Humpty Dumpty (1935)

Humpty Dumpty (An Ub Iwerks ComiColor Cartoon, 1935) 
Dir.: Ub Iwerks
Music: Carl Stalling
Cel Bloc Rating: 6/9

I'm not going to get into the supposed and varied sources of the nursery rhyme Humpty Dumpty. There are enough places that already deal with the whys and wherefores and whats, and I feel as much need to make sense of it all as do the animators who have brought cartoon life to the character over the years. Cannons, kings, blah, blah, blah! 

The disparity between how much information we actually have about Mr. Dumpty, given the brevity of his poem, and the amount of times he has been employed over the many decades in comics and animation is astounding. This is all the information anyone gets from the start:

"Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
All the king's horses and all the king's men
couldn't put Humpty together again."

The poem tells you so little, not even the seemingly necessary fact that Humpty is, indeed, an egg; though as this poem is meant as a riddle leading to that conclusion clears that mystery up for good. It is taken for granted that Humpty is an Ovoid of Notorious Balance; what has not been mentioned is that his skills clearly qualify him for most junior varsity gymnastics teams. (Were he created today, Humpty would possibly be some sort of a combination of idiot narcissist and daredevil, probably the forerunner in the quite narrow subgenre of X-Treme Dairy Products.)

Lewis Carroll was obviously bemused enough with the situation to clear it up for good in Through the Looking Glass, which is one of the early instances of Humpty being given more life than he possessed previously in this tidy little quatrain. In fact, Carroll skewers the structure of the poem by having Alice comment "That last line is much too long for the poetry" (given by Carroll as "couldn't put Humpty Dumpty in his place again," thus making it more ponderous than before).


In 1935, Ub Iwerks, like many studios in the 1930s, took to spending a good deal of time and money trying to compete with Walt Disney's Silly Symphonies series, and started a series, produced in the red-and-blue, predominant, two-color Cinecolor system, called ComiColor Cartoons. Like all of the Symphonic copycat series (and “copycat” is not a putdown, mind you!), the ComiColor shorts were generally cutesy and childlike. They were also severely lacking in the story department.

This does not mean that there weren't some good cartoons in the bunch, along with some excellent characterizations and quite memorable moments. One such cartoon (fun to watch, but with a story so weak you can hear its knees quaking from the strain) is the Iwerks updating of Humpty Dumpty, brought into the modern world with cheap melodramatic devices and poppy jazz. After all, when even the toddlers of the world have your source poem memorized, the only way to go is to set it finger-snappin’ music...

The film opens on a storybook where the credits are presented, and when the page turns, we are shown a window with wooden doors that open up and introduce us to the three main characters. As this is an update, the first egg is Humpty Dumpty, Jr., the son of the late wall-tumbler; the second is his lady love, the beauteous Easter Egg; and the third is the foul-mouthed villain, The Bad Egg. He is quite literally foul-mouthed: a stench wafts from his maw as he sneers at the audience, who cascade him with "Boo! Hiss! Boo!" which is apropos. The action proper begins with the camera showing us a picture of the late Humpty Dumpty, and a choir sings us a chiming version of the poem. It pulls back to reveal his son, Junior, who sits precariously atop the lip of a vase, and continues singing his story:

"My old man may have sat on a wall;
He slipped and had a very great fall!
But I'm Humpty Junior, 
I'm just like my pop!
I climb where I please!
They can't make me stop!"

His mother, sweeping the counter with a broom and worried beyond reason, intervenes, but almost causes her son's death inadvertently. She yells, "Junior! Come down from there!," and Junior is startled enough to lose his balance and fly down towards the ground. Luckily, his mother catches him in her apron. She tells him, "You be careful! That's how your father got cracked!" Junior slinks off, all the while hanging his head in shame.

Enter the heroine, Easter Egg. She skips along cutely, tapping various kitchen items with a stick, and Junior thinks fast and greets her with an armful of greens that he has plucked from a dinner plate. A light jazz number kicks in, and Junior serenades her:

"The moment you arrived, I had a feeling
I'd never be contented 'til we met!
But otherwise it ain't quite so appealing
So won't you join me in an om-e-lette?"

She then joins him in the chorus, as they rock back and forth as they literally spoon within a tablespoon:

"Oh, spooning in a spoon!
We don't need a moon!
Poached or fried or on the side
Morning, night or noon!
Scrambled in a tune,
Deviled with a croon!
In a cup, you're sunny side up,
Spooning in a spoon!"

