Pauvre Papa

Flocks and flocks of storks converge of Oswald the Lucky Rabbit's home to deliver what seems like a never-ending stream of baby bunnies. Are you feeling so lucky now, Ozzie?

It's a pretty good cartoon, but clearly not of the caliber of the leading houses in the field. A good part of the reason was that Disney had a couple of middle men to go through before they were distributed by Universal: Robert Winkler was his nominal producer, because sister, Margaret, was someone people had to go through if they wanted to get paid for their cartoons. The net effect was when Miss Winkler retired to marry Charles Mintz, Mintz basically took Oswald away from Disney. He would never deal with an outsider again.

Somehow, Papa rabbit is inundated with progeny. He has rabbits up the you know what. The storks deliver the en masse and now Papa has to figure out what to do. He washes huge amounts of clothing, tries to feed them, as they go berserk in the house. If you think the first wave is bad...watch and see what happens next.

"Poor Papa" is an Oswald cartoon from the early period in which Walt Disney oversaw the productions. Not long after launching this successful series, however, Universal Pictures essentially fired Disney and brought in new crew to do the films...and I assume it was to save a few bucks. However, the newer Oswald cartoons directed by Paul Terry were, by comparison, a bit dull...prettier to look at as the animation was nice but dull.

Oddly, the star of this cartoon is not Oswald but his father. It begins with Dad waiting for the stork to arrive. Unfortunately MANY storks arrive and soon the house is filled with the most active and annoying rabbits...and Dad is losing his mind as a result.

The plot is perhaps too simple but it is clever and fun...and is worth seeing. Not a great cartoon...but a very good one.

The interesting thing about this refound "pilot" for the Oswald the Lucky Rabbit series is how different it is from the succeeding films and hos easy it is to describe that difference. In this film, unlike all the others, the rabbits look and behave more or less like rabbits and they are confronting what might in some sense be described as a realistic rabbit-problem - the multiplication of their progeny. It is common to say that, after the initial rejection of this cartoon, Werks "refined" the character of Oswald the Rabbit, but it would truer to say that he simply anthropomorphised the character (a stage evidently on the road to Mickey Mouse).

I do not in the least like the "Oswald" series and I am not much of a fan of "Mickey Mouse" either, and however much it may be an "advance" in the direction that, for better or worse, US animation was destined to go, it is certainly not an advance in any other respect on the much more interesting and more varied "Alice" cartoons that preceded (in my view amongst the best short cartoons Disney ever produced). But "Poor Papa" is an intriguing glimpse of an alternative path that the animalière cartoon might have taken....and has, to my taste, a charm that the rest of the "Oswald" series singularly lacks.