The studio already had Scrappy, but I guess they decided he should be restricted to black-and-white shorts and not the higher-budget Color Rhapsodies, so a new boy character was invented.
It’s bad enough Sparky’s nose looks like a pig snout but, in what’s supposed to be a touching scene of remorse and sorrow, he has a 1940 version of botoxed lips. They form creepy shapes as he jerks his head around during his monologue to the bird he’s shot. Some of the drawings are held for seven frames, some for only one frame.
This short was another example of “We can make cartoons as good as Walt Disney.” The screen is full of flying birds for the sake of flying birds because, well, Disney would have lots of them, too. There are shadows (Chuck Jones loved those in his Disney period). There’s even a Disney-like fly-in-formation-under-the-crotch joke.
Note some insight into the origin of this short in the comment section.
Other than the Humane people, trade paper reviewers thought the short was fair at best.
Ben Harrison directed the short with Manny Gould getting an animation credit. Joe De Nat found plenty of public domain music to put in his score. The short was copyright December 18, 1939, but released on January 12, 1940 and turned into a Columbia Favorite re-release on November 26, 1953.
Good Lord! Isn't his skeleton on display at the Mutter Museum? He looks absolutely deformed!
ReplyDeleteHI Yowp, of course this cartoon is a remake of the Fleischer Color Classic "The Song of the Birds" made in 1935. "A Boy, A Gun and Birds" was made in 1940, well before Dave Fleischer came to Screen Gems. Mark Kausler
ReplyDeleteI think I. Klein confirmed it.
DeleteAnd, for some reason, Famous remade the cartoon again in 1949 as SONG OF THE BIRDS. Which must have totally confused the folks striking the TV prints since over the years I've run across at least two black and white copies of the 1940's version with the sound track from the 1935 cartoon!
DeleteDave K
I wonder how the animators felt drawing this grossness.
ReplyDeleteStill not as nightmare-inducing as "Art Davis" in The Way of All Pests.
ReplyDeleteThere's a lot contenders, like that one close up of Sparky in A Boy and His Dog (1936)
DeleteIt's apparent from studying the films that Harrison and Gould were split up to direct separately again in the late '30s, with their "animation" credits on each other's films thereafter being little more than just how the studio's credits worked at that point. (You mentioned Art Davis's recollection of this misleading system in a past post.) The animation on Harrison's films definitely wasn't as solid as when Gould was the main animator, and this instance reflects that. There were some fun Harrison films in that period, but you won't get disagreement from me on this being one of the lesser ones.
ReplyDeleteMaybe the Little Match Girl had bad "trans" surgery.
ReplyDelete