Film

Flowers and Trees

Name: Flowers and Trees
Genre: Animation, Music, Romance, Comedy, Thriller
Released: 1932
Cast: Clarence Nash, Esther Campbell, Marion Darlington, Pinto Colvig, Walt Disney

Disney's first Technicolor cartoon (and first to use the three-strip process) is a gorgeously coloured fever dream of anthropomorphic romance. Two trees fall in love while a jealous stump schemes their destruction. It's surreally lovely and utterly strange to modern eyes—pure visual imagination before narrative became everything. For anyone curious about animation's foundation, or just what happens when colour first arrives.

TMDb rating

3.4

Should you watch it?

Watch it if you love early animation where the pleasure is in the drawing itself, the lush color and wordless mood, and a fairy-tale romance told with more menace than you'd expect from a short.

Skip it if you need plot or characters with personalities; this is a mood piece with little dialogue, so the eight minutes may feel thin if you want story momentum.

What it asks of you: Eight minutes, scored rather than spoken, with slow hushed pacing and a shadowy edge to its fairy-tale scenes; it wants your eyes more than your attention span.

Not sure? Find tonight's pick in a minute.

If you liked this

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs1937

The feature-length version of what Disney was learning in shorts like this. Stunning animation, genuine darkness, and those peculiar transformations of object into character that made early Disney uncanny and magnetic.

But The pacing is glacial by modern standards, and the sentimentality can feel suffocating. Some find the princess herself thin compared to the supporting cast.

Steamboat Willie1928

The Mickey debut and the film that changed animation forever. Three minutes of pure kinetic joy, where music and movement are one thing. It's where modern animation begins.

But It's very short, and Mickey is recognizably not yet the character you know. The novelty of synchronized sound carries it more than plot does.

The Band Concert1935

Technicolor Mickey at his anarchic best, conducting a concert that descends into beautiful chaos. It's got more personality and humour than you'd expect from a 1935 cartoon, and the colour work is stunning.

But The gags are rapid-fire and sometimes obscure to modern viewers. It's a short, so you're done in ten minutes—barely time to settle in.

Not sure tonight? Get a pick in a minute, starting from Flowers and Trees

The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

Coal Face1935

Both are early experiments in what new colour and animation technology could accomplish; Coal Face just asks the question in the opposite direction, and for a completely different purpose.

A GPO Documentary short made a year after Flowers and Trees, using animation and live action to show coal mining life. Same era, same technical adventure, but pointed at documentary realism instead of fantasy. It asks what animation could do when it wasn't selling dreams.

But Eight minutes of intercut animation and grainy live film about industrial labour. It's gorgeous but austere. Not entertainment in the way Disney was—it requires you to sit with it.

Dumbo1941

A heartbreaking and genuinely weird feature. The Pink Elephants on Parade sequence alone justifies the watch. Simpler than Snow White, darker than you'd expect, and genuinely moving about difference and belonging.

But It's short for a feature, the plot is thin, and some of the racial caricatures are genuinely uncomfortable and indefensible by any standard.

Fantasia1940

An abandoned attempt to make animation pure visual music. It doesn't always work, but the ambition is staggering and some sequences (the sorcerer's apprentice, the dinosaurs) are unforgettable. It's Disney asking what animation could do.

But It's uneven and self-indulgent, and stretches to two hours for a concept that doesn't sustain it. Patience required. The centaurs and the way classical music gets arranged might irritate you.

Cinderella1950

The formula Disney perfected: gorgeous animation, perfect voice acting (especially the mice), and enough charm to carry a wafer-thin plot. It's the platonic ideal of a fairy tale animated. Hugely influential on everything that came after.

But It's pure comfort food with almost no edge. The heroine is passive and the prince is invisible. If you want complexity, this isn't it.

The Little Mermaid1989

The template for modern Disney: bright colours, showstopper songs, a heroine with agency, and a villain so good you almost don't care that the writing is thin. It revived animation and deserves the reputation.

But The environmental message is muddled and dated, and Ariel's choice to give up her voice for a man reads badly now. The animation is pre-digital so it ages differently than you'd expect.

Aladdin1992

Robin Williams as a genie, basically. The wisecracks, the impressions, the genuine affection for the characters underneath the comedy. The animation is fluid, and the songs actually move things along rather than stopping them.

But It's aggressively jokey in a way that dates it to the '90s hard. The orientalism is clumsy despite good intentions. Some find Williams' performance overbearing and exhausting.

Moana2016

A genuinely inventive adventure film disguised as a princess movie. Gorgeous hand-drawn animation sequences, a heroine who isn't defined by romance, songs that actually function as story, and real Polynesian cultural consultation. It's modern Disney remembering what made Disney great.

But It still hits the Disney plot beats even when you know it's happening. The villain twist is eyeroll-inducing. Some of the humour lands flat for adults.

Bambi1942

Both anthropomorphize nature and put real stakes (fire in one, predation in the other) at the heart of a love story. Both are stranger and darker than they first appear.

Disney's most visually sophisticated film and its most genuinely disturbing. Sublime animation of woodland creatures, matched with scenes of real violence and loss that feel unearned by the sweetness. You've never seen Disney like this—darker and more ambitious than the formula allows.

But The first thirty minutes are plotless mood-building. The pacing is glacial. The famous scene will wreck you if you're not prepared, and the ending doesn't earn the journey for some viewers.

Mary and Max2009

Both use animation to anthropomorphize and invest us in non-human or near-human relationships. Mary and Max just swings the register from romance to grief, and asks animation to do something it usually won't.

Stop-motion animation about friendship, depression, loneliness, and grace between two deeply flawed people. Black and white, deliberately crude puppetry, utterly unsentimental about pain. It's what happens when you use animation for truth-telling instead of comfort.

But It's relentlessly bleak and depressing until it suddenly isn't. The animation is deliberately unglamorous. The friendship is asexual and the emotional stakes are uncomfortably real. An eight-year-old will hate it.