In the mid-1930s, when theatrical animation on the West Coast had reached the point where studios needed professional actors to voice their ...

Ah, yes, the old cartoon gag of lifting up or moving a hole. Here’s an example from the early days of sound in Walt Disney’s The Picnic (19...

Is there any doubt that Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf was the most popular song written for a cartoon short in the 1930s? It was compos...

So much has been written about Steamboat Willie that I am loath to say much about it on this blog. Mind you, I said that the last time I br...

Director Wilfred Jackson goes for dark-light visuals in a shoot-em-up scene in the Mickey Mouse cartoon The Klondike Kid (1932). Here’s an...

Disney has always dominated discussions about animation. There was a minor bit of hoopla amongst critics in the early 1950s about the “anti-...

In the 1930 Disney cartoon Wild Waves , there's an awful lot of repetitious action. We see four penguins dancing on a beach. Then they g...

In the early 1930s, three East Coast animation studios were trying to entertain audiences on the big screen. The Fleischer studio was at the...

Oswald the rabbit’s girl-friend hears music. She wants to hear it better. Here’s the gag. Cut to an overhead shot of Oswald and his banjo...