You are currently browsing the tag archive for the ‘cuteness’ tag.
Director: Wilfred Jackson
Release Date: September 16, 1933
Rating: ★★★★
Review:
‘The Pied Piper’ is a vivid re-telling of the original fairy tale in operetta fashion.
Thus ‘The Pied Pier’, together with ‘King Neptune‘ (1932) and ‘Father Noah’s Ark‘ (1933), belongs to the operetta- like Silly Symphonies. In its score, composed by Leigh Harline, practically all dialogue is sung, making ‘The Pied Piper’ an animated mini-opera.
Its human designs are way more detailed and anatomically correct than in ‘King Neptune’ or ‘Father Noah’s Ark’, making these two films looking old-fashioned, already. Disney was advancing towards the later realism of ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs’ (1937) with a lightning speed…
Unfortunately, at the same time, a sugary approach is unleashed, as well. For example, the rats are not drown, but caught in an imaginary cheese. Likewise, the children, who are depicted as virtual slaves in Hamelin, do not just disappear, but they’re lured into ‘Joyland’, where even the crippled get cured. So, in the end, practically no harm is done to anyone.
And so, like the contemporary ‘Lullaby Land‘, ‘The Pied Piper’ is a strange mixture of ever advancing animation and rather infantile material. A great deal of the remaining Silly Symphonies would share this mixture, and even Disney’s first features, like ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs’ and ‘Bambi‘ (1942) are not immune to it.
The children designs used here would pop up in numerous sugary cartoons from the 1930s, including those from other studios. And, unfortunately, there would be a lot of them…
Watch ‘The Pied Piper’ yourself and tell me what you think:
This is Silly Symphony No. 39
To the previous Silly Symphony: Lullaby Land
To the next Silly Symphony: The Night before Christmas
Director: Friz Freleng
Release Date: April 10, 1937
Rating: ★★★½
Review:
‘She Was an Acrobat’s Daughter’ is a cartoon about an evening at the cinema.
It makes very clear that in the 1930s the experience of going to the movies was way more elaborate than nowadays: we watch newsreels, the audience singing to the title song and a feature, ‘The Petrified Florist’, a satire of the Warner Brothers film ‘The Petrified Forest’ (1936), with caricatures of its stars Leslie Howard and Bette Davis. During the cartoon we’re confronted with several movie theater annoyances, like people changing seats, people passing by in the middle of a film, popcorn sellers and bad front row seats.
In this cartoon, Friz Freleng really caught up with the new spirit at Warner Brothers induced by the coming of Tex Avery and Frank Tashlin in 1936. Gone is any resemblance to cuteness or children stars. Instead, there is an annoying duckling asking questions in an irritable voice, and causing havoc in the cinema. There’s no story, just gags, and the film ends rather unexpectedly. But the whole film is a sheer delight, aimed at laughs, and succeeding in it, too. Also featured is an early caricature of Adolf Hitler.
Watch ‘She Was an Acrobat’s Daughter’ yourself and tell me what you think:
http://www.supercartoons.net/cartoon/757/she-was-an-acrobats-daughter.html
Director: David Hand
Release Date: April 20, 1935
Rating: ★
Review:
‘The Robber Kitten’ is one of the more annoying entries in the Silly Symphony series.
Being a Silly Symphony, its animation is top notch, especially the character animation of the little rascal Ambrose (or ‘Butch’ as he prefers to be called) and the experienced robber Dirty Bill. But, the story is slow-paced, childish and dripping with morality.
The setting is vague and pretty unconvincing: Bill is clad in a medieval Robin Hood-like costume, while Ambrose is clad in 17th century fashion. A much sillier world as that of ‘The Cookie Carnival’ was brought with much more bravado.
All too typical for the Silly Symphonies of the mid thirties, ‘The Robber Kitten’ is nothing more than beautifully animated pulp.
Watch ‘The Robber Kitten’ yourself and tell me what you think:
This is Silly Symphony No. 51
To the previous Silly Symphony: The Golden Touch
To the next Silly Symphony: Water Babies
Director: Dave Fleischer
Release Date: January 17, 1936
Rating: ★
Review:
Max Fleischer’s first full color cartoon is in the same vein as Disney’s ‘Lullaby Land‘ (1933) and Walter Lantz’s ‘Candy Land’ (1934), depicting little children’s wonderful dreams.
‘Somewhere in Dreamland’ deals with two very poor children who dream that they are in dreamland which is full of candy and toys. Fleischer’s 3D-technique is used with stunning results, and the cartoon must have struck a chord with the audience during the Great Depression era, in which poverty was an all too familiar thing. Indeed, as children the Fleischer Brothers themselves had known hunger like depicted in the film, when their father ran out of business. Unfortunately, the cartoon is remarkably unfunny and sickeningly sweet, following similar sugary outings in Disney’s Silly Symphonies series, like ‘Funny Little Bunnies‘ (1934) and ‘The Robber Kitten‘ (1935).
Unlike those films, however, ‘Somewhere in Dreamland’ suffers from primitive designs. The children’s mother looks like a relative of Olive Oyl, while the little children are drawn in typical thirties kids style resembling Hänsel and Gretel from Disney’s ‘Babes in the Woods‘ from four years earlier. The result is that none of the characters seem to fit within the elaborate 3D-sets.
Watch ‘Somewhere in Dreamland’ yourself and tell me what you think:
Director: Wilfred Jackson
Release Date: March 24, 1934
Rating: ★★
Review:
‘Cute Little Bunnies’ would have been a better title for this easter short, for the bunnies are very cute, not funny.
In fact, “Funny Little Bunnies’ is so cute it can only have been meant for children. It makes one wonder what movies it was supposed to support in the theaters (surely no grim gangster thriller!).
Because everybody copied Disney at that time, other studios were copying this ‘new cuteness’ as well. Especially 1934 saw an explosion of Silly Symphonies imitating series, combining the appeal of color with sugary tales. Former Disney associate Ub Iwerks was the first, releasing his first Comicolor cartoon on December 23, 1933. He was followed by Max Fleischer (Color Classics, August 1934), MGM (Happy Harmonies, September), Van Beuren (Rainbow Parade, September), Columbia (Color Rhapsodies, November), and Walter Lantz (Cartune Classics, December). This resulted in a spread of cute (and severely unfunny) cartoons in the mid-thirties.
One is therefore particularly thankful that in the late thirties Tex Avery restored nonsense, wackiness and absurdism in the animated cartoon. These qualities Disney sometimes seemed to have forgotten during his pursuit for greater naturalism and beauty.
Notice how, for example, ‘Funny Little Bunnies’ uses animation to tell a story that cannot be told in live action, but how it tries to tell this story in the most conventional, ‘live action-like’ way. Especially the opening shot of this short is stunning, with two bunnies hopping realistically and lots of birds and butterflies flying around.
Watch ‘Funny Little Bunnies’ yourself and tell me what you think:
This is Silly Symphony No. 43
To the previous Silly Symphony: The Grasshopper and the Ants
To the next Silly Symphony: The Big Bad Wolf
Dr. Grob's Animation Review 