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visuals. Grierson himself describes this and his other new soundfilms as the first sods cut in a new country. He wishes them to be assessed only as beginnings. Yet Pett and Pott in its three reels contains more effective achievement in the expressive use of sound than there was in the collected work of all the previous experimentalists. Grierson and Cavalcanti have not shut their eyes to previous developments and there is for example, a comic sequence in a suburb-bound tube with a five-part chorus as commentary which is reminiscent of the methods of Clair; but we do not have a mere disguised excerpt from Le Million but an idea greatly elaborated and playing its inter-related part with other new ideas in the sequence. This as with the other experiments of the film, is not a haphazard interlopation but part of a co-ordinated sound accompaniment that runs on, now providing a background comment for the scene, now coming forward to dominate the visuals, and always making the film more expressive than it would have been with natural sound. I shall not attempt here to work out the significance of all that Grierson and Cavalcanti achieve in Pett and Pott; that is best left to the producers themselves. But it is important to record that a sizeable pebble has been dropped into the pool of complacency over the problems of sound and that the ripples will inevitably spread far and wide.
Walt Disney has for long been accepted as one of the major figures of the sound cinema. Rotha, writing in "The Film Till Now," considered that "the essential characteristics of the Disney cartoon films, where distorted linear images are matched with equally distorted sound images, are those of the visual sound-film of the future." For a time certainly, it seemed that Disney was working out the principles of a sound-film which, eschewing naturalism, would use sound images in counterpoint to increase the expressiveness of the film and supply through the sound-strip a comic commentary for the movement of the cartoon. But this line of development has not been followed out in his cartoons ; many of the early experiments with distorted sound were given up and Disney was apparently satisfied to concentrate on draughtsmanship. Possibly the immense popularity of his work made experiment more difficult. Colour has for the past year been absorbing his attention — for which development we are deeply grateful — and the quarter's colour Silly Symphonies, The Wise Old Hen, The Flying Mouse and Peculiar Penguins, are as fine as anything he has done. But the most exciting cartoon of the quarter is undoubtedly Orphan's Benefit which seems to indicate that Disney has begun to think again in terms of sound. The comic high-lights of the cartoon do not occur in its draughtsmanship; they are pure sound jokes. A burly Buff Orpington who appears as an opera star at Mickey's concert, has not a prosaic
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