Le Vieux Roi Cole

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

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.

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.

While I am a huge fan of the early Disney cartoons, it's hard to like "Old King Cole". It has practically nothing going for it. For example, although the cartoon is in color (as were all the Silly Symphony shorts at this time), the colors are VERY splashy and not at all pleasing to the eye. And, oddly, the characters' faces are all white and washed out--making the cartoon appear to have been hastily made. Additionally, there really is no story--just lots of annoying characters popping out of a storybook. They sing and dance, but none of it is appealing--it's all like a steady diet of saccharine! Some other cartoon producers specialized in making annoying cartoons like this (such as the dreadful Harmon-Ising shorts), but this is very atypical of Disney. Sure, their Silly Symphonies were known for singing and dancing, but usually the songs are good and there is some plot--here in "Old King Cole" the songs are bad, the animation is bad and the overall product will have you wondering why in heaven you watched it in the first place! Pretty terrible.

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.