Anopheles Annie

The U.S. Army knows how to take care of malaria-bearing mosquitoes, and that’s bad for Anopheles Annie in “It’s Murder She Says...”, one of the Snafu cartoons made by Warner Bros. during World War Two.

There’s limited animation in parts of this cartoon directed by Chuck Jones but there’s also a wonderful bit of personality animation of Annie at the start. Her character evokes a lady of the evening who has fallen on hard times, spending her life in the bar. Annie gulps down some cheap rot-gut and shakes her head in reaction to how bad it is. Then she blows her drooping antenna back up. Is this Bobe Cannon’s work? Ken Harris? (Late note: Thad Komorowski, who helped restore these cartoons for Thunderbean, says it was Ben Washam).



Bob Bruce is the narrator in this short, but I have no idea who’s playing Annie. Sara Berner supplies some incidental voices. Carl Stalling opens the soundtrack with “Chloe.”