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Director: Winsor McCay
Production Date: ca. 1918-1921
Stars: Gertie the Dinosaur
Rating: ★★½
Review:
‘Gertie on Tour’ is but a short fragment from an unfinished and unreleased film featuring the prehistoric star from ‘Gertie the Dinosaur‘ (1914).
In this excerpt Gertie lives in the modern world: she plays with a frog and with a streetcar, then she dreams she’s back in the Mesozoic, dancing for her dinosaur friends.
‘Gertie On Tour’, like almost all sequels, cannot compare to the first film. Nevertheless, it’s nice to see slightly more footage of this sympathetic brontosaur. The dancing scene in particular catches her playful spirit. Like ‘The Centaurs‘, this short contains very beautiful and elaborate backgrounds, which, undoubtedly thanks to the invention of the cell, are a great improvement over the backgrounds in ‘Gertie The Dinosaur’, which had to be retraced over and over again for each single frame.
Watch ‘Gertie on Tour’ yourself and tell me what you think:
This is Winsor McCay’s sixth film
To Winsor McCay’s fifth, unfinished film: The Centaurs
To Winsor McCay’s seventh, unfinished film: Flip’s Circus
Director: Winsor McCay
Creation Date: ca. 1918-1921
Rating: ★★★★
Review:
After completing four masterpieces, Winsor McCay produced three unfinished films, ‘The Centaurs’, ‘Gertie on Tour‘ and ‘Flip’s Circus‘ (all animated about ca. 1918-1921). ‘The Centaurs’ is the most interesting of the three.
This short film feels like a study. We see a female and a male centaur meeting each other, then we see the male centaur introduce his future wife to his parents, and then suddenly their baby jumps into the scene, frolicking around.
This film once again contains superb animation, rendering totally convincing centaurs. They indeed stand comparison to those of ‘Fantasia’, which were animated about twenty years later. In this short McCay also experiments with his creations moving behind his elaborate backgrounds, creating a great feel of depth.
Watch ‘The Centaurs’ yourself and tell me what you think:
This is Winsor McCay’s fifth film
To Winsor McCay’s fourth film: The Sinking of the Lusitania
To Winsor McCay’s sixth, unfinished film: Gertie on Tour
Director: Winsor McCay
Release Date: July 1918
Rating: ★★★★★ ♕
Review:
McCay’s fourth venture into animation is even more curious than the preceding three (‘Little Nemo‘, ‘How A Mosquito Operates‘ and ‘Gertie the Dinosaur‘). It’s an almost real time report of the sinking of the passenger steamer ‘The Lusitania’ by a German submarine in May 1915.
Like McCay’s earlier films, ‘The Sinking of the “Lusitania”‘ starts with some live action footage of the artist at work, helped by one Mr. Beach who provides McCay with the details on the sinking. Yet, this live action introduction is brief, and soon we cut to the real event.
The action depicted is explained by the title cards, who tell us when and how the ship was hit by two torpedoes fired from a German U-boat. The film also tells us about the number of passengers who perished, and singles out four of them. The tone of the title cards is agitated, and angry, pointing to Germany as a cruel and merciless enemy, and ending ending with the bold sentence “And they tell us not to hate the Hun!“. This message no doubt was rather welcome in a time in which the United States joined the war effort.
McCay’s animation is of a startling realism: the rolling waves, the steamer and U-boat moving in perspective, the explosions and smoke are totally convincing, and at the same time retain their graphic quality. The impact of the images is greatly enhanced by the use of cels (‘The Sinking of the “Lusitania” is the first McCay film to do so), and lovely background art of ocean skies. Despite the fine animation, the action is on the slow side, with people sometimes falling in slow motion into the sea. Yet, the slowness adds to the terrifying experience of the cruelty depicted.
The staging is superb: McCay uses only a few ‘camera angles’, most of them possible in real life, enhancing the idea of an objective record of events. Only two shots escape the documentary style: one shot of two fish fleeing from an approaching torpedo, and a final shot of a mother with child sinking into the sea. Clearly, McCay wanted the viewer to have the feeling he was witnessing the event in real time, as if he was there. Of course, the documentary style only enhances the clear propagandistic message against Germany. The bold propaganda may not have aged very well, McCay’s images certainly have: such command of perspective, such elegance of drawing and such dramatic yet convincingly ‘realistic’ staging is still impressive, one hundred years later. ‘The Sinking of the “Lusitania”‘ thus is a great example of how animation can be used in documentaries to show events that could not or have not been put on film. Strangely, this use of animation was not seen again, until the 21st century, when ‘Waltz with Bashir’ (2008) entered the cinemas.
In all, ‘The Sinking of the “Lusitania”‘ is an astonishing film, which may be both the first animated propaganda film and the first animated documentary. It’s totally unique in its drama, and, despite the propaganda, an all time masterpiece of animation.
