Is My Palm Read

"Is My Palm Read" is a Betty Boop cartoon that does what these cartoons do best--defying reality with strange anthropomorphic scenes and goofy jokes. It is far from normal....weird and well worth seeing.

Betty goes to a palm reader and what you see next is supposedly what will happen to her. Betty is somewhere on a haunted tropical island where lots of ghosts play tricks on her and try to scare poor Betty. But, along comes her hero, Bimbo the dog, and he bravely defeats the ghosts.

While the whole palm reading angle was really unnecessary, the rest of the cartoon is great fun. Extremely well animated like all Fleischer cartoons, this one also has lots of nice jokes and is the sort of silly far I liked best in Betty Boop cartoons.

Bimbo and Koko run a place where Bimbo is a fortune teller. Betty, in a sort of Southern Belle dress comes in to have her future told. The guys have a crystal ball that shows Betty as a baby. She looks exactly now except for the fact that she is tiny girl in the nude. They then shift to her coming on shore after a shipwreck and being captured by ghosts. This makes no sense but it's still a great deal of fun. Eventually, the whole gang gets back together.

There are scenes in this short, although incredibly tame today, that probably shocked the various moral watchdogs of 1933 and clearly the soon to be created Hays Office would NOT have been happy with this short. I think it's simply wonderful. Bimbo and Koko are both in this one and this is a prime example of what can be done with animation when the animators realize that the intended audience was composed not only of children, but adults as well and that not all adults are blue-haired little old ladies or Bible salesmen from Topeka, Kansas. The Fleischers did some marvelous work and this is an excellent sample of that work. In print and available. Well worth watching. Most highly recommended.

Puns, clever sight gags, a few risqué shots, some really old-fashioned Rudy Valley-type song, and just a generally wild story highlight this pre-Code Betty Boop.

I've noticed that in the early days of animation, the writers and artists really loved to make inanimate objects come alive. They would have fire, water, smoke, etc., all have hands that would appear and do something. Here, the waves on the ocean turn into big hands and dump a big steamship upside and drop the people in the water. Then the boat would be upright again and smoke rings from the two big stacks would turn into giant life rafts for the people. Betty would get washed ashore and "fingers" from the water would claw the sand or slap Bette on the behind! Later, we see smoke from a chimney spell out the word, "smoke." These kind of things are seen every few seconds in this cartoon. That kind of sight gag is still used today but not as much as in the '20s and '30s. You also didn't see naked women, either, but Bette would bare herself here and there before the censors would make her keep her clothes on by 1934.

What also marked Betty Boop as a different were the songs that would be inserted into the stories, even if they were very short as they are in this one. Betty (Mae Questel) was quite the singer and dancer!

There really isn't a much of a story to this one, just wild scenes, one after the other, but it's certainly entertaining! KoKo The Clown, from a silent decade earlier, and Bimbo the dog, make "guest appearances."

Fleischer were responsible for some brilliant cartoons, some of them still among my favourites. Their visual style often stunning and some of the most imaginative and ahead of its time in animation.

The character of Betty Boop, one of their most famous and prolific characters, may not be for all tastes and sadly not as popular now, but her sex appeal was quite daring for the time and to me there is an adorable sensual charm about her. The charm, sensuality and adorability factors are here and she's fun to watch. Koko and Bimbo are also featured and they are amusing too.

'Is My Palm Read?' is a wonderful Betty Boop cartoon, perhaps among her better ones. That it's virtually plot-less doesn't matter that much, because it's so rich in imagination, never less than entertaining, is up there as one of Betty's most boldly risqué cartoons and while it is a strange cartoon (the ending being especially so) it's a case of strange being handled brilliantly.

Furthermore, the black and white animation is very good, smooth, meticulously detailed and well drawn with the black and white not looking too primitive. A lot of it is actually very imaginative as well, some of the most inventive and eye-popping of the early Betty Boop cartoons to me. Even better is the music, which is rousing, catchy and unquestionably accessible to anybody who loves or is familiar with the compositional style. The voice acting is good.

Overall, wonderful cartoon. 9/10 Bethany Cox