Those thistles then become animated and dance the Trepak to Tchaikovsky’s “Russian Dance,” where they are joined by orchids. While the camera always maintained a distance from the mushrooms in that earlier sequence, here the camera moves deeply into the dance.
As the music concludes, the flowers stop their motion and transform into a tableau the looks like painted decoration. That image then dissolves into an image of a the world we saw in the first segment of the suite.
Once again we see fairies, and they move to “Waltz of the Flowers.”
The segment depicts the transition from summer to autumn, and then from autumn to winter.
First we see the fairies turning green foliage to fall colors.
Then we see seed pods floating though the air, finally coming to ground.
And then we see fairies skating on the surface of the pond, lines spreading across the surface as their skates cut paths — perhaps my favorite scene in the whole film.
As the sequence comes to an end the screen is filled with spinning snowflakes that turn out to be, you guessed it, twirling fairies.