Watch ‘The Sinking of the “Lusitania”‘ yourself and tell me what you think:
This is Winsor McCay’s fourth film
To Winsor McCay’s third film: Gertie The Dinosaur
To Winsor McCay’s fifth, unfinished film: The Centaurs
‘The Sinking of the “Lusitania”‘ is available on the DVD ‘Winsor McCay the Master Edition’
Director: Winsor McCay
Release Date: September 14, 1914
Stars: Gertie the Dinosaur
Rating: ★★★★★ ♕
Review:
‘Gertie the Dinosaur’ was Winsor McCay’s third animation film, and it certainly is his most famous one, still capable of entertaining new audiences.
The film follows a same story idea similar to that of ‘Little Nemo‘: during a visit to a natural history museum Winsor McCay bets the famous comic strip artist George McManus that he can make a dinosaur move. After these long nine minutes of slow live action introduction, we finally see McCay’s creation: Gertie the dinosaur.
McCay’s dinosaur appears to be a girl dinosaur. She behaves like a trained animal: she listens to what McCay is telling her, she eats a rock and a whole tree, she bows to the camera, she lifts her feet, she’s being startled by a small mammoth, which she throws into the lake, she dances, and she lifts McCay himself on to her back.
The captions in between replace dialogue, which was part of a vaudeville act with Winsor McCay talking to Gertie and she listening to him. This vaudeville show, with which McCay toured, has been recreated in the Disneyland special ‘The Story of Animated Drawing‘, which aired on November 30, 1955, and which is available on the DVD set ‘Behind the Scenes at the Walt Disney Studio’. At the 2014 Annie Awards Ceremony Bill Farmer also reenacted McCay’s vaudeville performance (included below). The reenactment makes the experience of the original film much more vivid, and watching this version is highly recommended.
The short is impressive because of its fine animation, command of perspective and detailed background art (which had to be drawn over and over again), but what really makes the film a milestone of animation is that Gertie the Dinosaur is the first animated cartoon character with personality. She’s not just any dinosaur, she’s a female dinosaur, behaving half like a trained animal, half like a small spoiled child. She cries when being scolded by McCay, and is clearly happy when performing her little dance.
Watching the interaction between her and (the off-screen) McCay is impressive, but it’s also delightful and fun. ‘Gertie the Dinosaur’ had a huge impact at the time, and inspired a whole generation of animation film pioneers (e.g. Paul Terry, Frank Moser, Pat Sullivan, Otto Messmer and the Fleischer Brothers). The film truly is an all time classic, and enjoyable to this very day.
‘Gertie the Dinosaur’ was followed by the unfinished and much less successful film ‘Gertie on Tour‘, of which McCay completed only two scenes.
Watch ‘Gertie tThe Dinosaur’ yourself and tell me what you think:
Here’s the original vaudeville show reenacted by Bill Farmer at the 41st Annie Awards Ceremony (2014):
This is Winsor McCay’s third film
To Winsor McCay’s second film: How a Mosquito Operates
To Winsor McCay’s fourth film: The Sinking of the Lusitania
Director: Winsor McCay
Release Date: January 1912
Rating: ★★★½
Review:
Winsor McCay’s second cartoon is about a giant mosquito who sucks a sleeping man until his body is a giant bulb. Then, suddenly aware of the audience, he performs some tricks on the man’s nose, sucks some more and explodes.
Unlike McCay’s first film, ‘Little Nemo‘, a long live action intro is absent, and more importantly, this one tells a real story. These are both great improvements on ‘Little Nemo’. Moreover, the mosquito is quite a character, arguably the first in animated history: he wears a tall hat and carries a suitcase. Besides, he’s not only a menace to the man, but also playful and a bit of a showoff. In ‘Before Mickey’ Donald Crafton tells us McCay even baptized the character ‘Steve’.
The film stands in the tradition of McCay’s ‘Dream of the Rarebit Fiend’ comics and is a rather peculiar combination of a sleeper’s nightmare and a bit of silliness. The mosquito is larger than life, and when he sticks in his long proboscis into the man’s head, it looks incredibly painful. This makes some of the action a discomforting watch, and this is perhaps the first time an animated film tries to draw on an audience’s emotions.
Unfortunately, the action is rather slow, and there’s a lot of reverse animation, in which McCay reuses the same drawings in reverse order. This may have spared drawings, but it doesn’t look convincing in its perfect symmetry of movement. Nevertheless, the realism with which the man is drawn and animated remains absolutely stunning.
Despite some flaws ‘How a Mosquito Operates’ remains an original and fresh film, and like all McCay’s films, very well animated.
Watch ‘How a Mosquito Operates’ yourself and tell me what you think:
This is Winsor McCay’s second film
To Winsor McCay’s first film: Little Nemo
To Winsor McCay’s third film: Gertie the Dinosaur
Director: Winsor McCay
Release Date: April 8, 1911
Stars: Little Nemo, Flip, The Imp
Rating: ★★★★½
Review:
‘Little Nemo’ was master comic artist Winsor McCay’s first animation film. It’s also one of the first drawn animation films ever made.
