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Director: Dave Fleischer
Release Date: April 22, 1932
Stars: Les Reis, Artie Dunn, Betty Boop
Rating: ★★★
Review:
In this Screen Song Les Reis and Artie Dunn, a.k.a. The Wandering Minstrels, make their screen debut to sing the World War I title song by Irving Berlin.
The cartoon sequence contains many military gags, while Betty Boop introduces the bouncing ball. The most interesting part of this mediocre cartoon is the morning scene, in which we watch trees, a cannon, and even fire and smoke waking up.
Betty Boop already had her picture featured in ‘Any Little Girl that’s a Nice Little Girl‘, and Kitty from Kansas City in the Screen Song of the same name could also have been her, but it’s this cartoon that marks Betty Boop’s first appearance in a Screen Song, underlining her popularity in 1932. She would appear in six more Screen Songs, the last being ‘Popular Melodies‘ from 1933.
Watch ‘Oh! How I hate to Get up in the Morning’ yourself and tell me what you think:
‘Oh! How I hate to Get up in the Morning’ is available on the French DVD Box Set ‘Betty Boop Coffret Collector’
Director: Dave Fleischer
Release Date: April 8, 1932
Stars: Betty Boop, Bimbo, Koko the Clown
Rating: ★★
Review:
In ‘The Dancing Fool’ Bimbo and Koko are painters, who try to paint the outside of a large building in a lengthy and boring intro.
Then they go painting the words ‘Betty Boop’s dancing school’ on the window of that very school. Immediately they go inside themselves, where Betty’s teaching several animals how to dance. This leads to several shots of dancing animals.
This short contains no plot and only a few gags. Its highlight is a scene of strange birds, who dance through, above and under each other. The animators must have thought the same way, for these weird birds appear no less than three times on the screen.
Watch ‘The Dancing Fool’ yourself and tell me what you think:
This is Talkartoon No. 36
To the previous Talkartoon: Crazy Town
To the next Talkartoon: Chess Nuts
‘The Dancing Fool’ is available on the French DVD Box Set ‘Betty Boop Coffret Collector’
Director: Dave Fleischer
Release Date: March 25, 1932
Stars: Betty Boop, Bimbo
Rating: ★★½
Review:
In ‘Crazy Town’ Betty Boop and Bimbo take a streetcar to Crazy Town, where everything is the other way round.
Unfortunately, this great idea doesn’t really lead to a funny cartoon. We’re watching e.g. fish in the sky and birds in the water, an elephant with a real trunk and a fish fishing for a person. In a lengthy sequence Bimbo is a barber adding hair to his customers. None of these scenes even raise a chuckle. In fact, the cartoon’s only interesting part is it’s opening, because the story unfolds like a real book.
It’s weird to realize that as soon as the Fleischers deliberately tried to show a surreal world, they failed, while their ‘normal’ shorts were full of mesmerizing surrealism (e.g. the earlier ‘Mask-a-raid‘ and ‘Chess Nuts‘ or ‘Betty Boop’s Bamboo Isle‘ from later that year). The theme song of this cartoon is the 1931 hit ‘Foolish Facts’.
Watch ‘Crazy Town’ yourself and tell me what you think:
This is Talkartoon No. 35
To the previous Talkartoon: S.O.S.
To the next Talkartoon: The Dancing Fool
‘Crazy Town’ is available on the French DVD Box Set ‘Betty Boop Coffret Collector’
Director: Dave Fleischer
Release Date: February 5, 1932
Stars: Bimbo, Betty Boop
Rating: ★
Review:
Even though ‘The Robot’ was released half a year after ‘The Herring Murder Case’ (1931) it features Bimbo in his design before his make-over in that film.
In this film Bimbo is courting a female character, who only wants to marry him, when he can lick ‘One Round Mike’ in a boxing match. Bimbo accepts, but when it’s his turn he builds a robot out of his car to win the game.
Betty Boop has a small cameo in this cartoon when she rushes outside to revive Bimbo’s car-robot (or is she Bimbo’s girlfriend but in a different design? The Fleischers were inconsistent enough to be unclear on this). Apart from this short scene, there’s little to enjoy in ‘The Robot’. The most interesting part maybe Bimbo’s way of courting his sweetheart, which he does by ‘television’, a sort of Skype avant la lettre.
