DVD Chronicle

Sabotage is Hitchcock’s 1936 version of The Secret Agent, Conrad’s 1907 novel of international intrigue and terrorist attentat. Almost distressingly, the film foresees the world we live in now—a crowded London bus being blown up, a cornered fanatic grimly turning to press the button detonating his explosives-lined vest. These scenes are not in The Secret Agent, and they are far from Hitchcock’s only revisions of Conrad. The director (or the credited screenwriter, Charles Bennett) also changed the main setting from a shabby contraceptives-and-dirty-pictures shop to a cinema run by the Verlocs, husband and wife, and this change leads to the best and strangest scene in the film. Mrs. Verloc realizes that her husband’s plotting has led to the death of her young brother Stevie; she stumbles from their dining room into the cinema, full of stunned grief; but when she hears music on the soundtrack and catches sight of what’s on the screen, she smiles tentatively. Then, as revealed in one of the most heartbreaking close-ups Hitchcock ever photographed, she laughs. It’s a cartoon short she sees, Disney’s 1935 “Who Killed Cock Robin?”, with a Bing-Crosby-voiced Cock Robin crooning to a Mae-West-proportioned Jenny Wren. A second later an arrow pierces Cock Robin, and Mrs. Verloc grimaces, abruptly returned from melodious fantasy to the reality of violence. But we have had a few seconds of laughter, something to be set against, put in ironic juxtaposition with, a coded terrorist message glimpsed earlier in the film: “London Must Not Laugh on Saturday.”

I think this moment illustrates two things: first, Hitchcock’s unmatched ability to capture emotions in extremis, especially pain oddly conjoined with comedy; and second, the power of animated images themselves—broadly drawn figures cavorting or conniving on a screen, providing escapist fun or satirizing reality, compelling laughter. One reason to survey animated films, which is what I’ll do in this Chronicle, is that so many of us have been compelled by them, have like Mrs. Verloc, been seduced by cartoons. Stalin liked Disney; so did Sergei Eisenstein; so did E. M. Forster (see the 1934 essay “Mickey and Minnie” in Abinger Harvest). In Preston Sturges’s Sullivan’s Travels a would-be documentary filmmaker drops grandiose plans and discovers his humanity in the course of watching Disney’s cartoon “Playful Pluto,” which is screened in an African-American church for an audience of convicts. In David Lean’s Brief Encounter the two would-be lovers, enjoying a tryst, momentarily forget their English reserve and laugh out loud as they watch a Disney cartoon in the cinema. Alec says, “The stars can change in their courses, the universe go up in flames, and the world crash around us, but there will always be Donald Duck.”

Personally, I am less an admirer of Donald Duck (or Mickey or Pluto) than of the various characters of Disney’s 1930s Silly Symphonies, the series to which “Who Killed Cock Robin?” belongs. These seventy-five seven-or eight-minute films earn both terms of their title, being both silly and symphonic, or at least inventive with music, as demonstrated by the very first of them, “The Skeleton Dance.” This is an intricately choreographed and comically ghoulish performance in a graveyard at midnight, with skeletal figures metamorphosing into fiddles, xylophones, and drums. At the start of what would be a lifelong career supplying scores...