Watch Noah's Lark For Free

Best movie of this year hands down!

Thanks for the memories!

How sad is this?

It's simply great fun, a winsome film and an occasionally over-the-top luxury fantasy that never flags.

This is another example of little pieces made into a single event. The only thing these pieces have in common is that they involve primitively drawn animals, doing various things with or to one another. It is fast and joyful and frantic. Apparently, one of the very first Fleicher animations.

This was the first of the Max Fleischer Talkartoons. In this one, Noah has his ark stop at Luna Park on Coney Island for his animals to take on the rides and other fun. Many gags abound in musical sequence throughout. I can't really remember them all but I found many of them quite amusing and pretty funny. The print on YouTube I watched was not in the best condition but it looked as good as it probably could have been since it's almost 80 years old now. I just remembered while the ship was still at sea a monkey played on the giraffe's neck like a xylophone so that's one gag I remembered. Like I said, this was a pretty entertaining cartoon from the Fleischer Studios. So on that note, I recommend Noah's Lark.

The Fleischer brothers had been turning out sound cartoons since 1924 with their 'screen song' series, but it was only in 1929 that they started to do full sound cartoons, most famously with 'Finding His Voice' but also with this piece. Here, we see an ark full of many different sorts of animal; spotting Coney Island, the captain announces shore leave and they all head out for some fun. There are a lot of gags, very advanced for the era, as was typical for Fleischer in this period, and some of them are very adult.Interestingly enough, I see many signs of the sort of cartooning that Ted Geisel would do under his pen name of Dr. Seuss. The captain looks like a Seuss character and two sequences are very much in his style: the sequence where the animals head ashore to the opening bars of "The Stars and Stripes Forever" and the sequence with the kootch dancer and the snakes.Although there is no sign that Geisel was associated with this film, he was already working as a cartoonist in this period. Perhaps some biographer will turn up a connection....