The Goddess of Spring

Let's start off with the most obvious thing about Disney's spin on the tale of Persephone and the origins of the seasons, the animation is positively delicious. The colors are warm and vibrant, the movements are fluid and dynamic, there's a variation in design yet they each seem to occupy the same world. It's a beautiful thing to behold.

And, shockingly, it's reasonably faithful to the original Greek myth. The basic skeleton frame of the myth is there, but somewhere along the way in the production process they decided that Hades and the Judeo-Christian devil were one and the same. They're not, and it seems like a large misrepresentation of his place in the cosmos to turn his kingdom into Hell fire and demons.

The problems are pretty simple, it's a wall-to-wall musical, but none of the music is any good, and there's too much fat that could be cut to the story. Let's start off with the music, which insists that each and every single line be sung as if this were opera, it's not and that frequently leads to numerous lines sounding like they're mumbled or garbled. It doesn't help that so much of the writing is nothing but purple prose and overacted by a gloriously large ham. The story itself is pretty basic, but constantly showing us singing and dancing in the environments is only interesting if the choreography is interesting or there's something unique going on. Continuously zooming in on a large billow of fire that changes color doesn't really qualify.

"The Goddess of Spring" is one of Disney's better looking short films, but it's bogged down by a lot of problems that keep it from being great. But it's by no means a bad short, just a merely adequate one.