Strangely enough, the idea of a boxing robot was reused in ‘Mickey’s Mechanical Man‘ from 1933, with equally weak results. There was something going on in 1932 with boxing robots anyway, for also Popeye socks a robot in the ring in the Popeye Sunday comic strip of April, 24 and May 1, 1932. In any case, to most people in the Great Depression robots were the ultimate terror, as unemployment already was a major problem. Luckily, no robot would be used in any factory until the 1960s. And boxing robots still haven’t seen the light of day, yet.
Spread from the April 1934 issue of Modern Mechanix and Inventions
More on the robot craze of the early 1930s can be found here and here.
Watch ‘The Robot’ yourself and tell me what you think:
This is Talkartoon No. 32
To the previous Talkartoon: Boop-Oop-a-Doop
To the next Talkartoon: Minnie the Moocher
‘The Robot’ is available on the French DVD Box Set ‘Betty Boop Coffret Collector’
Directors: John Foster & George Stallings
Release Date: April 23, 1932
Stars: Tom and Jerry
Rating: ★
Review:
In ‘Joint Wipers’ Tom and Jerry are plumbers who desperately try to fix a large leak in a woman’s house.
The duo only manages to drain the lady of her own house, together with her pets, and followed by several other animals. Meanwhile the apartment gets flooded, and at one point the whole building washes away.
Like other Tom and Jerry cartoons ‘Joint Wipers’ suffers from bad animation and an absence of timing. The cartoon’s highlight, if there is any, is when Tom & Jerry celebrate their profession in song, while drops of water play the piano.
Watch ‘Joint Wipers’ yourself and tell me what you think:
This is Tom & Jerry cartoon No. 9
To the previous Tom & Jerry cartoon: In the Bag
To the next Tom & Jerry cartoon: Pots and Pans
‘Joint Wipers’ is available on the DVD ‘The Complete Animated Adventures of Van Beuren Studio’s Tom and Jerry’
Directors: John Foster & George Rufle
Release Date: March 26, 1932
Stars: Tom and Jerry
Rating: ★
Review:
‘In the Bag’ opens the same way as the Waffles and Don short ‘The Haunted Ship‘ (1930): with the two main protagonists flying a plane that soon crashes.
This time the plane crashes into some Western setting, where Tom and Jerry meet a villain. We can also watch Jerry performing some impossible lasso tricks. Then the two go to a saloon where they perform a Mills Brothers-like song. Unfortunately, the villain appears, robbing everybody, but Jerry saves the day, bringing him back and earning a $1000 reward. Tom then steals the money, or does he?
From beginning to end, ‘In the Bag’ makes little sense at all. The film is surprisingly low on gags, and the action is devoid of any timing. The result is one of the weakest of Van Beuren’s Tom and Jerry films.
Watch ‘In the Bag’ yourself and tell me what you think:
This is Tom & Jerry cartoon No. 8
To the previous Tom & Jerry cartoon: Rabid Hunters
To the next Tom & Jerry cartoon: Joint Wipers
‘In the Bag’ is available on the DVD ‘The Complete Animated Adventures of Van Beuren Studio’s Tom and Jerry’
Directors: John Foster & George Stallings
Release Date: February 27, 1932
Stars: Tom and Jerry
Rating: ★★½
Review:
In ‘Rabid Hunters’ Tom and Jerry are hunters, who try to catch a rabbit with their semi-anthropomorphized dog and horse.
The rabbit appears to be an early forerunner of Bugs Bunny, outwitting all four characters to a jazzy upbeat score. This soundtrack, by Gene Rodemich, is the absolute highlight of this otherwise erratic, boring and terribly poorly animated short. Also noteworthy is a hallucinatory scene at a tree branch that has to be seen to be believed. Like the Silly Symphony ‘The Fox Hunt‘ from a year earlier, the cartoon ends with a skunk.
Watch ‘Rabid Hunters’ yourself and tell me what you think:
This is Tom & Jerry cartoon No. 7
To the previous Tom & Jerry cartoon: Rocketeers
To the next Tom & Jerry cartoon: In the Bag
‘Rabid Hunters’ is available on the DVD ‘The Complete Animated Adventures of Van Beuren Studio’s Tom and Jerry’
Directors: John Foster & George Rufle
Release Date: January 30, 1932
Stars: Tom and Jerry
Rating: ★★½
Review:
While Van Beuren’s Aesop’s Fables gained some quality, the Tom and Jerry series remained downright poor in terms of storytelling, staging and animation.
