Beau Best

Oswald the Lucky Rabbit travels by camel to a Middle Eastern city. There he observes the local snake charmers and rescues a veiled maiden in this funny but ill-focused Lantz cartoon.

Some of the gags are very funny, especially the snake-charming sequence, but the first half of the movie seems like it is just one gag piled on another, as if some one said "Let's do an Arabian cartoon' and some one pulled the jokes out of a file. The second half is a standard chase, with a decent mix of cartoon and slapstick gags, but Oswald is largely reduced to a supporting character in his own cartoon. This happens frequently in long-running series; no one objects to the occasional focus on a supporting character or using a well established star to introduce a new character, but there comes a time when the second bananas get all the laughs. This looks like the process is underway.

Oh, well It's still funny. Take a look.

Despite Oswald the Lucky Rabbit and his cartoons being popular and well received at the time, they have been vastly overshadowed over time by succeeding animation characters. It is a shame as, while not cartoon masterpieces, they are fascinating for anybody wanting to see what very old animation looked like.

Oswald in the Disney years saw mostly good to very good cartoons, and while the Winkler years had some duds there were also cartoons as good as the best of the Disney years. The 1929-1930 batches of Walter Lantz-directed Oswald cartoons were a mixed bag, with some good, some forgettable and not much special and a few mediocre. The 1931 batch was mostly underwhelming, with only 6 out of 18 cartoons being above average or more. The 1932 batch had a few not so good, though the cartoons in question were nothing compared to the worst of the previous 3 years, cartoons, but most were decent to good and some even very good.

'Beau Best' is not one of the best Oswald cartoons in a while like two of the previous 1933 Oswald cartoons 'The Plumber' and 'The Shriek' were, and it is also a step down from 'Going to Blazes'. It is still not bad at all, in fact pretty decent if agreed uneven and unfocused, and much better than the current IMDb rating it's gotten (have noticed that a lot of Lantz Oswald cartoons are rated pretty low, some deserved, some not).

The story does hurt it somewhat. It was basically agreed a string of gags in the first half and while there was a little more of it in the second half it was pretty standard stuff and like a cartoon of two halves.

Oswald deserved far more to do here, he is an endearing and fun character but he is too much of a supporting one when actually he should be the lead.

However, the animation is very good. There is the looser and more elaborate look of many of the previous Lantz era Oswald cartoons, but it was surprising and lovely to see parts of the animation reminding one of the animation style of the Disney years in places.

Can't complain about the music either, which is infectious and lushly orchestrated and despite some occasionally muffled moments even the sound quality can't diminish its impact.

Regarding the gags, they may not be the most imaginatively timed or funniest of the 1933 cartoons, but they're still solidly executed and never less than very amusing, despite the predictability of some.

In summary, decent cartoon. 6/10 Bethany Cox