Indeed, one of the title cards boldly states that Winsor McCay is “the first artist to attempt drawing pictures that will move.” This is obviously untrue: Stuart J. Blackton had made the first drawn animated film five years earlier, with ‘Humorous Phases of Funny Faces‘ (1906) and since then Frenchman Émile Cohl had produced more than a hundred animated films, of which a substantial part was (at least partially) drawn. Nevertheless, McCay seems to be the first artist to pick up the glove from Blackton and Cohl.
Star of McCay’s film is his world-famous comic hero Little Nemo, the little boy who always dreamed to be in Slumberland, only to awake abruptly at the end of each comic. He’s joined by Flip, the Imp, the princess and the doctor from the same comic. Nevertheless, they’re not the stars of the narrative, because that is their creator, Winsor McCay himself.
‘Little Nemo’ is a film with two clear sections:
the first half is filmed in live action and tells in three scenes about Winsor McCay’s plan to make moving drawings. In the first scene he proposes his idea to make 4,000 drawings in only one month. This only makes his friends laugh at him. In the second scene he orders three barrels of ink and two enormous packages of drawing paper, and in the third scene he can be seen in his drawing room, between huge piles of drawings and a primitive flipbook-like apparatus to preview his film. A young man, who has come to dust the place makes the piles of drawings fall.
In all, these scenes are rather slow and only mildly funny. Above all, they look as from an era long passed. But when the result is shown, one’s opinion changes completely…
The actual animation itself, completely hand-colored, is as startling and fresh as it was almost a hundred years ago. After an infectious “watch me move!” we watch Little Nemo, Flip and the imp move in 3D, Flip and the imp stretching like distorting mirror images (a gag that has his origin in the February 2, 1908 episode of the comic), Nemo drawing the princess himself, Nemo and the princess riding a dragon that disappears into the distance (inspired by three Sunday Pages from July/August 1906), and Flip and the imp crashing with a car, landing on the doctor.
The animated part may not make any sense, it certainly makes a great watch. McCay likely had seen some of Cohl’s films, because ‘Little Nemo’ displays some of Cohl’s trademark metamorphosis techniques, especially when introducing characters: the imp is made out of falling building blocks, while several small lines finally come together to form Little Nemo. But McCay goes beyond Cohl in command of drawing: his mastery of form, perspective and movement is astonishing.
Although some of the movement is awkwardly slow (a feature the film shares with the comic strip), McCay displays a displays a tremendous control of form and material. For example, he’s the first animator to make his drawings move in perfect perspective, which he shows when Little Nemo and the princess ride off in the dragon’s mouth. After McCay no one would surpass this high quality of animation, until Walt Disney’s innovative strive to realism during the second half of the 1930s.
Watch ‘Little Nemo’ yourself and tell me what you think:
This is Winsor McCay’s first film
To Winsor McCay’s second film: How a Mosquito Operates
Director: Dave Fleischer
Release Date: May 14, 1937
Stars: Betty Boop, Pudgy
Rating: ★★★★★
Review:
Betty has bought a fox. Pudgy, jealous of the lifeless animal, starts a fight, but after knocking his enemy down, he thinks he has killed it.
What follows is a great depiction of his feeble attempts to revive his foe, and then his genuine horror when he realizes he has killed the animal. His feeling of guilt turns his surroundings into a nightmare.
‘Pudgy picks a Fight’ is undoubtedly the most inspired of all Pudgy cartoons, the nightmare sequence being particularly imaginative. Its theme of guilt and imagination running away with it would be revisited by Disney in ‘Donald’s Crime’ (1945) with equally impressive results.
Watch ‘Pudgy Picks A Fight’ yourself and tell me what you think:
This is Betty Boop cartoon No. 63
To the previous Betty Boop cartoon: Pudgy Takes a Bow-Wow
To the next Betty Boop cartoon: The Impractical Joker
‘Pudgy Picks A Fight’ is available on the French DVD Box Set ‘Betty Boop Coffret Collector’
Director: Dave Fleischer
Release Date: April 24, 1936
Stars: Betty Boop, Pudgy
Rating: ★★½
Review:
When Betty is gone three kittens cause havoc in Betty’s house. Pudgy gets the blame until the kittens plead guilty.
The three kittens are doubtless inspired by the Walt Disney’s Academy Award-winning cartoon ‘Three Orphan Kittens‘ from 1935, from which it borrows a milk bottle gag. ‘We Did It’ is not half as elaborate as the Disney cartoon. Nevertheless, it shows the Fleischer’s growth in character animation through pantomime. Pudgy, like Pluto, is by design fit for character animation.
Unfortunately, the Fleischer Studio was very inconsistent and this cartoon was followed by many in which character animation is practically absent. And even in ‘We Did It’ the result of this technique is only mildly amusing and hardly impressing.
