With the arrival of sound, Walt Disney rapidly achieved preeminence through
imaginative use of sound and color with the vitality of his gags largely inspired by early
slapstick films. Disney’s The Three Little Pigs (1933), with the optimism of its theme
song (Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?), came to be a symbol of the era of sound. In
1937 Disney made his full-length animated films such as the extraordinary Fantasia in
1940 and developed techniques that combined animation with live action (as in Song of
the South [1946). On the other hand, experiments with these hybrid animations also
had been under way in the Soviet Union for instance where, in The New Gulliver (1935),
Aleksander Ptushko combined live actors and cartoon figures in the same scenes.