For example, the opening scenes of ‘Rocketeers’ are so deeply drenched in the 1920’s comic tradition that the scene’s silent acting feels terribly old-fashioned. In it, Tom and Jerry are members of the Royal Experimental Society, firing themselves to the moon in an over-sized sky-rocket. Then the cartoon takes quite an unexpected turn: instead of flying to the moon, the rocket plummets immediately and falls into the ocean, reaching the sea floor, where Tom and Jerry encounter some sea monsters and some skeletons (looking back to the Waffles and Don cartoon ‘The Haunted Ship‘ from 1930). But just when one starts to prepare for yet another horror-inspired cartoon, the duo hits on some sexy mermaids. Tom & Jerry perform a song, while the mermaids dance.
The designs of the mermaids are halfway those of Fleischer’s ‘Barnacle Bill‘ (1930) and Disney’s later ‘King Neptune‘ from September 1932. Their stylized, pretty human designs contrast greatly with Tom & Jerry’s own primitive features, and are without doubt the highlight of the cartoon.
Tom and Jerry would fly a rocket again in their last cartoon ‘The Phantom Rocket‘ (1933), which also plummets into the sea.
Watch ‘Rocketeers’ yourself and tell me what you think:
This is Tom & Jerry cartoon No. 6
To the previous Tom & Jerry cartoon: A Swiss Trick
To the next Tom & Jerry cartoon: Rabid Hunters
‘Rocketeers’ is available on the DVD ‘The Complete Animated Adventures of Van Beuren Studio’s Tom and Jerry’
Director: unknown
Release Date: May 13, 1932
Stars: Flip the Frog
Rating: ★
Review:
In most of his films Flip the Frog, like Mickey Mouse, is somewhat of a young adult. Yet, in ‘School Days’ Flip suddenly is young enough to have to attend school, where he gets music lessons among human kids.
Unfortunately, Flip’s dog (introduced in the previous cartoon, ‘Puppy Love’) has followed him to school, and battles with a skunk, which has popped out of nowhere, making all people, including the desks, flee the building.
‘School Days’ is a very weak and terribly unfunny cartoon, anticipating many childish cartoon of the later 1930s. Its story is less consistent, but also less sentimental than that of ‘The Milkman‘ or ‘What a Life‘ from earlier that year. Unfortunately, it doesn’t exchange the sentimentality for anything, rendering a bland, forgettable cartoon. To illustrate this: the ‘best gag’ is when the teacher accidentally picks up an erotic magazine instead of a schoolbook.
Watch ‘School Days’ yourself and tell me what you think:
This is Flip the Frog cartoon No. 21
To the previous Flip the Frog cartoon: Puppy Love
To the next Flip the Frog cartoon: The Bully
‘School Days’ is available on the DVD ‘Cartoons that Time Forgot – The Ub Iwerks Collection Vol. 2’
Director: unknown
Release Date: March 26, 1932
Stars: Flip the Frog
Rating: ★★★
Review:
‘What a Life’ is a genuine cartoon from the Great Depression era.
In the opening scene Flip and the little brat from ‘The Milkman‘ are poor musicians performing on the street to no avail. Being hungry, they pawn their instruments, only to lose their money to a swindler. Later they have to flee for a cop, and find food and shelter at a house, whose owner turns out to be the cop’s wife.
‘What A Life’ is a sentimental film, akin to the Laurel & Hardy film ‘Below Zero’ (1930), and ‘Mickey’s Good Deed‘ from later that year. Even more than ‘The Milkman’ it plays at sentiments more than laughs, and it looks ahead to the sentimentality that would dominate the years 1934-1938. Nevertheless, because it’s so typical of the darkest days of the Great Depression, it’s more interesting than most of those films. Moreover, it features a remarkably sexy and adulterous woman in the cop’s wife.
One of the spectators in the opening scene is a clear caricature of someone, but of whom?
Watch ‘What a Life’ yourself and tell me what you think:
This is Flip the Frog cartoon No. 19
To the previous Flip the Frog cartoon: Fire! Fire!
To the next Flip the Frog cartoon: Puppy Love
‘What a Life’ is available on the DVD ‘Cartoons that Time Forgot – The Ub Iwerks Collection Vol. 2’
Director: unknown
Release Date: February 20, 1932
Stars: Flip the Frog
Rating: ★★
Review:
In ‘The Milkman’ Flip is both a farmer with a dairy farm and a milkman.
