Mary-18

This is a wonderful little cartoon that had been pretty much forgotten for decades until it recently started showing up in vintage cartoon DVD sets under the title it was given in the 1940's, "Christmas Night." Otto Soglow's comic strip character, The Little King, had just been created in 1931, and this is one of the first times he appeared on screen. The Little King is an adorable and endearing character--a king who prefers to live like his working class subjects. In this cartoon, he befriends two very gritty bums on Christmas Eve, and together they prepare for Santa's arrival. The animation is beautiful. Sometimes blocky and abstract, while at other times more cutesy and full of detail. While almost entirely free of dialog, the cartoon is entertaining, completely understandable, and moves a brisk, enjoyable pace.

Sadly, it may have been the lack of dialog and simplicity of The Little King (in the comic strip, the king never spoke and ancillary characters did only rarely) that caused it to never really become successful in moving pictures. By the '30s, talkies were all the rage, and cartoon characters were expected to crack jokes or sing witty songs in addition to physical comedy.

In 1929 the Oswald the Lucky Rabbit series (originally created by Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks in 1927) was taken over by Walter Lantz and Universal Studios. I know that Disney purists would never deign to watch any of these post-Disney Oswald productions, but some of these cartoons are actually pretty cute. "The Plumber" is actually a very well animated story about Oswald's many failed attempts to control a water leak in his house as well as his extremely disobedient son (which actually makes one question why he is the "lucky" rabbit). This is a talking picture, but like many early talkie cartoons, it has very little dialogue and relies mostly on sight-gags; There is however a cute little song at the beginning, "Ain't Gonna Rain No More." I enjoyed the amount of absurd actions and anthropomorphized objects in the Oswald household, which kept the story going in spire of its lack of plot. It's a little disconcerting to see such Disney-esquire animation and gags in a non-Disney film, but the cartoon really is very well made and was an absolute pleasure to watch.

Disney fanatics know all about Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, Walt Disney's first popular cartoon animal hero. For the uninitiated, this character was created by Disney and Ub Iwerks, and they made 20+ successful Oswald cartoons in 1927 and 1928. This is not one of the more original or inventive Oswald cartoons, but it's very well animated and, even at this early date, features unmistakable Disney-quality characters and stock gags. In this one, Oswald hops the bandwagon and joins the army. They're sent to what seems like a WWI trench-based battle against Germany where the bombs fly and Oswald pines away for his bunny girlfriend back home. It's a little frantic, but still entertaining. I especially enjoyed seeing Oswald attempt to strangle what looks a lot like a very early Mickey Mouse prototype, since this kind of explicit cartoon violence would soon disappear from Disney's later, more family-oriented fare.