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Director: Unknown
Release date: May 7, 1920
Stars: Judge Rummy
Rating: ★★★★
Review:
Tad Dorgan’s Judge Rummy was a comic strip that run from 1910 to 1922. Between 1918 and 1922 it was also an animated cartoon series, directed by the likes of Jack King, Burt Gillett and Grim Natwick, who would all become animation legends, and, surprisingly, Gregory La Cava, later director of live action comedies like ‘My Man Godfrey’ (1936) and ‘Stage Door’ (1937).
I’ve no idea who’s responsible for ‘A Fitting Gift’ but the animator has a very pleasant animation style, with unexpected touches of metamorphosis, original staging, and surprising movements.
In this short Judge Rummy wants to buy a gift for a girl he admires. His friend Silk Hat Harry suggest a corset, but Judge Rummy is too bashful to enter, so Silk Hat Harry suggests the two dress as women themselves, but then Judge Rummy’s wife appears. The gags themselves in this cartoon, one including a homosexual stereotype, are pretty trite, but as said, the execution is much fun, making this short a pleasant watch.
Watch ‘A Fitting Gift’ yourself and tell me what you think:
‘A Fitting Gift’ is available on the Blu-Ray-DVD combo ‘Cartoon Roots: The Bray Studios Animation Pioneers’
Director: Walter Lantz
Release date: March 9, 1920
Stars: Jerry on the Job
Rating: ★★★
Review:
Jerry is on a job at a train station, where his boss is plagued by a mosquito. Jerry knows just the way to get rid of the little pest, or does he?
‘The Tale of the Wag’ is a nice little cartoon based on one simple idea. The animation is full of surprising details, like Jerry using his crest as an arm to scratch himself, or Jerry shaking hands with the thought balloon that contains his idea. These little touches rescue an otherwise rather run of the mill short.
Watch ‘The Tale of a Wag’ yourself and tell me what you think:
‘The Tale of a Wag’ is available on the Blu-Ray-DVD combo ‘Cartoon Roots: The Bray Studios Animation Pioneers’
Director: Vernon Stallings
Release date: March 3, 1920
Stars: Krazy Kat
Rating: ★
Review:
Compared to other cartoonists working at the Bray studio, the work of Vernon Stallings is certainly subpar. His Krazy Kat cartoons are crude and simple, and lack the sophisticated animation of an Earl Hurd or the inventiveness of Walter Lantz.
‘The Best Mouse Loses’ is a very short cartoon in which Ignatz Mouse goes into a ringed boxing match. Arbiter Krazy Kat lets him win, much to Ignaz’s chagrin. Both the premise and the execution of this cartoon are poor, and the animation is only interesting because of some strange body elongations not seen elsewhere.
Watch ‘The Best Mouse Loses’ yourself and tell me what you think:
‘The Best Mouse Loses’ is available on the Blu-Ray-DVD combo ‘Cartoon Roots: The Bray Studios Animation Pioneers’
Director: Władysław Starewicz
Release Date: 1920
Rating: ★★★★
Review:
In ‘Dans les griffes de l’araignée’ Starewicz tells his own, quite elaborated version of the classic ‘Spider and the Fly’ tale.
In Starewicz’s version the fly is called Dame Aurélie, a simple fly living at the countryside with her uncle, Beetle Anatole, and being in love with a longhorn beetle. One day a famous Paris star, a butterfly called Phalène, crashes in the fly’s village, and stays at her home. Phalène paints an all too rosy picture of Parisian life, and soon after her departure, Aurélie goes to the capital, as well.
First all goes well, as Aurélie works as Phalène’s house maid. But when she’s fired because of seeing a secret lover, things go downhill, indeed. The tale ends rather gruesomely with quite a spectacular finale, and in the epilogue we watch Aurélie returning to the village…
‘Dans les griffes de l’araignée’ is quite a tragic tale, but it’s hard to call it very engaging. Starewicz’s puppets are quite sophisticated, e.g. capable of rolling their eyes, but they don’t transgress the emotions very well, which remains emblematic. The emotional scenes are augmented by close-ups of the insect characters, in which live action puppets are used. Most spectacular is the finale, in which the title cards make place for a long action scene. The surviving print is gorgeous with its hand-painted colors, which certainly add to the film’s unique atmosphere.
‘Dans les griffes de l’araignée’ is available on the DVD-box ‘Starewitch 1882-1965 DVD Cinquantième anniversaire’
Director: Max Fleischer
Release Date: 1920
Rating: ★★★★½
Review:
‘All Aboard for a Trip to the Moon’ is a very early educational animation short. The short was animated by Max Fleischer at the Bray Studios, and apparently part of a series called ‘Goldwyn Bray Pictograph – The Magazine on the Screen’. For this short Fleischer got assistance of the Popular Science Monthly for the scientific details.
