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Director: Émile Cohl
Release Date: 1910
Rating: ★★★½
Review:
This short starts with a couple visiting a psychiatrist.
The woman exclaims that her husband is rather cuckoo, so the psychiatrist takes a look inside the husband’s head using a ‘cephaloscope’. As may be expected in an Émile Cohl film what the doctor sees is shown in animation: a series of weird images, tied by Émile Cohl’s trademark metamorphosis.
When the psychiatrist has seen enough, he drills a hole in the man’s skull and pulls out the crazy thoughts, which manifest themselves as more animation on a black screen, much in the vain of Cohl’s debut film ‘Fantasmagorie‘ (1908). Thus the man is saved and the film ends.
Cohl’s stream-of-consciousness way of animating works quite well for a film about craziness, and the framing story is amusing enough to keep the film interesting, even though it’s certainly not one of Cohl’s masterpieces.
Watch ‘Le retapeur de cervelles’ yourself and tell me what you think:
‘Le retapeur de cervelles’ is available on the DVDs ‘Émile Cohl – L’agitateur aux mille images’
Director: Walter Lantz
Release Date: July 7, 1941
Stars: Woody Woodpecker
Rating: ★★★½
Review:
After his knockout debut in ‘Knock Knock‘ (1940) fledgling star Woody Woodpecker was given his own series.
The first two entries in this new series, ‘Woody Woodpecker’ and ‘The Screwdriver‘ clearly play on the character’s lunacy. In fact, in his first scene Woody sings a song about how crazy he is. The other forest animals, all cute characters straight from a 1930s cartoon, think so, too, thus Woody goes to visit a psychiatrist, who turns out to be a fox who is even loonier than Woody is. What follows is a string of random gags of nonsense. For example we watch Woody swimming in the doc’s carpet, and the doc and Woody dancing the conga out of the blue.
‘Woody Woodpecker’ is full of wild gags, and owes almost nothing to Lantz’s previous cartoons, except of course for the cute forest animals. In this film Woody shows both a Donald Duck-like fighting style and a Porky Pig-like stutter, when he says: “maybe I AM crazy. Maybe I’d better see a psy… a psy… I go see a doctor”. Soon Woody’s lunacy would be downplayed, as this was a little too narrow a scope to build a series on.
Watch ‘Woody Woodpecker’ yourself and tell me what you think:
This is Woody Woodpecker cartoon No. 1
To Woody Woodpecker’s debut film: Knock Knock
To the next Woody Woodpecker cartoon: The Screwdriver
‘Woody Woodpecker’ is available on the DVD-set ‘The Woody Woodpecker and Friends Classic Cartoon Collection’
Dr. Grob's Animation Review 