As they cavort and sing, a kick-line of leggy she-eggs join them through the course of the tune, while The Bad Egg lurks jealously about in the background, peeking and sneering at their act, resplendent in traditional villain's curled mustache, tails, spats and top hat. The pair of love-eggs (I suppose that would make them pre-lovebirds were they fertilized properly) kiss sweetly and repeat the second half of the chorus, but then the villain stomps on the spoon handle, sending the pair flying into the air and onto their oval keisters. The Bad Egg tells Junior to "Scram!" and pushes him down, kidnapping Easter Egg, and carrying her off for his own twisted take on the process of love. Junior attacks him but only gets punched in the eye and knocked down again.

The Bad Egg carries Easter high up on the kitchen shelves where he puts the moves on her, but she runs and tries to stop him with anything in her path: a box of matches, a tomato can, and pepper, which she blows in his face, causing him to sneeze. Junior reaches the top shelf and charges the pair, but the Bad Egg roughly throws Easter off the shelf and down into a pan full of boiling water. She screams for help as Junior battles the villain, but finally the lovestruck hero breaks away from the melee and rushes to her aid.

Junior fashions a lasso out of some leftover spaghetti, but by the time Junior pulls her out of the water, she has become hard-boiled. To his surprise, she now speaks and looks along the lines of a Mae West. "Aw, scram!", she tells Junior when he tries to embrace her. The villain laughs at this turnabout, and Junior strides towards the heel to exact his revenge, but Easter pushes him out of the way. She hitches up her skirt toughly and starts pummeling the villain with a number of sharp blows to the face.

Junior, excited as usual, shadowboxes off to the side to Easter's every successful punch at the villain's face, but in his fervor, Junior slips and sends himself into the boiling water. At first, he calls for help, but he ends up getting hard-boiled as well. Crawling out of the boiling pan, he delivers a roundhouse punch that sends the Bad Egg flying. Junior then strikes a number of matches and throws them at the creep, surrounding him with flames and burning his rear end. Finally, Junior dumps the entire box of matches down on the Bad Egg. There is a large flash as the matches all catch on fire simultaneously, and when the smoke clears, the villain is revealed to be completely blackened and sick from smoke inhalation. 

The Bad Egg collapses exhausted into the tablespoon, and Junior stomps on the handle to send the Bad Egg sailing to the ground below, where he smashes to bits. As an explanation for his foul breath, a couple dozen skunks run out from the broken shards of his remains! Junior spits into the spoon's cup and it tosses him to the shelf above, where the two now-hardboiled love-eggs meet up. He embraces Easter and they kiss passionately, and then the film cuts back to the opening storybook window, where we see a replay of the chorus to "Spooning in a Spoon" before the book closes. Finis.

When I was a kid, I loved to make finger puppets, and I would do this by measuring a piece of construction paper into rectangular sections and then drawing clothes and faces onto the rectangles, cutting them out, rolling them, and then glueing the opposite ends together to form tiny little puppets. I would often have a hundred of these figures stored in a box by my desk, and each one was different, with distinct faces, clothes, and some even had arms, legs and other props glued onto their outsides. But there was one way in which they were the same: they all had tremendous facial areas that took up about 2/3 of their body lengths, mainly so I could get as much in the area of facial expressions as possible so that they could be seen by an audience (usually my brothers).

It is the same trick here with the eggs in Humpty Dumpty. Their faces easily take up most of their bodies, with only the bottom third left for the torso, arms and legs. Their eyes and mouths are huge and extremely expressive; as a result, with the wildly melodramatics at large in its action, this film would be an excellent example for drawing study.

The problem, though, is the close sticking to melodrama: the only real surprise in the film is the way the formerly innocent, childish eggs "grow up" and get "hard-boiled", though in retrospect, given the "tough guy" stance in most films of the period, maybe it's not really that surprising. But the film remains a visual delight even if there is that much going on storywise. The colors of the piece are remarkably vivid and the line work on the characters is sharp and clean. Overall, the film is politely entertaining, if nothing over which to fall off a wall.

RTJ

*****

And in case you haven't seen it:

[This article was updated with new photos on 12/28/15.]

The Cobweb Hotel (1936)

The Cobweb Hotel (A Max Fleischer Color Classic, 1936)
Dir.: Dave Fleischer
Animators: David Tendlar; William Sturm
Music: Sammy Timberg; Bob Rothberg
Cel Bloc Rating: 8/9

While all but three of the Popeye shorts and all of the films of the Betty Boop series that the Fleischer brothers produced were in black and white, Max and Dave did have a series explicitly designed to show off their creations in the glorious new color processes flooding the film medium in the mid-1930s. Since their series was called Color Classics, it had better do just such a thing as show it such grandeur in high style.

