The Old Mill

"The Old Mill" (1937) is a Disney animated short you can watch online on iFILM. Director Wilfred Jackson made this nine-minute film without a single line of dialogue: mice, owls, frogs and doves share an old watermill by a pond, and when a thunderstorm hits at night the mill wheel starts turning, threatening to shake the whole fragile place apart. It was the first Disney production to use the multiplane camera — the depth-of-field technique that would define the look of Snow White and Fantasia — and it took home the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film. Nine minutes, no words, and a technical leap hidden inside a quiet nature sketch. Stream "The Old Mill" (1937) on iFILM.