Old King Cole

A Walt Disney SILLY SYMPHONY Cartoon Short.

An invitation is sent by OLD KING COLE to a party at his royal castle. The storybooks open and soon the denizens from many a Nursery Rhyme & Fairy Tale are hurrying to attend. The Three Little Kittens, Humpty Dumpty, & Goosey Gander are among those that entertain the crowd, but when the Ten Little Indian Boys start to dance things really get raucous. Joined first by the King, and then by the audience, wild reveling extends right up to midnight, when all of the guests scurry home.

This is a pleasant little film, which allows the quick-eyed viewer the chance to play 'Name That Character'.

The SILLY SYMPHONIES, which Walt Disney produced for a ten year period beginning in 1929, are among the most interesting of series in the field of animation. Unlike the Mickey Mouse cartoons in which action was paramount, with the Symphonies the action was made to fit the music. There was little plot in the early Symphonies, which featured lively inanimate objects and anthropomorphic plants & animals, all moving frantically to the soundtrack. Gradually, however, the Symphonies became the school where Walt's animators learned to work with color and began to experiment with plot, characterization & photographic special effects. The pages of Fable & Fairy Tale, Myth & Mother Goose were all mined to provide story lines and even Hollywood's musicals & celebrities were effectively spoofed. It was from this rich soil that Disney's feature-length animation was to spring. In 1939, with SNOW WHITE successfully behind him and PINOCCHIO & FANTASIA on the near horizon, Walt phased out the SILLY SYMPHONIES; they had run their course & served their purpose.

Disney Silly Symphonies cartoon with Old King Cole and a bunch of nursery rhyme characters springing forth from the pages of their books at night. It's a concept Disney had done before in black & white and one that would be used to great effect in many other cartoons in the years following this. A fun idea, especially for little kids who (back then) would've known Mother Goose like kids today know Pokemon or whatever else is rotting their brains. It's a good short, despite not having much in the way of a plot. The animation is excellent. The colors are just drop-dead gorgeous! There's a lot of music and singing and I know from reading so many IMDb reviews over the years that inevitably someone will hate it for that and call it corny or dated. Nuts to them! I happen to like the music and found the songs charming. Anyway it's not one of the best Silly Symphonies but it is upbeat and colorful. Try to enjoy it in the spirit it was meant to be viewed in. It's simple kid-friendly entertainment. No fart jokes or double entendres needed.

This is a really nice cartoon featuring an assortment of Mother Goose and/or storybook characters, from Humpty Dumpty to the Three Blind Mice and from Bo-Peep to Goldilocks, performing a song and dance for Old King Cole.

It's nice how the storybook characters come together like this in one big bash and its clever to see them literally coming out of their respective storybooks. Very imaginative.

Grade B

1933 really marked the beginning of Walt Disney's cartoon kingdom and a ten-year period during which all of the elements that went into the making of his great feature-length cartoons could be seen in transition as the artists developed their talent for bringing instantly recognizable characters to life, with music and art.

OLD KING COLE is a merry old start for Disney. A storybook opens as trumpeters announce the arrival of The Pied Piper, Little Boy Blue, Mother Hubbard, The Old Lady Who Lived in a Shoe, all on their way to King Cole's Happy New Year celebration at the castle. The figures all appear as pop-ups in a storybook, a device used so many other times by Disney and other cartoon makers.

Jack Pratt, Peter Peter, Pumpkin Eater, Humpty Dumpty, Three Blind Mice, Ten Little Indians, all are part of the party celebrations, dancing in style to some nimble tunes and all sorts of party celebrants. The frenzied finale has the merry Cole joining The Ten Little Indians in a wild dance and then joining the other revelers for more of the same.

Enjoyable look at how the early animators began their training ground and what the Silly Symphonies were all about.

The nursery rhyme monarch summons all the nursery rhyme characters to his castle where they act out their stories. "Old King Cole" is a weird short. I understand that it's a semi-remake of an early Silly Symphony. Either way, it's the sort of situation where they thought that they were making something cute but it turned out kind of disturbing (with some politically incorrect content, natch). There's a reason why I've always preferred the Warner Bros. Cartoons to the Disney ones; let's just say that only one of the groups allowed vaudeville-style humor.

Basically, this is the sort of cartoon that you might show to keep the tykes entertained, but for nothing else.