Watch ‘We Did It’ yourself and tell me what you think:
This is Betty Boop cartoon No. 50
To the previous Betty Boop cartoon: Betty Boop and Little Jimmy
To the next Betty Boop cartoon: A Song a Day
‘We Did It’ is available on the French DVD Box Set ‘Betty Boop Coffret Collector’
Director: Dave Fleischer
Release Date: September 21, 1934
Stars: Betty Boop, Pudgy
Rating: ★★½
Review:
Betty and her little dog Pudgy are picnicking.
However, Pudgy wrecks the picnic, so Betty sends him home. Unfortunately he’s immediately caught by a dog catcher. Luckily, Pudgy manages to escape together with some other dogs.
‘Betty Boop’s Little Pal’ marks the debut of Betty’s little pup Pudgy, even though he remains unnamed in this cartoon. Though more cute than funny, Pudgy was to be Betty Boop’s most entertaining and long-lasting co-star of the Hays Code era. He was a real character, and, like Pluto, he behaved like a real dog, although he’s as anatomically incorrect as Pluto is. Compared to Pluto, Pudgy is younger, cuter and naughtier. He is as much a child character as a dog character, while Pluto is more mature. Pudgy starred in 23 cartoons, only retiring in 1939. Unfortunately, none of his cartoons can be considered classics, save one: ‘Pudgy Picks a Fight‘ from 1937.
‘Betty Boop’s Little Pal’ is very typical of a trend in the Fleischer films that caught on during 1934 (after the Hays Code was in practice): the story line is very clear, which is a great improvement upon most earlier cartoons, but at the same time all nonsense, weirdness, surrealism, sex and jazz have vanished, too (there’s only one surreal gag, of a car scratching itself). Therefore, this and the other Betty Boop cartoons from 1934 and later are remarkably boring compared with the earlier entries.
Watch ‘Betty Boop’s Little Pal’ yourself and tell me what you think:
This is Betty Boop cartoon No. 32
To the previous Betty Boop cartoon: There’s Something About a Soldier
To the next Betty Boop cartoon: Betty Boop’s Prize Show
‘Betty Boop’s Little Pal’ is available on the French DVD Box Set ‘Betty Boop Coffret Collector’
Director: Dave Fleischer
Release Date: March 2, 1934
Stars: Betty Boop, Koko the Clown
Rating: ★★★★½
Review:
‘Ha! Ha! Ha! was the last cartoon to feature Koko the Clown.
It opens with supposedly Max Fleischer’s hand drawing Betty Boop on a sheet of paper. When Max leaves the studio, Koko comes out of the inkwell for the very last time, and starts eating the candy bar Max had left on the table.
Almost immediately he develops a tootache, so Betty draws a dentist room to operate him, herself acting as the (most sexy) dentist. She first tries to pull Koko’s tooth, but when that doesn’t work, she tries laughing gas.
The laughing gas soon pervades everything, causing not only Koko and herself to laugh, but even the clock, the typewriter, and outside – in the real world – the mailbox, the cars and real people. Even a bridge and some graves join in.
This enjoyable and weird cartoon mixes animation, photographed backgrounds and live action to great results, and it forms a great finale to Koko’s long career, which had lasted fifteen years. Although Koko never had any great roles near Betty, he would be missed, for without Koko and Bimbo (who had his last screen appearance in ‘I Heard‘ from September 1933), Betty became a surprisingly inoffensive and boring character, and none of her remaining 62 films evoked the same fun as ‘Ha! Ha! Ha!’.
Watch ‘Ha! Ha! Ha!’ yourself and tell me what you think:
This is Betty Boop cartoon No. 26
To the previous Betty Boop cartoon: Red Hot Mamma
To the next Betty Boop cartoon: Betty in Blunderland
‘Ha! Ha! Ha!’ is available on the French DVD Box Set ‘Betty Boop Coffret Collector’
Director: Dave Fleischer
Release Date: October 6, 1933
Stars: Betty Boop
Rating: ★★½
Review:
Rubinoff and his orchestra play the score for this cartoon about a bunch of cats (‘the tom kat social club’) who threaten Betty Boop’s yard full of birds. This orchestra, led by the Russian violinist David Rubinoff, played sweet pseudo-classical music, and this sets the tone for the short.
Based on Franz von Suppé’s overture ‘Ein Morgen, ein Mittag und ein Abend in Wien’ (1844), ‘Morning Noon and Night’ is a very sweet cartoon. It opens with some typical Fleischer gags, like a sun with a hangover, but the overall mood is rather corny and lacking humor. The short is very Silly Symphony-like, and particularly reminiscent of Walt Disney’s ‘Birds in Spring‘ from earlier that year. Both feature a fledgling running away, and encountering a threat.