The cartoon features an extraordinary scene of Flip delivering milk, which uses an animated background, with an original curved perspective. Unfortunately, most of the screen time is devoted to Flip trying to deal with an annoying little brat he finds in a trashcan. The brat causes Flip quite some trouble, but at the end of the cartoon Flip and the brat become friends. Indeed, one month later we watch them together in the sentimental ‘What A Life‘.
The antics of Flip and the boy anticipate similar cartoons of ca. 1934-1938, when the Hays code had hit Hollywood hard, and most studios turned out remarkably childish, goody-goody cartoons. ‘The Milkman’ is an early example, playing on sentiments instead of laughs.
Watch ‘The Milkman’ yourself and tell me what you think:
This is Flip the Frog cartoon No. 17
To the previous Flip the Frog cartoon: Spooks
To the next Flip the Frog cartoon: Fire! Fire!
‘The Milkman’ is available on the DVD ‘Cartoons that Time Forgot – The Ub Iwerks Collection Vol. 2’
Director: unknown
Release Date: December 21, 1931
Stars: Flip the Frog
Rating: ★★★★★
Review:
‘Spooks’ opens with Flip seeking shelter from a rain storm in an old mansion.
There he encounters a skeleton who invites him to dinner of a skeleton of a roasted chicken. Later Flip dances with a female skeleton, while the deceased owner of the house plans to add flip to his skeleton collection.
‘Spooks’ is one of the best of the Flip the Frog cartoons. Featuring a much more consistent story than the earlier ‘The Cuckoo Murder Case’, the cartoon manages to provide a genuine feeling of horror, only matched by Disney’s ‘The Mad Doctor‘ (1932). When confronted with the homicidal skeleton, Flip is in real peril. Moreover, outside the mansion the nightmare continues, when even Flip’s own horse has turned into some living bones.
The scenes inside the haunted house feature distorted angles, which add to the claustrophobic feel. Strangely enough the curved backgrounds can also be seen in subsequent Flip the Frog cartoons, like ‘The Milkman‘ and ‘What A Life‘, where they don’t contribute to the atmosphere, at all. In fact, they would become a unique style element in the Ub Iwerks cartoons.
The complete cartoon is well-animated, with the opening scene, in which Flip and his horse battle the elements, being particularly outstanding.
Watch ‘Spooks’ yourself and tell me what you think:
This is Flip the Frog cartoon No. 16
To the previous Flip the Frog cartoon: Africa Squeaks
To the next Flip the Frog cartoon: The Milkman
‘Spooks’ is available on the DVD ‘Cartoons that Time Forgot – The Ub Iwerks Collection Vol. 2’
Director: Burt Gillett
Release Date: October 1, 1932
Rating: ★★★
Review:
‘Bugs in love’ was the very last of the black and white Silly Symphonies, being even released after the technicolor films ‘Flowers and Trees‘ and ‘King Neptune‘.
The short’s story is almost a copy of that of ‘The Spider and the Fly‘ (1931) and features two bugs in love, who are threatened by a mean crow. Luckily their fellow flies come to the rescue, in an elaborate battle scene, in which the flies use e.g. ink, false teeth, shoe polish, an eggbeater, a mousetrap and castor oil to defeat the crow.
The ingenuity of this particular battle scene is intriguing, but unfortunately it follows all too similar scenes in films like ‘The Spider and the Fly’, ‘The Bird Store‘ and ‘The Bears and the Bees‘. The result is a rather traditional Silly Symphony, with its repetitious animation and rhythmical sequences. Luckily, with its two color Silly Symphonies Disney had demonstrated it could do much better, and the studio did not return to this formula, until the elaborate ‘The Moth and the Flame’ from 1938.
‘Bugs in love’ is clearly related to the successful comic strip ‘Bucky Bug’, begun earlier the same year. However, it’s not entirely clear to me whether the hero bug in ‘Bugs in Love’ is Bucky himself, or not.
Watch ‘Bugs in Love’ yourself and tell me what you think:
This is Silly Symphony No. 31
To the previous Silly Symphony: King Neptune
To the next Silly Symphony: Babes in the Woods
‘Bugs in Love’ is available on the DVD ‘Walt Disney Treasures: More Silly Symphonies’
Director: Wilfred Jackson
Release Date: July 9, 1932
Rating: ★
Review:
‘The Bears and the Bees’ follows the adventures of two little bear cubs, who encounter a large mean bear and a bee colony.
The two cubs eat the bees’ honey, but luckily it’s the old mean bear who gets all the stings, in an elaborate battle scene, comparable to those in ‘The Spider and the Fly‘ (1931) and ‘Bugs in Love‘ (1932).