Outside of the inaugural film of the series starring Betty Boop, the Color Classics series was mainly comprised of the standard 1930s anthropomorphic animals, plants or inanimate object scenarios and kiddie book adventures much in the style of Disney's Silly Symphonies series, only not quite with the polish of that studio's product; it was also a stylistic choice that pretty much wrote the critical and eventual financial death knell of the series. The Fleischers’ color films, however striking at time, especially when using their “setback” camera, a tabletop process that was somewhat similar to the “multiplane” camera that Ub Iwerks developed (and that Disney’s William Garity would perfect later). The Fleischers’ color films were usually slightly rougher than Disney’s, however, there are a couple handfuls of decent, and sometimes more than decent, cartoons that truly lived up to the name of Color Classics.

The Cobweb Hotel, released in 1936 and ridden hard by public domain use ever since, is one of those memorable films. If you have seen Pee Wee’s Playhouse or any number of kiddie cartoon compilation shows in the ‘70s and ‘80s, you have seen The Cobweb Hotel. It may indeed be one of those cartoons that sticks in the mind more than others, so that years later, you go, “What was that cartoon where the really creepy spider was running a hotel?”

The Cobweb Hotel seems to be a basic buggy spectacular, much like Warner Brothers' 1934 love-bug fest Honeymoon Hotel, with a cute bug couple seeking comfort and joy in a low-rent hotel on their wedding night, but the differences end there. For while the Warners' short was laced with clever innuendo set in a mostly cutesy environment, The Cobweb Hotel takes a different tack to a similar happy ending. Along with Balloon Land (aka The Pincushion Man, a ComiColor short from the Ub Iwerks studio in 1935), for me, The Cobweb Hotel is one of the flat-out creepiest cartoons ever made, at least of the ones that came out of the American studio system in the first half of the 20th century. The cause of all this creepiness is not just the excruciatingly hideous spider that runs the titular hotel of doom (and I am a big spider fan); no, it is the imagery of all the innocent buggies caught in hotel beds made up of the spider's webbing, while they struggle and squeal to free themselves that sends a chill up the spine. The ickiness of Mr. Spider is merely the icing on this wedding cake of slow and torturous impending death.

The film opens brilliantly, first with a shot of a sign written in a spider's web reading "Cobweb Hotel - For Flies Only", and then there is a dissolve to a shot of a sumptuous hotel lobby, with marbled columns, gorgeous wooden floors, an expansive staircase, two couches, and with a large desk and mail-case centered at the back of the frame. But then the camera pulls back and reveals the true state of things: the hotel is actually the top of an abandoned roll-top bureau desk. It is covered in webs and dust, and the desk is nothing more than a large inkwell, the mail-case is for holding stamps, the staircase is a stack of spread out books, the couches are two open stamp pads, and the columns are two fountain pens standing up on end. We also see that there is a phone and other ephemera set about the outer edges of the desk, and the entire thing is shot three-dimensionally, as it is actually a prop setting for the film. Likewise, the spider that drops down from the ceiling into the picture; from its movement, he almost seems like a puppet, and I still feel perhaps that it is in that first shot. He definitely has a three-dimensional feel (like the set itself), until the true cartoon action begins.

When we get a closeup of the spider, he is not a pretty sight, to say the least. He has a long, almost saw-like nose, and he drools and slobbers as he sings and talks throughout the picture. He launches into the title song as he swings menacingly from side to side on the line from his web, occasionally thrusting his face and arms violently at the audience:

"Spend the night at the Cobweb Hotel!
You'll find that the service is swell!
Now, you needn't be shy;
I won't harm a fly!
Spend the night at the Cobweb Hotel!"

The spider motions up to his left, and we see that each of the holes of the desk have been turned into the rooms of his hotel, each draped in webbing, and as he begins the next verse, we see a squealing, squirming fly "tenant" who is stuck fast to his bed, also made of webs. As he sneers his way through the song, the camera keeps panning to even more victims of his bloodlust, including a female fly that squeals in an ear-piercingly shrill and upsetting manner as she struggles in a jar of glue, and another fly trapped on a Murphy bed that bounces up with his movements and traps him against the wall. The spider’s song of evil continues:

"Step into my parlor, please do!
In a while, your cares will be through!
There'll be no rent to pay,
'Cause you'll be here to stay!
Spend the night at the Cobweb Hotel!"

