The Busy Beavers (1931) User Reviews

Early Disney Animation

[Ron Oliver · 7/10 · 4 September 2000]

A Walt Disney SILLY SYMPHONY Cartoon Short.

Toiling together, THE BUSY BEAVERS have devised many ingenious ways to complete their dam. After retiring to their lodges, a mighty flood threatens to wipe out all their hard work. Only one lone beaver has the energy to save the day...

This black & white entry in the series is an exercise in dealing with the movement of light & dark forms; action & reaction.

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.

Pretty Dam Good!!

[Hitchcoc · 7/10 · 30 November 2018]

This focuses on a colony of beavers, making their lodges and building a dam. They work together in a sort of rodent assembly line. They use all available materials and are successful until mother nature steps in. It's pretty typical of the Disney musical presentations of the the time.

Not too much to see here, just beavers.

[OllieSuave-007 · 5/10 · 2 July 2018]

There is really not too much to see here, just a bunch of beavers working through the beat of the whimsical music. There were a few clever sound and visual effects, but not much in exciting entertainment value. The only remotely exciting scene is one of the beavers trying to stop a flood from occurring.

Grade C-

Nice beavers

[CuriosityKilledShawn · 2 September 2013]

As with "Birds of a Feather", another black and white 1931 Silly Symphony, this short mainly features beavers going about their daily business building a dam, moving and working to the beat and rhythm of the music. The beavers themselves are kinda cute and look like distant cousins of early Mickey.

It's an animation showcase that is still mildly impressive, but mostly forgettable as the primitive nature neuters its lasting appeal. I understand that these type of shorts were animated by very small amount of people, sometimes just a crew of two, and that they were pioneers of sorts, but that doesn't make the actual content a classic. The flood animation looks good however.

Bad

[kaicesbr · 2/10 · 15 July 2023]

Continuing my marathon of Disney shorts but as they are almost always not available on Disney plus I have to hunt on YouTube. First time watching as usual. Amazing how I get bored with 6 minutes watching these Silly Symphony shorts, they are extremely bad and monotonous, rare exceptions are not like that. Conclusion: As much as the Mother Goose Melodies short didn't amuse me, I thought the shorts were about to get more interesting but apparently I was wrong, it went back to being mediocre and bad. Watched on July 14, 2023.

Continuing my marathon of Disney shorts but as they are almost always not available on Disney plus I have to hunt on YouTube. First time watching as usual. Amazing how I get bored with 6 minutes watching these Silly Symphony shorts, they are extremely bad and monotonous, rare exceptions are not like that. Conclusion: As much as the Mother Goose Melodies short didn't amuse me, I thought the shorts were about to get more interesting but apparently I was wrong, it went back to being mediocre and bad. Watched on July 14, 2023.

Nice animation and some cute gags carry this one

[llltdesq · 8/10 · 5 October 2014]

This is another short in the Silly Symphonies series produced by Disney. There will be spoilers ahead:

Just the barest of plots to this one, as a group of beavers are shown in the building of a dam. For some reason, these beavers yip like little dogs. They go about their routine looking for all the world like workers at a construction site. One pretends to be a wheelbarrow after another loads up its back, leaves on sticks resemble hod carriers and so on.

There are some really nice gags in here on the process of selecting and collecting the materials with which to build the dam. One beaver actually rides a chopped down tree (complete with an unhappy owl) down the river, using its tail as a motor to speed through the water and using the poor owl as a whistle.

The highlight of the cartoon is the flood sequence, which is beautifully animated. The wall of water eventually takes out the dam in spite of the best efforts of the creative little beaver who perturbed the owl. It eventually becomes the hero when it comes up with an effective way to dam the river. The ending is cute.

This short is available on the Disney Treasures Silly Symphonies DVD set and this cartoon and the set are worth tracking down. Most recommended.

This is another entry in a long-running series of . . .

[pixrox1 · 5/10 · 23 October 2021]

. . . 1930's documentary shorts illustrating the shortcomings of the Kansas City school system. The Dizzy Corporation apparently tricked one or more products of this notorious diploma mill into committing to film their complete lack of even rudimentary understanding in core curriculum subjects such as Biology, Music and Art. THE BUSY BEAVERS bark like dogs and behave like clueless cats. Told that there's a bird in this story, the bewildered owl merely asks "W-H-O-O-O?"

While not being one of the best, this Silly Symphony was delightful in my eyes

[TheLittleSongbird · 8/10 · 7 July 2012]

Of course, The Busy Beavers is not perfect, the character designs of the beavers are unappealing and don't really stand out and it is virtually plot less with not as many individual standout scenes as other cartoons of the time and after. However, the backgrounds are very smooth and crisp, the music is catchy and beautifully matches the animation and vice versa and the sound effects are really very clever and enhance the music rather than disrupting from it. The sight gags and the inventive ways of working to build the dam are both funny and cute. And as for a standout scene, there is one in particular, which is the one with the flood, which in terms of animation, synchronisation and how the camera moved was very impressive then and now. All in all, delightful if not quite good enough to be one of my favourites. 8/10 Bethany Cox