Watch Old King Cole For Free

Plenty to Like, Plenty to Dislike

Fresh and Exciting

Better Late Then Never

Admirable film.

This is an early color short in the Silly Symphonies series produced by the Disney studio. There will be mild spoilers ahead:It's hard to spoil this short because it's the blandest Disney short I can recall seeing. The basic premise is simple. That may be a large part of the problem with this one.Old King Cole is throwing a party and has invited all the characters in Storybookland to come. That's about it. You see various books open and have buildings pop up relevant to whatever fairy tale it relates to and the visuals are nice, but they can't really compensate for the lackluster music and boring characters.The short is like cotton candy. It's very nice looking and might briefly seem sweet, but in reality, it's just so much air Pretty much every fairy tail character has a brief moment in the spotlight, but nothing is developed to any degree. The Three Blind Mice and Hickory, Dickory, Dock are the only ones which are even halfway memorable.This short is available on the Disney Treasures More Silly Symphonies DVD set. The set is worth having but this short is for die-hard Disney fans who want to see everything.

As I have said many times, I have a lot of fondness for the Disney Silly Symphonies. Old King Cole I'm afraid doesn't really do all that much for me. It is more tolerable than El Terrible Toreador, The Merry Dwarfs and Cannibal Capers, but if I want a masterpiece status Silly Symphonies I prefer The Old Mill, The Ugly Duckling(1939), The Skeleton Dance, Flowers and Trees, The Goddess of Spring and The Band Concert. I do like the vivid colours and colourful backgrounds, the music although simpler than most cartoons is still full of energy, the nursery rhymes are nice to hear and the dancing is niftily choreographed. And there are some nice parts to the cartoon such as Peter the Pumpkin Eater and his wife and Hickory, Dick and Dock jumping out of Pandora's Box to sound the midnight bells. However, while spotting the characters are a delight most of them are not very appealing to me. They are of the cute but bland kind. And I didn't care for some of the character designs, Old King Cole's features are very over-exaggerated and some of the side characters like the mice and the Pied Piper look like stick figures. There isn't much story to speak of either, it is over-simplistic and is more an excuse for short snippets of nursery rhymes to come to life and in a less charming way than it had potential to. All in all, not much memorable apart from the spotting of the nursery characters and rhymes. 6/10 Bethany Cox

While I am a huge fan of the early Disney cartoons, it's hard to like "Old King Cole". It has practically nothing going for it. For example, although the cartoon is in color (as were all the Silly Symphony shorts at this time), the colors are VERY splashy and not at all pleasing to the eye. And, oddly, the characters' faces are all white and washed out--making the cartoon appear to have been hastily made. Additionally, there really is no story--just lots of annoying characters popping out of a storybook. They sing and dance, but none of it is appealing--it's all like a steady diet of saccharine! Some other cartoon producers specialized in making annoying cartoons like this (such as the dreadful Harmon-Ising shorts), but this is very atypical of Disney. Sure, their Silly Symphonies were known for singing and dancing, but usually the songs are good and there is some plot--here in "Old King Cole" the songs are bad, the animation is bad and the overall product will have you wondering why in heaven you watched it in the first place! Pretty terrible.

A Walt Disney SILLY SYMPHONY Cartoon Short.An invitation is sent by OLD KING COLE to a party at his royal castle. The storybooks open and soon the denizens from many a Nursery Rhyme & Fairy Tale are hurrying to attend. The Three Little Kittens, Humpty Dumpty, & Goosey Gander are among those that entertain the crowd, but when the Ten Little Indian Boys start to dance things really get raucous. Joined first by the King, and then by the audience, wild reveling extends right up to midnight, when all of the guests scurry home.This is a pleasant little film, which allows the quick-eyed viewer the chance to play 'Name That Character'.The SILLY SYMPHONIES, which Walt Disney produced for a ten year period beginning in 1929, are among the most interesting of series in the field of animation. Unlike the Mickey Mouse cartoons in which action was paramount, with the Symphonies the action was made to fit the music. There was little plot in the early Symphonies, which featured lively inanimate objects and anthropomorphic plants & animals, all moving frantically to the soundtrack. Gradually, however, the Symphonies became the school where Walt's animators learned to work with color and began to experiment with plot, characterization & photographic special effects. The pages of Fable & Fairy Tale, Myth & Mother Goose were all mined to provide story lines and even Hollywood's musicals & celebrities were effectively spoofed. It was from this rich soil that Disney's feature-length animation was to spring. In 1939, with SNOW WHITE successfully behind him and PINOCCHIO & FANTASIA on the near horizon, Walt phased out the SILLY SYMPHONIES; they had run their course & served their purpose.