This short cartoon version of "The Wizard of Oz" is notable, I suppose, for being the first of the film adaptations to be in Technicolor, although since it wasn't originally released due to contractual disputes, its influence was likely negligible. Moreover, although the 1939 MGM film receives much credit for its use of Technicolor, the contrast between grays and colors has always been a feature of Oz, from the start in L. Frank Baum's book, as illustrated by W.W. Denslow. Like the films, such painting was a remarkable addition in the literary field at the time. Thus, similar to the book and as in the 1939 adaptation, this cartoon begins in a black-and-white Kansas, with a cyclone transitioning the fairytale to the rainbow-hued land of Oz.
There's a curiouser aspect to this particular cartoon, though--that's reproductive and sexual and almost along the lines of a Freudian, psychoanalytical treatment. After the familiar narrative of Dorothy meeting the Scarecrow and Tin Man (although, no Lion this outing), they travel to a bridge overlooking a romantic, spring-time scene about, quite literally, the birds and the bees. After this strange sequence of animal, insect and plant-assisted courtship, intercourse and reproduction completes, Dorothy and company are escorted to the Wizard. He performs a magic demonstration on reproduction that echoes early trick films in the cinema of attractions mode (e.g. "The Red Spectre" (1907)). Only, the Wizard's presentation exclusively involves birth and duplication--ending with the chicken and the eggs fertilized by the Wizard's phallic wand. Thankfully, Toto cuts this magic act short. As with the rabbit hole in Alice's adventures, to the Freudian mind of perversities, such an interpretation adds an entirely new meaning here to the funnel of the tornado from Dorothy's Kansas and the color transformation (decades later, "Pleasantville" (1998) did the latter explicitly). It becomes a story of rebirth and, seemingly to some extent, one of sexual awakening.
I've read Baum and Lewis Carroll's books, though, and this isn't how I read them, but that seems to be the message encoded here--and concluding with the hen holding her chick, as "Rock-a-bye Baby" plays us out. I tend to find such Freudian analysis amusing rather than serious-minded, so I'll conclude this review before further considering the implications here for the portrayal of Dorothy, from falling atop the Scarecrow to the Betty-Boop-type skirts and of the Wizard's focus on the posteriors and undergarments of his duplicate dancing girls. It's as though someone misread "children's story" as meaning that it's a story about where children come from.