The cartoon’s finale is a battle scene in which all birds come to the rescue, most notably a boxing rooster. Battle scenes like this could be seen in e.g. the 1932 Silly Symphonies ‘Bugs in Love‘, ‘King Neptune‘, and ‘Babes in the Woods‘. Although ‘Morning, Noon and Night’ doesn’t come near any of these Disney cartoons in quality, it shows that the Disney style was invading the Fleischer studio, and that the brothers were getting more ambitious. This ambition would lead to the launch of the Color Classics in 1934.
Betty is more cute than sexy in this cartoon. The difference in mood between this cartoon and that of ‘I Heard‘ is enormous, although that cartoon was released only one month earlier. The reinforced Hays code would only be installed in the summer of 1934, but ‘Morning, Noon and Night’ shows that already by 1933 its morals had become more and more present in the American film industry’s output.
Watch ‘Morning Noon and Night’ yourself and tell me what you think:
This is Betty Boop cartoon No. 21
To the previous Betty Boop cartoon: I Heard
To the next Betty Boop cartoon: Betty Boop’s Hallowe’en Party
‘Morning Noon and Night’ is available on the French DVD Box Set ‘Betty Boop Coffret Collector’
Director: Dave Fleischer
Release Date: May 18, 1934
Stars: Betty Boop, Max Fleischer
Rating: ★★★★½
Review:
‘Betty Boop’s Rise to Fame” is a compilation cartoon, but it’s easily one of the best in its kind.
It features Betty Boop and her creator, Max Fleischer in a nice mix of animation and live action. Fleischer asks Betty, who is depicted as a tiny cartoon character, to perform for a reporter. She does three of her finest moments, using footage from ‘Stopping the Show‘ (1932), ‘Betty Boop’s Bamboo Isle‘ (1932) and ‘The Old Man from the Mountain’ (1933).
In between, there’s some lovely interplay between Betty and “uncle Max”. Even these new scenes are sexy, when Betty changes clothes behind an ink pot and some books. This delightful cartoon can be regarded as an ode to Betty’s glorious past. From now on sex and eroticism would be banished from her cartoons due to the censorship of the Hays code.
Watch ‘Betty Boop’s Rise to Fame’ yourself and tell me what you think:
This is Betty Boop cartoon No. 28
To the previous Betty Boop cartoon: Betty in Blunderland
To the next Betty Boop cartoon: Betty Boop’s Trial
‘Betty Boop’s Rise to Fame’ is available on the French DVD Box Set ‘Betty Boop Coffret Collector’
Director: Dave Fleischer
Release Date: January 5, 1934
Stars: Betty Boop, Fearless Freddie
Rating: ★★★★½
Review:
Betty is the star in a melodrama with an evil landlord and a classic hero.
Arguably the first Betty Boop cartoon with a clear plot, ‘She Wronged Him Right’ marks the debut of Fearless Freddie, who seems to be designed as Betty’s new suitor (Bimbo, being an animal, was no longer accepted in a Hollywood dominated by the puritan Hays Code). His stay would be short, however, because very soon Betty would lose interest in men altogether, taking the Code even further.
Only nine months later the formula of this cartoon was repeated with less successful results in ‘Betty Boop’s Prize Show’. ‘She Wronged Him Right’ still contains some wonderful metamorphosis gags and some inanimate objects speaking or suddenly growing hands, preserving some of Fleischer’s famous surrealism.
The very idea of Betty performing in a melodrama may have been borrowed from Disney, who had released the comparable ‘Mickey’s Mellerdrammer‘ in 1933.
Watch ‘She Wronged Him Right’ yourself and tell me what you think:
This is Betty Boop cartoon No. 24
To the previous Betty Boop cartoon: Parade of the Wooden Soldiers
To the next Betty Boop cartoon: Red Hot Mamma
‘She Wronged Him Right’ is available on the French DVD Box Set ‘Betty Boop Coffret Collector’
Director: Dave Fleischer
Release Date: April 6, 1934
Stars: Betty Boop
Rating: ★★★½
Review:
Late at night, Betty Boop is making a jigsaw puzzle with a picture of Alice in Wonderland on it.
When the clock says it’s time for bed, the rabbit jumps out of the puzzle, and through the mirror. Betty follows him, and the mirror changes her more or less into a sexy Alice, with long curly hair, which becomes her very well.
In Wonderland, the Mad Hatter’s hat pulls out several characters from ‘Alice in Wonderland’ and ‘Through the Looking Glass’, a.o. Humpty Dumpty, the Duchess, the Mad Hatter, the Walrus and the Carpenter, the Gryphon and the Mock Turtle. Betty sings “How Do You Do” to them, before being kidnapped by the evil Jabberwock. Of course, the creatures come to her rescue, accompanied by Franz Liszt’s Second Hungarian Rhapsody, but when she falls off a cliff, she awakes.