Enter Mr. and Mrs. Bug. They fly in hand in hand; she is cute and doting, and he is a barrel-chested powerhouse who proudly wears a banner that drifts behind him that reads "Flyweight Champion". They spy the hotel below, and following the spider's landing instructions, march up to the hotel desk unaware of the structure's true nature. The spider-clerk offers the register to them for a signature; the fly grabs the spider's nose, dips it in the ink, and signs their names, “I. Fly and Wife”. “Newlyweds, I presume?” gasps the spider in his Peter Lorre-like whine. He then asks the couple to make themselves at home while he prepares their room.

The couple first turn the telephone into their own personal amusement ride, with the Mrs. sitting in one of the holes as her hubby spins the dial. The spider, meanwhile, is up in their room building a bed out of his webbing, which unfurls like thread from a spool on his back. He attaches it to four pins that he pulls out of a pincushion and then jabs into the floor in a square formation. The flies are busy turning an ink blotter into a seesaw, and after the spider lays down a strip of flypaper on the floor like a throw rug, he calls them up by singing, again: "Step into my parlor, please do!" The newlyweds are eager to get on with the honeymooning, but when they walk in, they hear the screams and cries of the poor trapped fly in the next room, whom they view through a convenient hole in the wall. They turn in shock towards the camera, and it captures their horrified faces.

The spider, foaming at the mouth with a mad, craving lust, closes the webbed curtains, rubs his numerous hands together and advances on the pair. They duck under the bed and to the opposite side, but when they try to escape, he grabs them both and the spider throws the girl onto the sticky covering of the bed. Mr. Fly pummels the spider about the face and head several times, and then manages to duck out of the room, causing the spider to chase after him. In the lobby, the spider unspools a long line of webbing and forms a lasso, which he throws over the fly, allowing him to pull the delicious morsel back towards his clutches. But as the fly nears his greedy hands, they are given a rope burn when the fly makes a last ditch effort to escape again. The spider pulls again, and once more the fly gets close to being captured before kicking into high gear across the room.

This time, he wraps the webbing around the side rung of a chair, and conveniently enough, there is a large lighter sitting just beneath the strand. The fly jumps on it to activate its flame, and the spark shoots down the webbing right onto the spider's back! The spider is forced to put out the fire in the inkwell, and then dives back into the fray as the fly decides to settle the affair with his flyweight championship-winning fists. Eventually, the spider backs the fly near a box of paper clips, and indeed, he affixes one of them to the fly's wings, rendering him flightless. The fly starts to get a royal beating from the villain, who easily holds off the fly's attack with one hand, as he wallops the little guy with his other hands and feet. The fly manages to make it to a case full of sewing needles, and both he and the spider grab a needle and begin a sword fight, with the spider backing the fly into a hanging web. Though the fly defends himself vigorously, all seems lost.

But Mrs. Fly manages to free herself from her honeymoon bed of doom, and locates a razor blade laying about in her room. Bravely, she flies from room to room and frees the would-be victims of the spider, who then charge to the rescue of Mr. I. Fly. Just as the spider seems ready to end Mr. Fly's life, three of the freed flies pick up a fountain pen and sharply jab its point into the spider's rear. Distracted by the attack, the spider chases the other flies, allowing Mrs. Fly enough time to free her husband from his bonds. As the spider continues his chase, he is flooded with the ink from another fly-operated fountain pen, then he is shot in the rear numerous times by another fly wielding a safety pin and pen points like a bow and arrow; and pelted machine gun-like with aspirin from a perfume bottle and plunger. Fearful for his life, the spider crawls to the top of the book staircase, but he is beaned by the sliding arm of a typewriter when two flies hop down onto the shift key. He falls into a web being held by several flies, who then airlift the villain into a vat of library paste.

The victorious flies zoom off from the hotel of horrors, with Mr. and Mrs. Fly riding atop a makeshift sedan chair constructed out of a jewelry box with an enormous ring, held aloft by several flies carrying two pencils. The flies sing as they exit the film:

"And now, as we go,
there is one thing we know:
Stay away from the Cobweb Hotel!"

