Cheese Burglar

Dogs and cats are typically mortal enemies in this variety of cartoon, but "Cheese Burglar" breaks from convention by making them partners as they attempt (armed to the teeth) to do in a troublesome mouse. The animation is top-notch, and the gags genuinely funny. Recommended!

Well Well Well this movie was bad. Who wants to steal Cheese anyway?? If there was enough people to see this movie and voted on what they thought of it , it would most definetly be the worst movie ever with the exception of Vanilla Sky.

. . . the bogus harmonies of CHEESE BURGLAR are sure to sound like fingernails cracking the blackboard to those of us surviving the year 2023. Maybe the ranchers and the cowboys COULD be friends in OKLAHOMA, but that was back in the yesteryear time of the 1800's. Nowadays, you never hear the termites and the wooden home foundations singing about being best buddies, and seeing this happening between a watch dog, mouser feline and rapacious rodent during CHEESE BURGLAR rings off-key, discordant and 100% out of tune. The only proper sounding board for any mouse, whether named Mickey or Jerry, is the dissection slab, with all the flaps gaping wide open and nailed down securely.

Now there is an unusual opening scene: a cat and a dog arm-in-arm and singing about how they will be pals forever. They also have shotguns at their side. It turns out the guns only shoot corks but the two of them use them to pop "Herman," the mouse, who always is stealing cheese out of the refrigerator. However, these guys are great shots and always get their mouse, which means Herman has gone 29 straight days of starvation, according to his calendar.

Herman tells the animals: "cats and dogs are natural enemies. You two will kill each other one day." They just laugh at him. Herman tries to make sure the other two animals become paranoid about each other, so they'll leave him alone. The plan sounds good, but these animals aren't as dumb as they look!

The ending to this is very unexpected; not what I would have guessed, so the cartoon gets points for originality and well as decent humor. Nothing super, but very watchable.

Despite not being a huge fan of the Herman cartoons, Cheese Burglar for me is one of the best and funniest ones and a big improvement over the previous two Herman cartoons Henpecked Rooster and Scrappily Married. It doesn't have the best animation in the world, again it is better animated than the previous two cartoons but some of the drawings is not quite as fluid as it could have been, and Carl Meyer's voice for the cat is a very acquired taste, for me it was a little grating.

The music is wonderful though and quite possibly the cartoon's highlight, it sounds great, is rhythmically energetic(particularly in the last minute) and it adds a good deal to the action and humour. The song is very amusing too. Herman is entertaining while the cat and dog are equally great characters, the three of them work beautifully together and their conflict actually makes sense, okay the cat-and-dog-being-friends is unusual but it works. Arnold Stang and Jackson Beck provide solid voice work. What makes Cheese Burglar one of the best of Herman's cartoons most of all is that it actually tries to be original and different(most of the cartoons are the complete opposite) in concept even if it is not always surprising and that it's actually legitimately funny when again most are only mildly amusing or are not all that funny. The cartoon has a great ending, but the funniest bits were the cat hitting his head on the radiator/heater and his one-liner 'Me best pal! I must be dreamin'!'.

In conclusion, an enjoyable cartoon and easily among the best of a series of cartoons I'm not a huge fan of. 8/10 Bethany Cox