‘Betty in Blunderland’ is a sweet, albeit a bit uninspired cartoon that fails to deliver its promises. It features wonderful designs of the Wonderland characters, many of which are clearly based on the original illustrations by Sir John Tenniel. However, the Fleischers don’t do anything interesting with them. We watch Tweedledee and Tweedledum fighting, the duchess doing a boring dance, and the Gryphon and the Mock Turtle shooting craps. None of these scenes is remotely interesting. Moreover, one grows tired of creatures kidnapping Betty, something that happens in several cartoons from the era, e.g. ‘Mother Goose Land‘ and ‘Parade of the Wooden Soldiers‘ (both 1933).
Two years later Betty was followed by Mickey who, too, dreamed stepping through the mirror into Wonderland, in ‘Thru the Mirror’ from 1936, which is by all means a much more memorable cartoon.
Watch ‘Betty in Blunderland’ yourself and tell me what you think:
This is Betty Boop cartoon No. 27
To the previous Betty Boop cartoon: Ha! Ha! Ha!
To the next Betty Boop cartoon: Betty Boop’s Rise to Fame
‘Betty in Blunderland’ is available on the French DVD Box Set ‘Betty Boop Coffret Collector’
Director: Dave Fleischer
Release Date: September 1, 1933
Stars: Betty Boop, Bimbo, Koko The Clown
Rating: ★★★★
Review:
Betty Boop works in a tavern near a coal mine, where Koko The Clown and Bimbo are working. The latter discovers some ghosts in the mine.
This short contains an excellent swinging jazz score by Don Redman and his orchestra, who are introduced in the beginning of the picture, playing in a zany cartoon decor. The music includes adapted versions of Don Redman’s hit songs ‘How am I doing?’ (1932) and ‘I Heard’ (1931).
‘I Heard’ was the last Fleischer cartoon to feature a great jazz score. Don Redman, and his predecessors Cab Calloway and Louis Armstrong, where soon replaced by Rubinoff and his orchestra playing sweet semi-classical music in ‘Morning Noon and Night‘ and ‘Parade of the Wooden Soldiers‘ (both late 1933). Even worse, the cartoon marked Bimbo’s last screen appearance. Being an animal he was no longer accepted as being Betty’s suitor in a Hays Code dominated Hollywood which shunned all eroticism and ‘unnatural sexual behavior’, including human-animal relationships.
After Bimbo, Betty would shortly date a human character named Fearless Freddie, but from 1935 on she remained a bachelor apparently with no interest in men whatsoever. In this cartoon, though, she’s still sexy, and she can briefly be seen in her underwear, after the elevator she and Bimbo had taken has crashed.
Thus, in many ways, one can regard ‘I Heard’ as the last of the classic Betty Boop cartoons. After this cartoon, the intoxicating mix of sex and surrealism was only seen once, in the compilation cartoon ‘Betty Boop’s Rise to Fame‘ (1934), a last tribute to Betty’s glory days.
Watch ‘I Heard’ yourself and tell me what you think:
This is Betty Boop cartoon No. 20
To the previous Betty Boop cartoon: The Old Man of the Mountain
To the next Betty Boop cartoon: Morning Noon and Night
‘I Heard’ is available on the French DVD Box Set ‘Betty Boop Coffret Collector’
Director: Burt Gillett
Release Date: November 25, 1933
Stars: Mickey Mouse, The Orphan Mice
Rating: ★★★½
Review:
Mickey tells the story of Jack and the Beanstalk to his numerous nephews with him in the starring role.
These nephews come out of nowhere, even though they had appeared in ‘Mickey’s Nightmare‘ (1932), where they were, indeed, part of a nightmare. In ‘Giantland’ they’re real alright, and they would star in five other Mickey Mouse cartoons of the 1930s.
In his story Mickey meets the first giant of his career. This giant is very well drawn, with great use of perspective and realistic details, especially in the hands. This must have been the closest the studio could come to the human form in 1933. The cartoon also contains many shadows. Both features are a testimony of Disney’s urge to master more naturalism in his cartoons.
Nevertheless, one can see that the animators were still struggling with such elaborate designs. The giant is not drawn very consistently, and some sequences are more convincing than others. The best and most beautiful scene is when Mickey ends up inside the Giant’s mouth. This is an original scene by all means, and one that could almost only be done in animation.
Notably, the cartoon emphasizes that the story is a fantasy, with Mickey only telling it. Mickey was slowly becoming more settled, and while he’s still the hero of this cartoon, as the years progressed his quieter nature meant that he lost more and more screen time to less timid characters, like Pluto, Donald Duck and Goofy.
Mickey would deal with giants again in ‘Brave Little Tailor’ (1938) and in ‘Fun and Fancy Free’ (1947), a re-telling of the same fairy tale. ‘Gulliver Mickey’ from six months later follows the same story line as ‘Giantland’, but now in reverse, with Mickey himself being the giant, while Floyd Gottfredson retold the story of ‘Giantland’ in his Sunday Mickey Mouse comics from March 11 to April 29, 1934.
