Vanishing Binko

Animation is full of footnotes, and Binko is one of them.

I still can’t figure out if he was called Binko Bear or Binko the Cub. But he’s notable because a number of the people who worked on him went on to bigger things—Ken Harris, the McKimsons, Jack Zander, Preston Blair and others.

Binko was the product of the Romer Grey studio. Over the years, knowledgeable people have pieced together the Grey story. I’m not one of them, but I posted about the studio here.

In 1930, not much was expected out of animated cartoons. The idea of sound married to animated action on the screen was novel enough. So it was Grey followed the example of Harman-Ising at Warners and Walt Disney. Animals played make-shift musical instruments. They danced.

Grey’s animators tried overlays and perspective animation but a surviving cartoon, Hot Toe Mollie, comes out blah. Bosko and Mickey Mouse are at least likeable in their early cartoons. Binko is a zero.

The animation checking leaves something to be desired. In one scene, Binko vanishes twice. The first time, he disappears for three frames, the second time, for four frames. The second example is below (The fourth drawing below is held for two frames).



Even the sausage horse disappears for a frame.



Evidently the opaquers got conflicting instructions. The horse’s grey shades are inconsistent. It’s tough to tell in the drawing below, but the horse isn’t the same colour as the one above and you can see the tone switch back and forth on the screen. Compare the two drawings.



Perhaps the most painful thing is an animation cycle of an elephant swaying at a table. It would appear the drawings were not numbered correctly as the elephant violently twitches, He jerks to the right and then back to the left.



The cartoon has floating action as the director (Volney White?) hadn’t learned a good use of timing and spacing in-betweens. And there are an awful lot of unmatched shots, where a cut to a close-up has a character in a completely different position than in the previous longer shot. Yes, it was 1930, but other studios were far slicker than this.

Even if the Binko cartoon had been more competently made, Grey had a large problem—there was no major studio available in 1931 to distribute his cartoons. Warners, Paramount, MGM, Univeral, RKO, Columbia, even Educational all had cartoon releases. United Artists wasn’t releasing shorts then. That didn’t leave very much (Monogram and Tiffany). Personality-challenged Binko never stood a chance.