Watch Orphans' Benefit For Free

Very good movie overall, highly recommended. Most of the negative reviews don't have any merit and are all pollitically based. Give this movie a chance at least, and it might give you a different perspective.

The best films of this genre always show a path and provide a takeaway for being a better person.

One of the worst ways to make a cult movie is to set out to make a cult movie.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

This is a color remake of the original black and white 1934 cartoon of the same name and soundtrack. Here, Mickey and his friends put on a benefit show for orphans. The plot line for this story sounds touching and meaningful enough, but the orphans themselves were actually pretty mischievous with no redeeming qualities. They torment poor Donald Duck, who tries to recite nursery rhymes for them. Donald got the brunt of all the mean jokes and gags from the orphans.While the animation of this color remake is very nice and seeing Mickey team up with Donald Duck and Clara Cluck is a treat, the overall cartoon is not very entertaining or funny.Grade D--

THE REMAKE HAS long been a staple of the great Hollywood motion picture business. But until now, we weren't aware of the extent to which redoing a picture had pervaded the studios, extending into the cartoon units. In this case, it is at the Walt Disney Studios that we find this absolute carbon copy of the black & white release from the previous decade.IF IT WEREN'T for the evolved, modified and updated appearance of the principal players, one could not be faulted for believing that this 1941 version was simply a colorized copy of the old 1934 original. The design, the background and the scripted action & gags all match in a nearly perfect manner.BY THIS TIME, Mickey had been either promoted or relegated to the straight man of the group. His stature as the "leader" of the Disney stable of characters was reassured and strengthened with his starring in the Sorcerer's Apprentice segment of FANTASIA that previous year. That left the comedy business up to the others. Goofy, Horace Horse Collar, Clarabelle Cow and the Hen.THAT LEFT ONLY the participation of Donald Duck, who had by this time affixed his rising star to the very zenith of the animated comedy. His reprising of his 1934 performance seems to be a case of spinning his wheels and wasting time.ALTHOUGH IT SEEMS to be a sort of sacrilege to even think, let alone to write or say, the animation in this installment appears to be just a trifle rough, poorly executed and even somewhat "limited"(a word that one never uses in reference to Disney).

Orphan's Benefit is a very good cartoon, but it isn't the best of the Donald Duck cartoons, though probably one of his more popular ones. While the animation is very colourful, it was obvious it had been originally black and white, so some of the character movements were disappointingly stiff. And some of the jokes, while spot on most of the time, came across as slightly over-familiar in others. The music though is absolutely wonderful, one of the musical highlights of the cartoon was Clara Cluck singing the sextet from Lucia Di Lamenmoor. The orphans are adorable, and Donald voiced by the one and only Clarence "Ducky" Nash was on top form. While not a classic, this is well worth the watch. 8/10 Bethany Cox

This short was made during the fallow period in Disney shorts: Disney was concentrating on feature production, the strike that would result in much of his staff going off to form UPA was on and the result was that his bread-and-butter work, the shorts distributed by RKO, showed a severe drop in script quality. It was not until the the following year, when he 'exiled' some of his more talented people who, he felt, had supported the strike, to the shorts department, that quality would be re-established.In the meantime, shorts like this and MICKEY'S BIRTHDAY PARTY resulted, basically redrawn version of earlier successes. Do we need to speculate on why all the 'orphans' look exactly like Mickey?