Watch So Much for So Little For Free

Good movie, but best of all time? Hardly . . .

A lot of fun.

A lot more amusing than I thought it would be.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

Love animation, it was a big part of my life as a child, particularly Disney, Looney Tunes and Tom and Jerry, and still love it whether it's film, television or cartoons.Chuck Jones deserved his status as one of animation's most legendary, greatest and most important directors/animators. He may have lacked the outrageousness and wild wackiness of Bob Clampett and Tex Avery, but the visual imagination, wit and what he did with some of the best-known and most iconic characters ever were just as special. 'So Much for So Little' is interesting and well made, but did it deserve its Oscar Win? Not to me, while appreciating it highly of Jones' three Oscar-winning cartoons it's perhaps my least favourite.'So Much for So Little's' portrayal of inoculations is somewhat one-sided agreed and some of the content is very of the time and would be very different now. With that being said, what we are told and how it's executed on the whole is fascinating, engaging, important and entertaining, making its points without preaching too much. The voice acting from Mel Blanc and Frank Graham is as spot on as can be. Two multi-talented voice actors on top form. Jones' direction is solid and the cartoon is paced in a lively fashion.Animation is excellent, it's fluid in movement, crisp in design, vibrant in colour and very meticulous in detail.Ever the master, Carl Stalling's music is typically superb. It is as always lushly orchestrated, full of lively energy and characterful in rhythm, not only adding to the action but also enhancing it.In summation, very interesting and well done but didn't blow me away and won't be for everybody. 8/10 Bethany Cox

Directed by Chuck Jones, "So Much for So Little" is a very nice Warner Bros. cartoon. Notice I wrote "nice", not "funny", as humor is not the real gist of this cartoon. It's an attempt for post-war families all over the country to increase their awareness of the quality of public health services in their communities. Specifically, this film traces the life span of one John Emerson Jones, Jr., during which time the narrator continuously addresses him and recommends that he take care of himself through periodic checkups.Certain sequences in "So Much for So Little" put a smile on my face. The sight of little John in a suit of armor holding a lance is quite amusing as he attacks various diseases (tough customers on the path of life, as they are called) in human form. This cartoon also highly benefits from the music score of Carl W. Stalling. Among other songs that I recognize are "Strolling through the Park One Day" as John takes a walk with his wife Mary; "Singing in the Shower" as a fly washes its feet (!!); the all-too-familiar "Powerhouse" during the blood test; and Chopin's "Raindrop" Prelude in D-Flat at the sight of sewage water pouring into a clean creek.When I first see John as an infant in this cartoon, I want to weep for him, because the narrator points out that John's chances of not seeing his first birthday are quite high. As the film progresses, however, my potential sadness is put to rest. As I wrote earlier, this is a fairly serious cartoon, as the life expectancy of infants is greatly dependent upon the quality of our public health services.

For folks back when this "short" was made, they weren't as aware of toxic wastes, untreated sewage water flowing in their creeks, etc., so this animated documentary was a good wakeup call. The message here is to keep babies healthy and away from diseases that were fairly prevalent apparently in this time period. Inoculations and better sanitation are the suggestions here, and what's wrong with that? Judging by how "dated" some of these diseases are in this short, a lot of progress has been made, although we still have concerns in related areas today. Check out the gloom-and-doom left-wing loonies here on the user-comments who hate positive messages or anything in which Americans are portrayed as good people trying to help each other. Talk about illness! This interesting, eye-opening documentary, animated by the famous Chuck Jones, was part of the Looney Tunes Golden Collection Volume 2. It's recommended except for people are obsessive-compulsive like the TV character, "Monk," who would get super-paranoid watching this 10 minutes of germ-talk.

When we watch movies and cartoons from the '40s and '50s, we can often tell that they came from that era, as they promote a happy-go-lucky, perpetually optimistic attitude. But they're usually still OK to watch. "So Much for So Little" doesn't fit in this group. It's purpose is to remind us that if we give three cents a week to health care, we'll cut down on the infant mortality rate. It displays this by showing a wholesome, all-American boy growing up through the years.Well, we've seen the unfortunate reality. Almost 47 million Americans go each day without health care. Countless people live near toxic waste dumps to this day; New Orleans was already like a cesspool before Hurricane Katrina exacerbated the pollution. As for the boy's adult years, now that we can look back on the baby boomers' young adult life, it would have been more realistic to portray him as a hippie and then a disco pimp.But the main point is that Chuck Jones should have known better than this. Maybe it would have come out better had he cast Bugs, Daffy, Porky or one of those other guys. You can find it in the documentary "Toonheads: The Lost Toons" on the Looney Tunes Golden Collection, and its status as part of Looney Tunes history is about the only thing that makes it worth watching (in fact, I wish that the documentary's narrator had poked fun at it rather than praising it).