Flowers and Trees
The first animated short in full color and the first one to win an Academy Award - Walt Disney's first of twenty-two. Also the first film (animated or otherwise) to use the three-strip Technicolor process.,While playing the makeshift harp, the shorter "strings" should produce the higher-pitched tones, while the longer "strings" should produce the lower-pitched tones. However, when the tree plays, the opposite is true.,Edited into Academy Award Review of Walt Disney Cartoons (1937),Kamennoi-Ostrow, op. 10, no. 22
(uncredited)
Written by Anton Rubinstein,A Walt Disney SILLY SYMPHONY Cartoon Short.

One beautiful Spring morning, the FLOWERS AND TREES awake to rise & shine. Two young trees, swept away by leafy bliss, carry on an arboreal romance which is threatened by the arrival of an evil-hearted old stump...

This cartoon has a cute little story, but its significance lies in the fact that it was the first cartoon produced in Technicolor. Walt had cannily entered into an exclusive contract for the use of the procedure, only the latest of a string of risky innovations he would brave. Technicolor proved to be a sensation, and FLOWERS AND TREES pointed the way to the future. It would be three more years before Mickey Mouse took the Technicolor plunge - his films were so profitable he didn't need to abandon black & white just yet - but eventually virtually all cartoons would appear in one of a handful of competing color processes.

The SILLY SYMPHONIES, which Walt Disney produced for a ten year period beginning in 1929, are among the most fascinating of all animated series. 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.,