Watch ‘Giantland’ yourself and tell me what you think:
This is Mickey Mouse cartoon No. 62
To the previous Mickey Mouse cartoon: The Pet Store
To the next Mickey Mouse cartoon: Shanghaied
Director: Wilfred Jackson
Release Date: October 28, 1933
Stars: Mickey Mouse, Minnie Mouse
Rating: ★★★
Review:
Mickey applies for a job at Tony’s pet store. Then Minnie drops by and together they perform their usual song-and-dance-routine.
‘The Pet Store’ was Mickey’s last cartoon to feature the half song-and-dance routine half story formula, a story structure that by 1933 had become old-fashioned.
This time Minnie’s quite tiresome lalala’s are interrupted by ‘Beppo, the movie monk’, an ape who has read about King Kong (that movie was released the same year) and who wants to imitate him, after he had imitated Stan Laurel. This leads to a nice spoof of King Kong, in which the ape climbs a pile of boxes with Minnie under his arm while being attacked by birds, mimicking the planes in the original feature. In the end Mickey and Minnie are fleeing the pet shop, just before the owner returns, leaving it in complete ruin.
Unfortunately, by 1933 such battle scenes had become as jaded as the song-and-dance routines, and the one in ‘The Pet Store’ is not really different from the ones in ‘The Bird Store‘, ‘King Neptune‘, or ‘Babes in the Woods‘ (all 1932). Nevertheless, the take on ‘King Kong’ is marvelous, and more original than Walter Lantz’s much more literal spoof ‘King Klunk‘ from one month earlier.
Tony is the first elaborate human to enter Mickey’s world, being on par with the human characters in the Silly Symphony ‘The Pied Piper‘ from one month earlier. He would be topped, however, by the giant in Mickey’s next cartoon, ‘Giantland‘. Part of the fun in this cartoon is provided by Tony’s pseudo-Italian labels (like “birda seed” and “biga da sale”), a type of pun that was later borrowed extensively by Chuck Jones in his Pepe le Pew-cartoons.
Watch ‘The Pet Store’ yourself and tell me what you think:
This is Mickey Mouse cartoon No. 61
To the previous Mickey Mouse cartoon: The Steeple Chase
To the next Mickey Mouse cartoon: Giantland
Director: Burt Gillett
Release Date: July 1, 1933
Stars: Clarabelle Cow, Horace Horsecollar, Mickey Mouse, Minnie Mouse, Pete, Pluto
Rating: ★★★★★ ♕
Review:
‘Mickey’s Gala Premier’ is without doubt one of the greatest of all Mickey Mouse Cartoons.
The short both celebrates the enormous popularity Mickey enjoyed in the early 1930s, and establishes him as one of the leading actors of that period.
We’re witnessing the premiere of a new Mickey Mouse cartoon at the famous Grauman’s Chinese Theater in Hollywood, where Mickey and the gang are welcomed as celebrities (only Goofy is absent, his character was not yet established at that time).
The cartoon that is shown at the premiere is called ‘Galloping Romance’. It is an early and fantastic self-parody. This short only exists within ‘Mickey’s Gala Premier’ and is a ridiculous variation on ‘The Cactus Kid’ (1930), in which Mickey rides a number of silly animals in his pursuit of Pete, including a marimba. This self-consciously silly cartoon is way more old-fashioned than ‘Mickey’s Gala Premier’ itself.
Nevertheless, the crowd, which consists solely of well-known performers of the time, laugh their heads off and, after the show, all try to congratulate Mickey. Mickey’s wet dream appears to be being kissed by Swedish actress Greta Garbo, because it is the cartoon’s climax before it’s being revealed that all has been just a dream.
All the caricatures are the work of Joe Grant, whose work was also quoted by the Disney studio in the short special ‘Parade of the Award Nominees‘ (1932). For ‘Mickey’s Gala Premier’ Disney went directly to Grant, and the film became the story man’s first job for Disney. However, it was only two months after this film that Joe Grant became a full-time employee at the Disney studio. There he would also draw caricatures for ‘Broken Toys’ (1935) and ‘Mickey’s Polo Team’ (1936), but his main contribution would be to the story department.
The self-conscious nature of ‘Mickey’s Gala Premiere’ would remain rare at Disney’s, but it would become one of the key features of the Warner Brother Cartoons, who would produce similar cartoons as ‘You Ought to be in Pictures’ (1940) and ‘What’s Cookin’ Doc?’ (1944). Both cartoons are tributary to ‘Mickey’s Gala Premier’.
