In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.

It isn't all that great, actually. Really cheesy and very predicable of how certain scenes are gonna turn play out. However, I guess that's the charm of it all, because I would consider this one of my guilty pleasures.

The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.

Great example of an old-fashioned, pure-at-heart escapist event movie that doesn't pretend to be anything that it's not and has boat loads of fun being its own ludicrous self.

This is one of the shorts in the Silly Symphonies series produced by Disney. There will be spoilers ahead:The opening shot is a pan in on a china plate. It goes from a static shot to animation and the story starts. It involves the daughter of a Chinese mandarin and a young fisherman. First, we see servants of the mandarin serving him food, then musicians and dancers entertaining the mandarin.The daughter enters the short in a dance sequence and then follows a butterfly outdoors. The action cuts to a nice sequence of the fisherman using a bird to bring in fish. The girl falls in the water and is rescued by the fisherman. They start chasing the butterfly together.The butterfly flies into the house and lands on the chair in which the mandarin is snoozing. The fisherman tries to catch the butterfly, only to roughly grab the mandarin instead, who wakes up in very bad temper. The two begin to fight as the daughter tries to stop them.Eventually, the daughter and fisherman escape in a rickshaw, with the mandarin soon in pursuit. The mandarin meets up with a dragon, which eliminates one threat only to become a greater threat to our happy couple. They vanquish the dragon in the end and go off on their own (with the bird) on the boat.All of the characters are Chinese and are mildly stereotypical. This short is available on the Disney Treasures Silly Symphonies DVD set and both the short and the set are worth getting. Most recommended.

I have always much enjoyed the Disney Silly Symphonies, and while not quite in my top 10 favourites The China Plate is one of the better early ones to me. It is simply but still beautifully animated, with something always interesting to watch such as the umbrella reveal and the lovers' hands, and the music, with very effective use of In a Chinese Temple Garden, is both authentic and energetic, always enhancing the always entertaining action such as the tapping of the girl's shoes. There are also some interesting gags, especially the fishing gag, and the more romantic aspects are genuinely charming. The characters are in a way ethnic stereotypes but are done in a mild way, so I never felt offended watching The China Plate. The fight scene is exciting with well-incorporated and fitting music, and the story is engaging and deserves credit for choosing a setting different to nature or in a barnyard. Overall, really excellent. 10/10 Bethany Cox

This is an amazingly strange and dated little Silly Symphony cartoon from Walt Disney. It begins quite oddly--with the camera going in for a closeup of a Chinese plate. As it gets closer, suddenly the scene changes to an amazingly patronizing and stereotypical view of China of old. It's kind of like a China of the Charlie Chan variety--Chinese in name only as lots of cute stereotypical Chinese folks dance about and have fun. And, like a typical Silly Symphony, there is a baddie that comes in and tries to spoil the fun--and the little Chinese guy needs to fight him to get back his girlfriend. It's all very odd--and very un-Chinese. I'd really love to show this to some Chinese folks to watch their reactions--I am pretty sure they would NOT be very positive!! It's all an obvious relic to our past and the way we viewed 'strange people from strange lands'. In addition, it's really not that good a cartoon either--though the animation is the best for its time, as are all the Disney shorts from this era.

A Walt Disney SILLY SYMPHONY Cartoon Short.THE CHINA PLATE on the shelf has much to tell, if you examine the picture on its face carefully. There you'll find the story of a dreadful old mandarin who forbids the love of his daughter for a simple fisherman...An interesting black & white cartoon, which alternates between action/reaction antics & the plot of the romantic story. The animation is stylized to look somewhat like a blue willow pattern plate. Quite a few racist elements in the story.The SILLY SYMPHONIES, which Walt Disney produced for a ten year period beginning in 1929, are among the most interesting of series in the field of animation. Unlike the Mickey Mouse cartoons in which action was paramount, with the Symphonies the action was made to fit the music. There was little plot in the early Symphonies, which featured lively inanimate objects and anthropomorphic plants & animals, all moving frantically to the soundtrack. Gradually, however, the Symphonies became the school where Walt's animators learned to work with color and began to experiment with plot, characterization & photographic special effects. The pages of Fable & Fairy Tale, Myth & Mother Goose were all mined to provide story lines and even Hollywood's musicals & celebrities were effectively spoofed. It was from this rich soil that Disney's feature-length animation was to spring. In 1939, with SNOW WHITE successfully behind him and PINOCCHIO & FANTASIA on the near horizon, Walt phased out the SILLY SYMPHONIES; they had run their course & served their purpose.