIP.

Obligatory Disney butt moment.

I also love the tree's grin of satisfaction.

And if you haven't guessed by now, this sudden fire is what the second half of the short focuses on. Will the entire forest burn down?! Let's find out...

The forest critters try (but are unable) to extinguish the fire themselves.

We're treated to a few gag pieces involving the animals' evacuation. Here's my favorite, where the fire claims most of an unfortunate owl's feathers.

Two butt moments in one cartoon?! This short's on fire!

... wait...

I *love* this far shot. We've got all this background chaos, what with the forest burning up and all and the animals trying to flee... and then this moose swims by in the foreground and makes a stupid noise.

Finally, a raccoon alerts Pan of the chaos.

Pan plays his flute (a la the Pied Piper) and charms the fire away from what remains of the trees. I love that despite the flames' intent to wreck everything in their path, even they have an innate obligation to obey Pan.

One by one, the flames are all extinguished...

... except for one little rascal who's not quite as cooperative.

Finally, Pan outsmarts the last of the flames and order is restored to the forest!

I chose my childhood taping of this short for that last clip, because I think the wear and tear is a great testament to how much I loved cartoons like this at such a young age.

So what do I think of this short as a whole?

On the surface level, it's a pretty simple story. Pan leads a forest in a song and dance number, fire breaks out, Pan saves the day. But I think a lot of the short's overall strength lies in its milestones and technical achievements.

For one, it's an early venture into storytelling for the Disney studio. It's not a *huge* story granted, but it's one of their first shorts to truly utilize music as a storytelling device.

It also makes great use of the three act storytelling structure.

1 - Mythological god Pan charms the forest with his pan flute.
2 - Animals make a futile attempt to extinguish a resulting forest fire.
3 - Pan's music charms the flames and saves the day.

Back to the music, I especially like how it plays a key role *in* the story itself. Most preceding Disney shorts used these dance routines as sort of an act break before the story resumes, but the routine in Playful Pan is the rhyme and reason for everything that follows.

As I said at the beginning of this thread, the constant marriage of animation and music shown here is a technique I *adore*. It lends itself to a special kind of animation magic that can keep me captivated in front of the screen for hours on end.

Playful Pan as a whole represents many of the key values in animation that I hold with high importance. One might even consider it a key stepping stone for the many great Silly Symphonies that followed afterwards.

Playful Pan is a very charming seven minutes, and I'm always delighted to revisit it.