The story of ‘The Bears and the Bees’ is consistent, but remarkably boring. The two little bears look like early forerunners of Mickey’s nephews Morty and Ferdy, who would make their screen debut two years later in ‘Mickey’s Steamroller‘ (1934). It’s interesting to see how the animators tried to render these two cubs partly as animals and partly as little brats. This way of animating animals halfway anthropomorphism would become a Disney specialty, leading to masterpieces like ‘Bambi‘ (1942) and ‘Lady and the Tramp‘ (1956). In this short it can be watched in its embryonic form.
Watch ‘The Bears and the Bees’ yourself and tell me what you think:
This is Silly Symphony No. 27
To the previous Silly Symphony: The Bird Store
To the next Silly Symphony: Just Dogs
‘The Bears and the Bees’ is available on the DVD ‘Walt Disney Treasures: More Silly Symphonies’
Director: Wilfred Jackson
Release Date: January 5, 1932
Rating: ★★★
Review:
‘The Bird Store’ follows earlier Mickey Mouse films and Silly Symphonies in presenting half a song-and-dance routine and half a story.
This short starts quite boringly with endless bird song routines, but after 4 minutes of this a cat enters, which leads to a small story when the cat captures a small canary and all other birds free the canary and chase the cat away to a city dog pound.
The bird designs are still pretty primitive, and much more akin to those in ‘Birds of a Feather‘ from one year earlier than to ‘Birds in the Spring‘ from one year later. Most birds are clearly drawn from fantasy, and make no sense at all. The provisional realism of the canary in ‘Mickey Steps Out‘ hardly gets any follow-up here. A small highlight form the four ‘Marx Birds’, which mark the earliest instance of Hollywood caricatures in a Disney film.
Watch ‘The Bird Store’ yourself and tell me what you think:
This is Silly Symphony No. 26
To the previous Silly Symphony: The Ugly Duckling
To the next Silly Symphony: The Bears and the Bees
‘The Bird Store’ is available on the DVD ‘Walt Disney Treasures: More Silly Symphonies’
Director: Wilfred Jackson
Release Date: November 10, 1931
Rating: ★★★
Review:
‘The Fox Hunt’ is the most atypical Silly Symphony of the black and white era. It’s not devoted to music at all, and it features human characters.
These human hunters ride rather cartoony horses, and much of the fun comes from the silly ways the hunters ride their horses. One even rides a cow, a pig, a porcupine and a log with four dogs in it. The cartoon opens most spectacularly, with the morning sun’s beaming rays lighting a few forest scenes. A little later there’s a beautiful scene of the hunters and their horses casting long shadows on a hill. A scene like this looks all the way forward to the Ave Maria sequence of ‘Fantasia’ (1940).
The human figures are a bit of a mixed bag, but generally more convincing than those in ‘Mother Goose Melodies‘ or ‘The China Plate‘ from earlier that year. Thus, ‘The Fox Hunt’ is one of those films showcasing Disney’s ambition, even though it’s by no means a classic.
The fox hunt theme was revisited nine years later in the Donald Duck & Goofy short of the same title (1938), which uses the same skunk end gag, which itself was copied from the Oswald cartoon ‘The Fox Chase‘ (1928).
Watch ‘The Fox Hunt’ yourself and tell me what you think:
This is Silly Symphony No. 24
To the previous Silly Symphony: The Spider and the Fly
To the next Silly Symphony: The Ugly Duckling
‘The Fox Hunt’ is available on the DVD ‘Walt Disney Treasures: More Silly Symphonies’
Director: Wilfred Jackson
Release Date: October 13, 1931
Rating: ★★★½
Review:
After ‘The Cat’s out‘ of three months earlier ‘The Spider and the Fly’ is the second silly symphony focusing on a story instead of a musical routine.
In this short a mean spider lures two flies into his web by playing harp on it, recalling a similar scene in Max Fleischer’s ‘Wise Flies‘ from 1930. The female fly is captured, but the male fly summons all the other flies to help him rescue her, which they do in a long battle scene on the music of Franz von Suppé’s overture ‘Die leichte Kavalerie’ and Franz Schubert’s Erlkönig. Here we watch flies riding horseflies and using dragonflies as bombers and shoes on caterpillars as tanks. There’s also a spectacular scene in which the flies set fire to the spider’s web, with the poor female fly still in it. Ironically, the spider’s finally captured with flypaper.
