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Director: Dick Lundy
Release Date: October 24, 1941
Stars: Donald Duck
Rating: ★★
Review:
‘Donald’s Camera’ opens with Donald reading a sign saying ‘Shoot nature with a camera instead of a gun’.
Donald immediately becomes anti-hunting, eschewing the sight of a gun and deploring the fate of some stuffed animals in a hunting shop’s window. In the next scene Donald is on his way in the forest, trying to photograph some wild animals. He fails to take a picture of a chipmunk, and is laughed at by a whole bunch of cute animals, who seem to have entered the cartoon straight from ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs’ (1937).
After three-and-a-half minutes Donald meets the main adversary of the cartoon, the obnoxious woodpecker from ‘Self Control‘ (1938). The angry bird doesn’t want to get photographed and gives Donald a hard time. Thus in the end, we watch Donald wandering the forest, carrying two guns and dragging a miniature canon with him in search of the pesky little bird.
‘Donald’s Camera’ is a genuine gag cartoon, and contains some very fast animation, but the short is hampered by Lundy’s gentle approach to directing. The silliest gag is when Donald puts the woodpecker into two ridiculous poses.
Watch ‘Donald’s Camera’ yourself and tell me what you think:
This is Donald Duck cartoon No. 28
To the previous Donald Duck cartoon: Old MacDonald Duck
To the next Donald Duck cartoon: Chef Donald
‘Donald’s Camera’ is available on the DVD-set ‘The Chronological Donald Volume 1’
Director: Chuck Jones
Release Date: May 11, 1940
Stars: Sniffles
Rating: ★
Review:
In ‘Sniffles Takes a Trip’ Sniffles goes on a holiday to the country meadows for some peace and quietness.
The short opens with Sniffles walking the rails and singing a tune in his all too childish voice. When he arrives at the meadows, he tries to get some rest in his hammock, but is hindered by a woodpecker. In his next attempt, he hangs his hammock between the legs of a crane, who quickly walks into a pond. Sniffles’s last trial is at night, when he gets so scared, he rushes back to the city.
‘Sniffles Takes a Trip’ is the Sniffles’s fourth film, and in this cartoon the little mouse is even cuter than before. The cartoon is genuinely Disney-like in character: it’s beautifully animated, its backgrounds are lush and artful, and the humor is mild and devoid of conflict.
Unfortunately, the short is also utterly boring, being even much less entertaining than Sniffles’s earlier films. The woodpecker scene mimics a similar one in the Donald Duck cartoon ‘Self Control‘ (1938), another example of the huge Disney influence on Chuck Jones’s earliest efforts as a director.
Watch ‘Sniffles Takes a Trip’ yourself and tell me what you think:
‘Sniffles Takes a Trip’ is available on the Blu-Ray set ‘Looney Tunes Mouse Chronicles: The Chuck Jones Collection’ and the DVD-set ‘Looney Tunes Golden Collection Volume Six’
Directors: William Hanna & Joseph Barbera
Release Date: May 14, 1949
Stars: Tom & Jerry
Rating: ★★
Review:
An egg rolls into Jerry’s house where it hatches, revealing a tiny woodpecker.
The little woodpecker thinks Jerry is his mother and who destroys Jerry’s wooden household almost instantly. When Jerry sends the fledgling home, it encounters Tom and of course Jerry and the woodpecker team against him.
‘Hatch Up Your Troubles’ is one of those Jerry-teams-a-bird-cartoons that are more cute than that they are funny. It is only interesting for its experiments using oil in the backgrounds. It was re-shot in 1956 in Cinemascope as ‘The Egg and Jerry’, which used the same animation against new fifties style backgrounds.
Watch en excerpt from ‘Hatch up your Troubles’ yourself and tell me what you think:
This is Tom & Jerry cartoon No. 41
To the previous Tom & Jerry cartoon: The Little Orphan
To the next Tom & Jerry cartoon: Heavenly Puss
Dr. Grob's Animation Review 