SERGEI PROKOFIEV wrote the musical symphony for children PETER AND THE WOLF in 1936. he had left russia after the revolution and toured successfully europe and the US with concerts. in 1936 he returned to his home country, what was not one of his better decisions as it showed some years later. during a visit to the DISNEY studio in 1938 the russian composer offered WALT DISNEY this composition with the words – I have composed this with the hope that I would get to see you and that you would make a cartoon with my music. well, PETER AND THE WOLF was a part of MAKE MINE MUSIC, released august 1946. the characters are very well designed, the animation is flawless – WARD KIMBALL, ERIC LARSON, OLLIE JOHNSTON and JOHN LOUNSBERY are the animators, the bg’s were created by CLAUDE COATS following MARY BLAIR’S styling, beautiful effects animation by GEORGE ROWLEY.
all in all it is a little masterpiece, mainly because of the perfect match of story, music and visuals. below I recreated some of the bg’s, a few of them are fortunately in original in the DISNEY ARCHIVES ARL.
© disney enterprises, inc
my name is hans bacher, – I work as production designer in the animation film industry. for the last 45 years I lived and worked in exciting places around the world. after 7 years of teaching in singapore I am back at my homebase in manila, working on a few more books.
One1more2time3's Weblog 
Wonderful to see these again, the bridge is one of my favourite backgrounds.
Thanks Hans!
Thanks for doing these! It looks as if you had corrected the color (in comparison to my dvd screenshots). I’ve started putting together a post about those blue trees some time ago. Would I be allowed to include your reconstructed BGs?
only the color in the snow had to be corrected a bit. it turned green around the right edges, what made the stitching pretty difficult. overall the BG’s were a touch too dark. but PECOS BILL was the worst so far. I am afraid there was no correction in the film processing at all. you can use whatever you want, disney has the copyright, not me.
I love PETER AND THE WOLF and know that Prokofiev visited Disney in 1938…but had no idea that the piece was written FOR Disney.
Wasn’t this supposed to be in the original FANTASIA, as the old segments rotated out and were replaced by new ones?
from hans –
he did not write it FOR disney, he just loved the disney cartoons, especially SNOW WHITE, and probably thought his musical piece would work well in a disney cartoon. apparently disney had planned a second FANTASIA and PETER AND THE WOLF was supposed to be one segment in it. but after the financial disaster of the first FANTASIA the plans were dropped. as you probably remember, there were more plans in the eighties for another FANTASIA, called MUSICANA, with MICKEY MOUSE in the CHINESE NIGHTINGALE. mel shaw did some beautiful designs. then finally it all came together in FANTASIA 2000.