LITTLE HIAWATHA (1937)

RELEASE DATE: Saturday 15th May 1937

SYNOPSIS: Based (very) loosely on the American Indian legend of Hiawatha, this cartoon shows what the fearless warrior might have been like as a child. Little Hiawatha marches out to conquer, armed with a bow, arrow, and pants that are probably a bit too big for him.

IRVYNE: I think at one point Wendy was about to explode from the cute.

MALEFICENT: It was super-cute!

WENDY: All of the animals were adorable, but Hiawatha himself was very, very cute. With his little chubby cheeks!

IRVYNE: The animation is just so fantastic in this. The expressions they get on the little animals' faces is just incredible.

MALEFICENT: Aww, that little bunny rabbit!

WENDY: Stop it! I can't take it!

SHENZI: He just drops his little bow and arrow!

IRVYNE: I wanna know where the heck Hiawatha was HIDING that bow and arrow!

PASCAL: Because his pants kept falling down! You could see his little bottom!

IRVYNE: First ever Disney bum...? Possibly!

MALEFICENT: He definitely needed a belt.

WENDY: The music itself is like another character. It's fantastic. So what was the process? Would they have scored it first, or animated first?

IRVYNE: I think by this stage they were scoring first. It would have been fully storyboarded, then they would have recorded the music, then finalised the animation. Don't quote me on that. I know that in the early days they did it the other way round.

Meanwhile, this is again the kind of cartoon that you could probably argue is pretty racially insensitive.

MALEFICENT: I don't think it is.

IRVYNE: It's hard for us to call that though, since we're not in the race being depicted here. On the other side of the coin, 58 years later Disney would make Pocahontas, which some would call a bit too racially SENSITIVE, at the expense of being as entertaining as it could be. But anyway, Little Hiawatha is definitely entertaining. It's so funny, and it's cuuuuute!

WENDY: So cute!