I am not the biggest fan of flies; in fact, like most bugs, if they are in my home or on me, they are fair game, and I am pretty obsessive about ridding myself of their presence. And spiders? I've always been partial to their kind, and usually go out of my way to get them safely out of my abode so that they can concentrate their supposedly malicious, but actually beneficial, powers on the insect population out of doors. Of course, since I've moved out of Alaska, I am now confronted with spiders manyfold the quantity and size that I am used to seeing, and of many more varieties, too. And with a girlfriend who is deadly allergic to spider bites and bee stings, I have been forced into a more violent approach to two of my favorite arthropods. This coalesced into my first live meeting with a black widow who had taken up residence in an area at my job, where I was basically pressured into performing an execution on the gorgeous creature. I admired her for two days before I was called crazy for not considering the safety of both myself and my co-workers (by a Republican, no less… I think there were racist overtones to his “concern”), and once I thought about how much work I was going to be doing around the area, I took matters into my own hands.

Perhaps if that black widow spider had been as hideous and vile-looking as the fiend in The Cobweb Hotel, I would not have hesitated so long. The Fleischers play up the horror theme to the maximum, and I feel that the scenes of bondage and torture are as creepy as anything seen in any horror film of that era. There is such an element of fear at large in this picture, that I find it incredible that it was even shown for children in that time, given that people were known to faint during pictures as innocuous (nowadays, at least) as Frankenstein and Dracula. It seemed that it didn't take much to bring on a case of the vapors back then; perhaps the picture got past censors on these counts due to its being a cartoon, and thus, considered to not reflect reality. Fair enough, but I grew up with this film; like most things that locked creepy images into one's mind as a child, you grow up either loving it or hating it, and I have never been one to shy away from the creepy. Thus, my appreciation for this film.

I must say, I recently attended a test screening for an upcoming Sarah Michelle Gellar picture, The Return, and there is a point in the film where her character has to go check into a hotel where there is a pig's head hanging from a hook in full view in the lobby. And she still checks in!! Likewise, all of these flies who have checked into the swank Cobweb Hotel, who don't seem to notice the spiderwebs all around the place, and while he may be done up in his clerk's vest and shoes, there is no mistaking the fact that the clerk is a giant friggin' spider! And yet, the flies still check in!!

I know people say that looks can be deceiving, but the operative phrase there is “can be,” not “are”. In many cases, they are not deceiving at all. If you enter a hotel with either a bloody pig's head or giant spider-webs hanging about the place, there's a good chance that it has not been rated with four stars in any reputable guide.

But this picture should be. As an entertainment and as one of the closest instances of a cartoon recreating a true atmosphere of horror, The Cobweb Hotel is pretty near perfect.

RTJ

And in case you haven't seen it: Not finding a really great version of The Cobweb Hotel online, but this one (cut up credits and all) has one of the better pictures. But if you can, get the Somewhere in Dreamland: Max Fleischer's Color Classics DVD set.

[This article was reedited and updated with new photos on 12/14/15.]

The Little Stranger (1936)

The Little Stranger (A Max Fleischer Color Classic, 1936)
Dir.: Dave Fleischer
Animators: Eli Brucker and Dave Tendlar
Cel Bloc Rating: 6/9

It always seemed to me that the Ugly Duckling, actually a baby swan, didn't have it all that bad. Sure, compared to any baby duckling, he was homely; but he had enough going for him where, even with the mental abuse at the hands of his "siblings", he could at least compete physically with them. He could swim just as well, he could dive just as well; he was simply different in face and feather color, but otherwise, for all intents and purposes, he was basically the same type of bird, designed for life on the water. On most key elements in their young lives, both the ducklings and the (to the eyes of the ducks) hideous cygnet are relative equals.

But, not so with a cockerel. By this, I mean a baby rooster (which I presume this oft-considered "chick" actually is; he performs a rudimentary "cock-a-doodle-doo" near the film's end). He is horribly ill-suited to pose as a duckling, as he does not possess the proper feet for paddling; his quacking attempts fall out of his tiny, pointed beak as meek little "peeps"; and he is far too easily distracted by worms and seeds to pray proper attention to waddling in line! The babies of chickens, while undeniably cute as buttons, are wholly unsuited for lives largely spent diving and foraging in the water. It would be an unlucky (and possibly quickly deceased) chick or cockerel indeed who got stuck mistakenly in a family of ducks.

And that is precisely what happens in this Max Fleischer Color Classic, The Little Stranger, from 1936. We first hear these lyrics sung over the title cards and opening credits:

“Don’t make a sound,
don’t make a sound!
There’s a stranger here in town.
Where’s he from nobody knows!

Lonely little stranger,
he looks so forlorn.
He thought he was in danger
the day he was born.

