The Buzz About the Bees

The Harman-Ising short Honeyland (1935) is an exercise in overkill. More cute characters than Disney! More colours than Disney! That seems to have been the attitude.

The problem is putting all those bees on the screen at the same time and umpteen colours in the palate have nothing to do with the story. They’re there to show off. If you strip down the film, it’s the same old thing Hugh and Rudy were doing in 1930: singing and dancing in the first half, the gang rescues the girl from the villain in the second.

I imagine Hugh, Rudy and Metro were now giddy with the fact that Disney’s exclusive hold on three-strip Technicolor was over (effective September 1, 1935) and any studio could now use it. So they did. MGM began printing cartoons with the “new Technicolor” at the start of the 1935-36 season; first The Old Plantation and then this cartoon.

Variety of May 29, 1935 does not give numbers for MGM, but talks about the other cartoon studios getting ready for the new season:

Leon Schlesinger will make 13 three-tint cartoons for Warners; Max Fleisher delivers six to Paramount; Disney's two groups call for total of 18; Charles Mintz expects to close negotiations for 13 three-color Screen Gems for Columbia, and Radio deal for 13 is virtually set.

“Radio” means Van Beuren, referring to the Rainbow Parade series. As Ub Iwerks’ ComiColor series was released via states rights through Pat Powers’ Celebrity Pictures, it is not mentioned.

Enough about the gaudy colours. As for the bees, there are hives full of the things in this cartoon, with big eyes and child-like proportions for extra “Awww” factor.

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The cartoon got pounded by critic W.J. Turner in the New Statesman and Nation, published in London. He especially took aim at Scott Bradley (who did not get screen credit for the short). Under “Music For the Films” in the April 13, 1940 issue, Turner sniffed:

I recently visited a cinema where a Technicolour [sic] film was shown called Honeyland in which the dramatis personae were bees. I thought the film hideous in colour (as are the majority of colour films from Disney onwards) and boringly vulgar in conception, the humour particularly being of the adult school-boy type. Nevertheless, it had the slick efficiency of most American films of this kind, an efficiency which is in itself sufficient to account for their popularity in the present degraded state of public state. What struck me most, however, was the badness of the music for a subject which to a composer of taste and some invention offered exceptional opportunities.

The article complains about the lack of original scores in movies of all types, and how music was heard at times when the action on the screen called for silence.

The faux Disney era carried on for a few more years but, slowly, other influences came into play. Variations on Warner Bros. phoney travelogues and heckling animal characters started appearing at other studios. Even at MGM, a pair of new directors named Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera realised you could have rich settings that were muted, not garish, and entertain audiences with characters expressing a variety of emotions within a logical narrative. Realistic colour became the means to an end, not the end itself.