The Cookie Carnival (1935)
A poor sugar-cookie girl wants to enter the carnival's beauty pageant but has nothing to wear, until a kindly gingerbread hobo fashions her a gown from cupcake wrappers and candy hearts, and she wins the crown as 'Miss Bonbon.'
A late, lavishly animated entry in Disney’s Silly Symphonies, The Cookie Carnival is best remembered for its gingerbread-and-frosting production design, though its “Miss Licorice” character is also a documented instance of the racial caricature Disney left unaddressed in its shorts until well into the following decade.
Background
The Cookie Carnival is a later entry in Disney’s Silly Symphonies series, the line of short films built around music and visual spectacle rather than a recurring character, that the studio used partly as a proving ground for animation and color techniques ahead of its feature films. This one imagines a carnival populated entirely by anthropomorphic baked goods, staging an elaborate beauty pageant with candy and pastry contestants.
What to watch for
Watch for the inventive character designs built from cookies, cakes, and candy, and for the lavish, colorful production values typical of the series by the mid-1930s. Modern viewers should also be aware that one of the film’s characters, referred to as Miss Licorice, is a documented example of a racial caricature that Disney continued to use in various shorts of the period before eventually phasing such depictions out; it is worth watching with that context in mind rather than only for its technical achievements.
