The Little Match Girl (1937 film)

Last updated
The Little Match Girl
Directed by Art Davis [1]
Sid Marcus [1]
Written byCal Howard & Sid Marcus
Music byJoe De Nat
Animation by Emery Hawkins [1]
Distributed by Columbia Pictures Corporation
Release date
  • November 5, 1937 (1937-11-05) [2]
CountryUnited States

The Little Match Girl is a 1937 animated short film adapting Hans Christian Andersen's 1845 literary fairytale The Little Match Girl . Part of the Color Rhapsody series, [3] [4] it was directed by Art Davis and Sid Marcus, produced by Charles Mintz and distributed by Columbia Pictures Corporation.

Contents

Plot

The bells ring in the New Year and people are partying in the streets of New York. A poor little girl makes her living selling matches. It's winter, and the hustling crowds at best ignore her, and some are outright rude.

Eventually, she makes her way to a secluded alley and lights a candle to warm herself. And as she does so, she dreams of comforts. It gets blown out; this happens again, then on the third try, she falls into a dream. In this dream, cherubs attend her in a wonderful, heavenly place. She gets a new doll, then a new dress. She sees visions of a Christmas tree, an adult angel playing the harp, and other wonderful sights.

The cherubs put her on a throne and give her flowers, and she cries with happiness. But suddenly, a storm comes and destroys everything: the harsh reality of winter catches up in her dreams, blowing away all the happiness the little girl dreamed up. She starts crawling towards a lit candle, using her last strength to keep warm, before the candle goes out, just as the little match girl succumbs to the harsh cold and collapses dead in the alleyway. The snow starts falling again and the camera pulls back, revealing the lifeless body of the little girl, lying in the snow.

The adult angel comes along, cradles the child's soul and takes her to Heaven, lifting her into the night sky, and eventually turning into a star. Then the bells that rang for the New Year during the overture begin to ring again, announcing both the death of the little girl and the world's indifference to a child's suffering and tragic death.

Production

The majority of the animation was done by Emery Hawkins. [1]

Reception and legacy

The film was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Short Subject (Cartoons) [1] [5] but lost to The Old Mill by Disney. [3] [6] A short contemporary review in The Film Daily labeled the short as "amateurishly executed". [7] Steve Stanchfield, writing for Cartoon Research in 2016, described it as one of his favorite cartoons and as "surprisingly touching", and admired part of the background art, although criticizing the high amount of dissolve and wipe transitions. [5]

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 Arnold, Jeremy (2023). Christmas in the Movies (Revised & Expanded ed.). Running Press. ISBN   9780762481057.
  2. ↑ Lenburg, Jeff (1981). The Encyclopedia of Animated Cartoon Series. Arlington House Publishers. p. 32. ISBN   0870004417.
  3. 1 2 Pauley, Jim (2024). Columbia Pictures: A Century of Hollywood Motion Picture Magic. Rowman & Littlefield. p. 109.
  4. ↑ Lenburg, Jeff (2006). Who's Who in Animated Cartoons: An International Guide to Film & Television's Award-winning and Legendary Animators. Hal Leonard Corporation. p. 133. ISBN   9781557836717.
  5. 1 2 Stanchfield, Steve (December 15, 2016). "Columbia's Color Rhapsody "The Little Match Girl" (1937)". Cartoon Research.
  6. ↑ Fleming, Patrick C. (2025). Animating the Victorians: Disney's Literary History. Univ. Press of Mississippi. ISBN   9781496855398.
  7. ↑ "The Little Match Girl". The Film Daily . November 16, 1937. p. 17.

The Little Match Girl at IMDb

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.