Don’t make a sound,
don’t make a sound!
There’s a stranger here in town.
Where’s he from nobody knows!”

A sneaking mother hen, who I suppose is living insufferably in depressive means (such was the age), under cover of darkness, leaves her solitary egg in the nest of a mother duck, and her young son then has to fend for himself amongst a group of water-dwellers. Not too smart on the hen's part (were there no other hens that could raise him?) if she wants the kid to survive, but perhaps she didn't expect him, too. Hmmm... is there a far darker vision at work here in this film? (No... the darker vision is well outside this film, and it is clearly me.)

Come the morning, the eggs hatch underneath the mother duck, and she quickly sets to training her brood of three ducklings, and even tries to teach the "Little Stranger,” who gets sung about over the opening credits. As described, his "peeping" makes him fail his quacking lessons, even with repeated effort; and he nearly drowns when the family first takes to the water. After a pair of leaves attached to his feet merely float off when he tries them, he is left onshore by himself, while the ducks paddle about the pond. The poor chick climbs into the broken remnants of his egg, but then hatches the brilliant idea of using half of his shell as a boat. Running back to the water,  he paddles about with increasing ease upon the water. He swiftly catches up to his adopted family, and soon all five of them are enjoying a relaxing afternoon at play, jumping off logs and paddling all around.

But, then the giant roc attacks! OK, it's actually a buzzard of some sort, but its menacing, circling shadow over the water reminds one of the similar bird in Popeye the Sailor Meets Sinbad the Sailor, released later the same year by the Fleischers. (I have wondered if this sequence was used as a test for the roc scenes in the Popeye flick, or at least inspired them to try something similar on a larger scale in that far more successful cartoon.) The buzzard tries to make a meal of one of the ducklings, but the chick paddles swiftly and heroically yanks a feather out of the tail of the villainous bird. The buzzard turns about on the chick and mocks him. The cockerel makes like a miniature motorboat, windmilling his formative wings in the water to reach the far shore. Running onto the land, he runs through a knot in a tree and manages to trick the buzzard into getting its head stuck. This allows the baby to make it into the likely safety of a nearby mill.

The buzzard manages to free his feathery head, and then hops through a broken window, chasing the chick throughout the entire mill. A bad step on a loose board gets the buzzard a face full of pine, and allows the little stranger to hide in the middle of a wagon wheel. The buzzard naturally dives for him and gets its head stuck yet again, and the force of his attack causes the buzzard's neck to wind up like a rubber band. Spinning and crashing wildly through a pair of apple barrels and then the door of the mill, the buzzard ends up floating by his neck from the wheel in the middle of the pond. A quartet of frogs hop aboard and turn the contraption into a carousel, making fun of their common enemy in the process. The family of ducks rush to the side of their little yellow hero, and the cockerel unleashes his best “Cock-a-doodle-doo!” The ducks, now accepting the chick as a full member of their little family, do their best quacky version of the same cry. All is well. Dissolve to the Paramount logo.

This film is the most traditional cartoon of the Color Classics released in the series up until this point: the action is generic, heroic action with a hungry villain chasing his prey; the lyrically rich music, a dominant feature in most of the Color Classics, is done by the time the opening credits close; and the three-dimensional is highly underplayed for the first time in the series. There is also very little overt humor; what humor there is happens to be of the most gentle form, and except for the buzzard attack and the brief early scene with the sad mother hen, the film is extremely lighthearted. Due to this stricture to established lines, is also the most forgettable of the series to this point. At times, it's cuteness almost makes it seem like “Baby's First Duck Cartoon”. This is not a slap at it, for the film is very well made, but it is never more than a pleasant, simple diversion.

I wish that I could say that the film, like the misplaced cockerel, only seems out of place in the Color Classics series, and that it has hidden strengths that allow it to show its true worth in the flock, but what it really does is allow a peek at where the series would eventually head: to increasingly middling and cutesy productions with lambs and bunnies galore. Long before this film, Fleischer seemed to already be nearing the moppet cartoon ideal; but even the previous film, Somewhere In Dreamland, though steeped in kewpie-doll optimism, had a severely dark undercurrent and subtext built around the Great Depression which resonates emotionally even while you are scraping the sugar off your tongue. But as the Color Classics moved through the decade, there was less emphasis on technical innovation and more placed on charming a family audience.

A family of sheep, I don't doubt. And I am steadfastly of the lupine persuasion. I'll never be accepted into the fold...

*****

And in case you haven't seen it:

[This article was updated with new photos and edited on 12/12/2015.]