Little Dutch Plate

The animation quality of Looney Tunes' cartoons in 1935 wasn't bad at all. The only big drawback is that only Disney could make full color cartoons due to an exclusive contract with Technicolor. But using the cheaper two-color process, "Little Dutch Plate" still looks pretty good. Sadly, there's also a lot to dislike...a complete lack of comedy as well as an overreliance on singing, dancing and cutesy characters.

The story is about animated salt and pepper shakers that look like 19th century Dutch characters. A baddie arrives (sort of a Snidely Whiplash sort) and abducts the cutesy girl pepper shaker and so it's up to her boyfriend to rescue her, beat up the baddie vinegar container (huh??) and save the day.

It's all very typical for 1935. Many studios liked making cute cartoons with singing and dancing...though the directing team of Harmon-Ising really emphasized this at Looney Tunes...which is why you mostly see later Looney Tunes cartoons on TV....cartoons with more humor and no singing!

Another one of Friz Freleng's early cartoons is an installment of the "inanimate objects come to life" series. In this case, they're objects in Dutch kitchen. A boy-shaped salt shaker falls for a girl on a plate and they move into a miniature windmill, but a nasty jar of vinegar demands the mortgage under threat of foreclosure.

I've always thought that the idea of inanimate objects coming to life was a neat one - other cartoons of this genre include "Have You Got Any Castles?" and "Book Revue" - and here they even tie it to the Great Depression! Since "Little Dutch Plate" came out in Warner Bros. animation's early days, there's none of the totally wacky stuff that became their staple in the '40s and '50s. Worth seeing.

Available on YouTube, but I believe that the YouTube version has been altered: it begins with the zooming WB shield, which didn't yet exist in 1935 (also, they end it with "That's all, folks!" appearing across the concentric circles; at this time, the phrase was uttered by a court jester).