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Undescribable Perfection

Highly Overrated But Still Good

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.

An early sound cartoon from the company responsible for all those Aesop's Fables cartoons, this is animation of the really dated kind. It's the type where the only really recognisable creatures are the elephants who wear clothes. All the other creatures look similar to each other but don't truly resemble real animals. They often kind of bounce where they stand with fixed smiles on their faces.Anyway, this black-and-white cartoon is reasonably amusing but rarely raises a laugh and would probably seem pretty dull if watched again. A squeaky-voiced woman creature is taken on a tour of a cartoon factory by an old doorman and we see how cartoons are drawn. Basically, it's a production line comprising of rows of desks at which creatures each draw one component of a cartoon character before passing the sheet of paper to the drone on their left. They work to music - a frenetic rhythm designed to keep up the work-rate. Watching it, you can't help wondering whether there was some kind of veiled grievance being voiced by the real animators - after all, the van Bueren studios used to turn out one film every week...

As a history teacher and lover of films, I occasionally like watching cartoons that have been banned, as they tell us a lot about our society and how far we have come over the years. What was perfectly acceptable decades ago is now, in some cases, seen as gross and inappropriate. Occasionally, these cartoons which have been removed from screening aren't particularly offensive but often, as in the case of this cartoon, they are so god-awful it's hard to imagine that people would have laughed at and enjoyed these films! Thirteen of these cartoons have been packaged together on a DVD entitled "Cartoon Crazys: Banned and Censored" and while the print quality of many of the cartoons is less than stellar, it's a great chance to see how sensibilities have changed.Oddly, I really saw nothing offensive about this cartoon and it was the most perplexing film in the set because of this. Instead, it's a cute look at how cartoons are supposedly made--and fortunately the film never took this very seriously! While this was cute, it wasn't super funny--but compared to the average film of the time, it was. Thankfully, cartoons improved by light-years in the following decade!

This is another strange cartoon from the collection of "Aesop's Fables" animated shorts from the very early 1930s. We get a tour of an "animated studio" because some woman is interested to see how these cartoons are made. Once inside, the crazy things start. The place is like a busy office but yet many of the animators are in an assembly line with an a band playing over them on a stage. Once again we see how important music was in this era. In many cartoons, someone is playing an instrument, or singing or dancing. Music has always been in the forefront of entertainment, but it must have been far more popular back then than today.Anyway, later we wind up seeing a movie-within-a-movie as a short, "Little Nell" is shown before an audience. That's entertaining, too. I particularly laughed at the reactions in the audience.There were very few things where I laughed right out loud, yet all of it was entertaining to a degree and certainly had the time era stamped on it. One look at this and you know it's made around 1930 with the crazy story and humor.

"In a Cartoon Studio" is a pastiche on how cartoons (and movies) are made. Some of it is surprisingly accurate. Some is done for laughs, like the assembly-line cartoon production set-up where a given artist is responsible for each character's right foot, as the drawings move past on the conveyor. (Actually that's how "starving artists" original oil paintings are made today.)This film includes a cartoon within a cartoon in which Little Nell is kidnapped by a villain and tossed onto a log at the sawmill. It's a send-up, done for laughs, but it's also an ironic take on the worst movie-making conventions of the day. The dialogue is strictly formulaic. The cliffhanger ending is stretched out endlessly. And the audience (of cartoon animals) just eats it up, like the undiscriminating sheep and cattle they are. Literally. (Well, cows and hippos, to be exact.)Someone must have had a lot of good reasons for such cynicism, to make 1931 sound so much like 1999.