The short also sprouted several other cartoons featuring caricatures of contemporary Hollywood stars, among others ub Iwerks’s ‘Soda Squirt‘ (1933), Walter Lantz’s ‘The Merry Old Soul‘ (1933) and ‘Toyland Premiere’ (1934), Disney’s own ‘Mickey’s Polo Team’ (1936) and ‘Mother Goose goes Hollywood’ (1938), and the Warner Brothers cartoons ‘The Coo-Coo Nut Groove’ (1936), ‘Porky’s Road Race’ (1937) and ‘Hollywood Steps Out‘ (1941). Nevertheless, ‘Mickey’s Gala Premier’ was not the first in his kind, for already ten years earlier Felix the Cat made the trip to Hollywood to meet the stars in ‘Felix in Hollywood’ (1923).
Among the stars featured in ‘Mickey’s Gala Premier’ I managed to identify The Keystone Cops, Marie Dressler, Laurel & Hardy, the Marx Brothers, Maurice Chevalier, Eddie Cantor, Jimmy Durante, Harold Lloyd, Edward G. Robinson, Clark Gable, Joe E. Brown, Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Mae West, Greta Garbo, Bela Lugosi, Frederic March and Boris Karloff.
Also featured is some guy who has a striking resemblance to Prince Charles of Wales and who’s dressed as a king. This is a caricature of Will H. Hays, the president of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA). Hays was Hollywood’s chief censor and the man behind the Hays code, the censorship Hollywood imposed on itself between 1930 and 1968. Interestingly, the censorship only became severe when Hays made place for Joseph Breen in 1934…
Watch ‘Mickey’s Gala Premier’ yourself and tell me what you think:
This is Mickey Mouse cartoon No. 58
To the previous Mickey Mouse cartoon: Mickey’s Mechanical Man
To the next Mickey Mouse cartoon: Puppy Love
Director: Burt Gillett
Release Date: April 8, 1933
Stars: Clarabelle Cow, Goofy, Mickey Mouse, Minnie Mouse
Rating: ★★★★½
Review:
Mickey and the gang are staged in many different times and places in their cartoons. Yet, this medieval short is the only cartoon in which they are introduced as actors performing their parts.
This idea of Mickey being an actor was first coined in ‘The Wayward Canary’ (1932) and played out to the max in ‘Mickey’s Gala Premier’ (1933). This cartoon nevertheless is played without any awareness of the public.
Minnie is the princess of Lalapazoo, and forced by her father to marry prince Goofy from Pupupadoo. Minnie refuses and is locked up in the high tower. Fortunately, there is minstrel Mickey to save her and to battle the evil prince, chasing him through the window, and marrying the princess himself. This adventure film cliche Disney already had visited in the Oswald cartoon ‘Oh, What A Knight‘, but it is expanded and improved in ‘Ye Olden Days’.
Like ‘Building a Building’ and ‘The Mad Doctor’ from the same year, this cartoon is partly a musical with lots of parts sung. It also contains a very anachronistic guillotine and an elaborately designed horse that shows the aspirations of the studio to master more lifelike designs and animation.
Goofy, who is introduced as Dippy Dawg, is quite miscast here, playing the villain, whom he acts out more sillily than threateningly. It seems that the animators didn’t really know what to do with the character, so far only funny because of his typical voice. So, after this film they dropped him for more than a year.
Watch ‘Ye Olden Days’ yourself and tell me what you think:
This is Mickey Mouse cartoon No. 55
To the previous Mickey Mouse cartoon: Mickey’s Mellerdrammer
To the next Mickey Mouse cartoon: The Mail Pilot
Director: David Hand
Release Date: January 21, 1933
Stars: Mickey Mouse, Pluto
Rating: ★★★★★
Review:
‘The Mad Doctor’ is Mickey’s third horror cartoon and easily his best (the other two are ‘The Haunted House’ from 1929 and ‘The Gorilla Mystery’ from 1930).
The plot is simple: it’s night, the weather is foul and Pluto is kidnapped by an evil scientist called Dr. XXX, who takes him into his laboratory, which is reminiscent of that of Frankenstein in James Whales’ film of the same name, 1931. Mickey follows Pluto’s tracks into a creepy castle, entering it in a scene which reuses some footage of ‘Egyptian Melodies‘ from 1931. Inside the castle he has to deal with several skeletons, including a ridiculous hybrid of a skeleton and a spider. Soon, he’s captured, too, and about to be killed by a chainsaw. Fortunately, it turns out to be all just a dream…
Besides the horror, this cartoon also features elaborate designs and loads of special effects. Especially beautiful is its shadowing on the characters. It also has a strong musical element, as the mad scientist sings all his lines. Some of the gags are quite surreal and reminiscent of the Fleischer style, like a lock locking itself or the scientist cutting off Pluto’s shadow. The cartoon also features a gag with many doors in one doorpost. This gag would be reused and improved by Tex Avery in ‘The Northwest Hounded Police’ from 1946.
Watch ‘The Mad Doctor’ yourself and tell me what you think:
This is Mickey Mouse cartoon No. 52
To the previous Mickey Mouse cartoon: Building a Building
To the next Mickey Mouse cartoon: Mickey’s Pal Pluto
Dr. Grob's Animation Review 