Betty Boop's Birthday Party

This is a cute, if second-tier, short that centers around a surprise party thrown for Betty by her friends. The usual sight gags, many rather bizarre and unusual, to say the least, run throughout the cartoon. Entertaining, if not really among the best of the period. Well worth watching. In print and available. Recommended.

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. The rest of the gang are similarly enormously entertaining.

'Betty Boop's Birthday Party' is not quite up there with Betty's best, but is wonderfully bizarre and never less than enormously entertaining, with some very imaginative, insane and very funny sight gags. The cartoon's thin on plot, but the atmosphere, humour and visual style more than compensate and keep things afloat.

Furthermore, the black and white animation is extremely 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 composition style.

All in all, one birthday party Betty Boop/Fleischer-style that one doesn't want to miss. 9/10 Bethany Cox