Frolicking Fish (1930)

Why so much hype?

It's entirely possible that sending the audience out feeling lousy was intentional

While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

It's a movie as timely as it is provocative and amazingly, for much of its running time, it is weirdly funny.

There's not a lot to recommend this one. With a musical score and some percussion, we go to the bottom of the sea and watch a series of sea creatures cavort. There are mostly fish jigging around. We also get a creative lobster and an octopus. Like so many of these, we have coordinated dance sequences featuring the stars of the show. It is interesting but gets old quite quickly.

I do enjoy, and in most cases, love the Silly Symphonies. Frollicking Fish is better than El Terrible Toreador, The Merry Dwarfs and Cannibal Capers, but it is not one of my favourites like Father Noah's Ark, Skeleton Dance, The Band Concert, The Old Mill and Flowers and Trees. The animation is suitably dynamic and smooth, the music is lovely and energetic and the dancing is niftily choreographed. But at the end of the day, it is a virtually plot less cartoon, with nothing that comes across as funny, a lack of crispness in the pacing and apart from the octopus who is a remarkable creation there are no characters that are properly engaging. Overall, nice but nothing special. 6/10 Bethany Cox

In the late 1920s, Walt Disney started a series of cartoons labeled "Silly Symphonies". These shorts did not feature the usual Disney characters but consisted of various animals or bugs (in most cases) moving about to the music. While the style is pretty antiquated compared to later cartoons, they're pleasant and a lot better than the competition--who started copying Disney with similarly named shorts (such as Merry Melodies and Happy Harmonies)."Frolicking Fish" is pretty typical of these films in many ways. While it is odd that it features fish, the rest is pure Silly Symphonies. Cutesy creatures dance about and frolic. However, the fun is cut short when an evil creature (in this case an octopus, but in others it's a cat or bear or bird or some other nasty) appears and wants to do harm to the super-cute folks of the sea. Fortunately, the fish it pursues is pretty handy and the day is saved....huzzah! Overall, while not terribly original, it's pleasant and easy to watch.

A Walt Disney SILLY SYMPHONY Cartoon Short.The FROLICKING FISH at the bottom of the ocean are having a wonderful day, swimming & darting about. The arrival of a hungry octopus, however, seriously threatens to disrupt their fun...With virtually no plot to speak of, this black & white cartoon is another exercise in action/reaction animation.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.