‘The Spider and the Fly’ is more melodramatic than funny, but there’s a lot going on, and one doesn’t get the time to get bored. The basic story line of this cartoon would be followed in two other Silly Symphonies: ‘Bugs in Love‘ (1932) and ‘The Moth and the Flame’ (1938), also featuring insects.
Watch ‘The Spider and the Fly’ yourself and tell me what you think:
This is Silly Symphony No. 23
To the previous Silly Symphony: The Clock Store
To the next Silly Symphony: The Fox Hunt
‘The Spider and the Fly’ is available on the DVD ‘Walt Disney Treasures: More Silly Symphonies’
Director: Wilfred Jackson
Release Date: September 16, 1931
Rating: ★★
Review:
‘The Clock Store’ was the last of the Silly Symphonies solely devoted to a dance routine.
This time, the traditional dance routine is performed by clocks and watches to Frank Churchill’s music. The cartoon ends with two alarm clocks fighting each other to pieces. Unfortunately, before this final scene there is no story, whatsoever, and by now the dance routine had become very tiresome, indeed.
Nevertheless, the short is beautifully made: the opening scene shows a lamplighter lighting the street lights to stunning effects. Furthermore, halfway the cartoon we watch two 18th century human figures dancing an elegant minuet. This short dance scene was the studio’s most realistic take on the human form, yet, and a spectacular sight for a 1931 cartoon.
Watch ‘The Clock Store’ yourself and tell me what you think:
This is Silly Symphony No. 22
To the previous Silly Symphony: Egyptian Melodies
To the next Silly Symphony: The Spider and the Fly
‘The Clock Store’ is available on the DVD ‘Walt Disney Treasures: More Silly Symphonies’
Director: Walter Lantz or Bill Nolan
Release Date: January 18, 1932
Stars: Oswald the Rabbit
Rating: ★★
Review:
By 1932 Oswald had changed into a cute little boy. And yet, in the opening scene of ‘Grandma’s Pet’ he’s shown reading the fairy tale of Little Red Riding Hood to his three nephews(?).
Soon Oswald falls asleep himself and he dreams that he’s inside the fairy tale himself. Apart from Oswald’s presence, the cartoon quite faithfully follows the fairy tale until the wolf kidnaps Little Red Riding Hood, and out of nowhere produces a magic wand, which changes the complete scenery several times. In the end, Oswald uses the magic wand to change the wolf into a roast.
‘Grandma’s Pet’ is one of the Lantz films in which Tex Avery is billed as an animator. It may have inspired his own mix-up fairy tale films, like ‘Little Red Walking Hood’ (1937) and ‘The Bear’s Tale‘ (1940). It pales when compared to those latter cartoons, however, suffering from erratic animation and sloppy timing.
Watch ‘Grandma’s Pet’ yourself and tell me what you think:
‘Grandma’s Pet’ is available on the DVD ‘The Woody Woodpecker and Friends Classic Cartoon Collection’
Directors: John Foster & Mannie Davis
Release Date: March 26, 1932
Rating: ★★
Review:
In ‘The Cat’s Canary’ we watch a cat swallowing a bird. Surprisingly the bird remains alive, and makes the cat produce chirping sounds.
The cat goes to a doctor, to no avail, he then joins a quartet of alley cats serenading a kitten. He joins in chirping. But when he gets hit with a cage, the bird escapes. The bird takes revenge on the cat with help from some fellow birds, including a pelican.
After watching such ambitious films by Van Beuren as ‘The Family Shoe‘, ‘Toy Time‘ and ‘Fly Frolic‘, the Aesop Fable ‘The Cat’s Canary’ feels pretty backward. The designs of the cat are highly inconsistent and primitive, looking back to the Waffles and Don films from 1930. The complete short lacks the Silly Symphony-like quality of the preceding Aesop Fables. Moreover, it’s storytelling is weak and inconsistent: there’s a complete throwaway scene, in which the cat is visited by sympathizing birds, and although the cat is the main protagonist throughout the whole film, he suddenly changes into a villain in the end.
The final scene is clearly inspired by the finale of Disney’s ‘Birds of a Feather‘ (1931), and perhaps ‘The Bird Store‘ (1932), but it adds nothing of its own.
Watch ‘The Cat’s Canary’ yourself and tell me what you think:
‘The Cat’s Canary’ is available on the DVD ‘Aesop’s Fables – Cartoon Classics from the Van Beuren Studio’
Dr. Grob's Animation Review 