In less than 8 minutes ‘All Aboard for a Trip to the Moon’ tells about a hypothetical trip to the moon, telling us how far the moon is, and how to overcome the Earth’s gravity by using a radium-propelled rocket. Fleischer depicts quite a hard, bouncing landing of the rocket on the moon, and it’s never revealed how the vessel would be able to return to Earth, but we get some nice and convincing shots of the moon’s landscape and earth from the moon itself.
Fleischer’s drawings and animations are combined with live action footage, e.g. of a man handling radium, and another one getting dressed for the trip. Apparently in 1920 the scientists deemed a thick fur coat and a gas mask enough protection in outer space…
The short also states that radium alone can create the force to overcome the Earth’s gravity, while the Saturn V rockets that eventually would put man on the moon were fueled by a modified form of kerosene, and in 1920 kerosene itself was already well-known…
Anyhow, scientific errors aside, ‘All Aboard for a Trip to the Moon’ is an entertaining piece of infotainment. It not only predates Disney’s similar futurist television specials, like ‘Man and the Moon‘ (1955) with a staggering 35 years, it also gives an insight look in how space travel was perceived in the 1920s.
‘All Aboard for a Trip to the Moon’ is available on the Thunderbean Blu-Ray ‘Fleischer Rarities’
Director: Walter Lantz
Release Date: February 27, 1920
Stars: Jerry on the Job
Rating: ★★★★
Review
‘The Wrong Track’ is a short gag cartoon featuring ‘Jerry on the Job’, apparently a little kid doing all kinds of jobs.
In this short he’s a train engineer, who’s scolded by his boss of killing too many animals on the train track. And indeed, only a few seconds after leaving the train station Jerry encounters a cow, which after some action is killed.
The short features quite some funny gags and ends with a great punchline. The designs are simple, but pleasant and Walter Lantz’s animation is fair and effective. ‘The Wrong Track’ may not be a masterpiece, it’s a fun bit of early animation, and certainly one of the better shorts from this era.
The Wrong Track’ is available on the Thunderbean Blu-Ray/DVD-combo ‘Technicolor Dreams an Black & White Nightmares’
Director: Frank Moser
Release date: July 25, 1920
Stars: Bud and Susie
Rating: ★★
Review:
‘Bud and Susie’ was an animation series created by Frank Moser that consisted of at least twenty cartoons and run from 1920 to 1921. ‘Down the Mississippi’ does little to advertise the series as something outstanding, when compared to contemporary series like Earl Hurd’s Bobby Bumps’ or Otto Messmer’s Felix the Cat.
Like, Ub Iwerks, Moser is known as a very fast animator. However, unlike Iwerks, Moser wasn’t either innovative or funny. It may be unfair to use such an early cartoon as ‘Down the Mississippi’ as an example, but the ‘Bud and Susie’ series was Moser’s own creation, so it could have been inspired. This is not the case.
In this film Bud, Susie and their cat read ‘Huckleberry Finn’. When the sandman puts Bud to sleep, he dreams he’s on a raft on the Mississippi with his sister and the cat. The cat catches an electric eel and Bud catches a crocodile. They camp at the river bank, where they’re about to be eaten by a bear, which looks like an oversized mouse. The print on the ‘Presenting Felix the Cat’ DVD unfortunately stops here.
‘Down the Mississippi’ is clearly rooted in the comic strip tradition, although there are only two text balloons. Like, Ub Iwerks, Moser is known as a very fast animator, in fact he famed himself as being the fastet animator in the world. However, unlike Iwerks, Moser wasn’t either innovative or funny. His animation is certainly very readable but crude, and the animal designs are anything but original. Most interesting are his animation of the waves and the background art of the camping site. Notice that the cat’s tail changes into a question mark at one point, a feature normally attributed to Felix the Cat.
Nothing is particularly outstanding in this cartoon, which isn’t funny either. Indeed, Art Babbitt was unimpressed with Moser’s art. As he relates to Charles Solomon in his book ‘Enchanted Drawings’: “Moser was a man devoid of humor. He worked very rapidly, but his work was crude and without feeling. Of course, everybody’s work was crude in those days, but he constantly told you he was the fastest animator in the world. I undiplomatically told him that was like being the fastest violinist in the world. You can play very fast, but you can’t play worth a damn!” (Enchanted Drawings – The History of Animation p. 95).
Frank Moser would later co-found Terrytoons with Paul Terry. The two were likely kindred spirits, more interested in efficiency than in art.
Watch ‘Down the Mississippi’ Yourself and tell me what you think:
‘Down the Mississippi’ is available on the DVD ‘Presenting Felix the Cat – The Otto Messmer Classics 1919-24’
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