''Merbabies'' is a ''

Silly Symphonies ''Silly Symphony'' is an American animation, animated series of 75 musical short films produced by Walt Disney Animation Studios, Walt Disney Productions from 1929 to 1939. As the series name implies, the ''Silly Symphonies'' were originally inte ...

animated Animation is a method by which still figures are manipulated to appear as moving images. In traditional animation, images are drawn or painted by hand on transparent celluloid sheets to be photographed and exhibited on film. Today, most anim ...

Disney The Walt Disney Company, commonly known as Disney (), is an American multinational mass media and entertainment conglomerate headquartered at the Walt Disney Studios complex in Burbank, California. Disney was originally founded on October ...

short film A short film is any motion picture that is short enough in running time not to be considered a feature film. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences defines a short film as "an original motion picture that has a running time of 40 minutes ...

. It was released on December 9, 1938. It is a collaboration between Walt Disney and

Harman and Ising Hugh Harman and Rudolf Ising were an American animation team known for founding the Warner Bros. and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer animation studios. Early history Harman and Ising first worked in animation in the early 1920s at Laugh-O-Gram Studio, W ...

, the latter studio having donated artists to Disney to work on the production of ''

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" is a 19th-century German fairy tale that is today known widely across the Western world. The Brothers Grimm published it in 1812 in the first edition of their collection ''Grimms' Fairy Tales'' and numbered as Ta ...

'' (1937). It is one of the last shorts of the ''Silly Symphonies'' series.

Plot

A large number of identical redheaded "merbabies" materialize out of the crashing surf and are summoned to a playground on the ocean floor for an underwater circus in which marine creatures such as

seahorse A seahorse (also written ''sea-horse'' and ''sea horse'') is any of 46 species of small marine fish in the genus ''Hippocampus''. "Hippocampus" comes from the Ancient Greek (), itself from () meaning "horse" and () meaning "sea monster" or " ...

s and

starfish Starfish or sea stars are star-shaped echinoderms belonging to the class Asteroidea (). Common usage frequently finds these names being also applied to ophiuroids, which are correctly referred to as brittle stars or basket stars. Starfish ...

also take part, beginning with a parade. When a

whale Whales are a widely distributed and diverse group of fully aquatic placental marine mammals. As an informal and colloquial grouping, they correspond to large members of the infraorder Cetacea, i.e. all cetaceans apart from dolphins and ...

blows all the merbabies to the surface inside bubbles, they disappear into the waves from which they came.Merbabies
. ''www.bcdb.com'', July 1, 2014

Notes

* This is the only

short to be outsourced to the Harman-Ising Studio.

Home media

The short was released on the DVD of '' The Little Mermaid II: Return to the Sea'' and again on December 19, 2006, on '' Walt Disney Treasures: More Silly Symphonies, Volume Two''.

References

External links

* *
Video
1938 films 1938 short films 1938 animated films 1930s fantasy comedy films 1938 musical comedy films 1930s Disney animated short films Silly Symphonies Animated films without speech Animated musical films Fictional mermen and mermaids Films directed by Rudolf Ising Films scored by Scott Bradley American musical comedy films 1930s American films {{Disney-animation-film-stub