One Funny Knight

When the brigand Katnip magnetizes all her knights' armor and kidnaps the Princess Guinevere, it is up to a Robin-Hood-hatted Herman to rescue her from a tower in his castle in this decent but rote Famous Studios cartoon.

It starts off well, with some fine gags, but like many a comedy short, once the plot actually begins with the already-mentioned kidnapping, it turns into the usual collection of well-executed hit-Katnip-in-the-head bits. I also find the way that Guinevere is drawn a bit unsettling: while everyone else is a bit cartoonish, she is shown in a profile that looks all too human and realistic.

Of the later Herman and Katnip cartoons, where budget restrictions and repetition were showing more heavily, One Funny Knight is among the weakest. This said, it's still watchable, but with not much more than that.

The best and only really great thing here for One Funny Knight is the music score. More than just great actually, it's outstanding, very lush and energetic with a great sense of mood and it not just matches the action so well but it adds just as much to it, which is what music in a cartoon should do. The main theme is very catchy too. There are some nice colours in the animation and the voice work is dependable. Herman in the hero role is resourceful and likable, and not annoying or too cunning, while Katnip is a decent adversary, their chemistry gelling just right though would have sparkled more with better material.

Apart from some nice colours, however, the animation is not up to top standard. Some other colours are not as vibrant as one would like and lack variety, some of the drawing is rough and the rather sparse-in-detail and scrappy backgrounds was where any budget limitations really shows. The story, like Robin Rodenthood, has an intriguing setting and tries to do something different with it and has a quite sweet ending, but it does take too long to set up (almost half the cartoon is setting the main plot, with not an awful lot particularly interesting happening in the mean-time) and is rather standard, formulaic Herman and Katnip territory.

One Funny Knight is not one of the funnier Herman and Katnip cartoons either, and that the gags, while comparatively tamer than some other Herman and Katnip cartoons, are quite repetitive (basically Katnip getting hit on the head with different objects and not particularly inventively executed) and very little different to what's been seen before with this duo is a large part of the problem. The dialogue has the frequent use of thees, thous and thys, and this mix of archaic speak and modern Herman and Katnip dialogue jars awkwardly and the dialogue is a little tired here. Guinevere is pretty but slightly bland and more of a plot device, while the other mice add little, their parts could have been left out and nobody would have noticed.

In conclusion, a watchable Herman and Katnip cartoon but outside of the music there's never anything exceptional here. 5/10 Bethany Cox