Pastoral 2: Color and Sound

It seems that I’m not done with Disney’s Pastoral. I want to think about Disney’s palette in the Pastoral in this post and I’m planning another post on the dance sequence.

It’s not simply that the colors are often garishly saturated. They’re often unnatural as well, and the forms are highly stylized, as we see in the next five frame-grabs. The first two come quite early in the film, shortly after the establishing shot of Mount Olympus at dawn. The next two are near the end of the first segment while the last comes early in the courtship segment.

I’ve decided that there’s more here than simple exploration and extension of visual possibilities, though there is that.

The imagery in the Pastoral episode is the most highly stylized imagery in the film, even more than the Ave Maria. And one cannot help but be aware of it: Whoa! Those colors, those shapes! Disney establishes this awareness early and definitively in the episode.

And he amplifies that awareness in the last segment, where a rainbow appears after the storm. Disney revels in that rainbow. It’s the main event in the sequence. The visual point of rainbows, of course, is color, and color is what images are made of, color and form. Notice how Disney has the characters work with the color:

Look closely at the wine Bacchus is drinking; it has all the colors of the rainbow. He’s drinking the color.

Now the cherubs and the young horses take flight into the rainbow.

They’ll play IN the color for 45 seconds or so, which is a substantial length of time. Disney works hard to immerse us in the color.

Yet it’s not simply that these children are playing in color. We’re also to notice that it’s the young horses playing with cherubs. Why’s that significant? Because the cherubs have an ambiguous place in the episode.

They appear in the second sequence, the courtship sequence. They observe the courting, but they also participate in it, creating hats for the centaurettes and, at the end, making a match. They’re outside the main action, but manage it and comment on it.

At the very end of the sequence, when the match has been made, the cherubs draw a curtain across the scene. Where did that curtain come from? Do such curtains hang around here and there in the Elysian Fields? Perhaps. And perhaps Disney is just having the cherubs step outside the scene entirely as a way of marking a sharp transition to the next sequence, the Bacchanal. In so doing, of course, he pushes the audience out of the scene as well, making us aware of the staginess of it all.

It’s the cherubs that do that. They’ll reappear in the storm segment, where they flee, cower, and hide. And they reappear here, at the end, where they play with young winged horses. Now they’re thoroughly ‘inside’ the action and thus inside the film. They’ve assumed the same status as the horses. By linking these two sets of characters together in the midst of rainbow color Disney is, in effect, intermixing the ‘inside’ (the flying horses) and the ‘outside’ (the cherubs) of his fictional world, the imaginary events and our awareness THAT they are imaginary.

It’s not simply that Disney is going ‘meta’, breaking the fourth wall as he does when the cherubs draw the curtain, but he’s playing around while doing so. If you will, he’s flirting with us, and with his characters.

And that, I suggest, is how we are to understand those moments where it is as though part of Beethoven’s score is being played by an onscreen character. By breaking the ‘wall’ between the characters and the soundtrack, Disney calls attention to the music itself and to the conventionalized relationship between music and visible action.

There’s a particularly interesting case of this motif in the Bacchanal, just before the dance. A red runner is being unrolled up steps toward Bacchus’s throne:

But no one seems to be unrolling the carpet. Rather, the fauns at lower left are playing horns, and the carpet unrolls as they play and advance up the stairs themselves. Thus the sound itself is affecting the physical world, which is a bit different from the cherubs using sounds to entice a centaur and centaurette to one another. That music CAN work in THAT way, such understanding is well conventionalized. That music can unroll a carpet up the stairs, THAT’s something that happens only in Cartoonland.

Which, of course, is where we are.

Just before the Pastoral Disney had that intermission episode in which we saw the correspondence between musical sound and visual images. That, I suppose, is not so much that the sound caused the image, but that the sound and the image are both manifestations of the same thing. Then there’s the opening episode, Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor. As I observed in my post on that episode:

... the changes in the imagery are synchronized to the music. The sparkles, bows, waves, disks, and so forth, move in time to the music. Transitions between one type of imagery and another are synchronized with the transition from one musical phrase to another. To the extent that it makes sense to talk of causality in this fantastic world, it is the music that drives motion in the imagery and causes one type of imagery to give way to another.

There’s an echo of that effect in the relationship between the fauns’ horn playing and the unrolling carpet.

Thus in this episode Disney calls our attention both to color and to music, the dual substance of his art while at the same time unfolding a sexually charged panorama of domestic life. It’s an astonishing conception. Perhaps a bit overwrought, but nonetheless astonishing.

As for the cuteness, I’ve almost forgotten about it. Almost.