Walt Disney’s Botanical Short Film – Flowers and Trees – Still Charms

June 30, 1932

On this day, Walt Disney premiered his first Academy Award-winning animated cartoon.

The short was called Flowers and Trees, the first cartoon to use technicolor.

Flowers and Trees was supposed to be a black-and-white cartoon, but Walt Disney decided it would make the perfect test film for the new technicolor process. The vivid colors of the natural world were the ideal subject for a technicolor production.

Meanwhile, the Mickey Mouse short features were judged to be successful enough, so they remained in black-and-white until 1935.

Flowers and Trees premiered at the Chinese theater in Los Angeles on this day and won the Academy Award for animated short subject.

In the movie, the trees and flowers are anthropomorphized; they wake up at the beginning of the day, lifting their heads and stretching.

In the short film, a beautiful lady tree is wooed by a suitor while an evil old leafless tree attempts to steal her away.

The two trees dual each other, and when the old tree loses the battle, he sets the forest on fire. The plants in the natural world work together to put the fire out.

In the end, the two trees find happiness together, getting engaged in the final seconds of the movie.

The lady tree is presented with a ring made from a curled-up caterpillar. The bellflowers play the wedding march as the trees embrace, and the other flowers dance around the hugging trees.