Holiday Land

This "Scrappy" cartoon from the Mintz factory is the first they produced in color. It's two-color Technicolor, since Disney had a monopoly on the three-color variety. It looks a little off, since the design was not changed. The line drawing of Scrappy with splashes of color looks weird -- but then he always did. Certainly the background work benefits from from the color and emphasizes the size of a couple of shots.

As for the story, Scrappy doesn't want to get up to go to school and dreams of going to a banquet with tiny avatars of holidays. Like many of the Scrappies, it's an exercise in childhood weirdness and enjoyable. My interest in how they handled the color kept it from being too long.

"Holiday Land" is a Scrappy cartoon from producer Charles Mintz which managed to earn an Oscar Nomination. Most of the reason for this, I assume, is that the cartoon short was made using a two-color process...at a time when only DIsney could use the far better three-color process. This is because Disney arranged for the Technicolor company to only provide film stock to his company and none of the other cartoon manufacturers until 1935.

As far as the two-color process goes, it's problematic. While it looks good for 1934, it clearly is NOT full color, since the tones are all pinkish-red or bluish-green. Colors like yellow and purple just aren't possible with this sort of film stock.

Unlike the earlier Scrappy cartoons, Scrappy is not a nasty little boy...something which actually makes his earlier films much more fun. Here, he has little personality and is at best 'nice'...and nothing more.

Scrappy's mother is trying to get him to wake up but he wants to stay in bed and skip school. Just before returning to bed, he says he wishes it was a holiday...so he could sleep all day. He then dreams he goes to Holiday Land and all sorts of happy characters sing and dance...and bore most of the audience to tears.

Now this sort of happy, nice, vacuous product was not too out of the ordinary for 1934. Earlier cartoons tended to be more violent as were those of the 40s...but this period of niceness produced a lot of cartoons that looked good but were incredibly dull by comparison. While this is not a bad film, it's hardly among Scrappy's best and apart from the color and nice animation, I think it's pretty skippable.

A young lad named "Scrappy" is determined not to get out of his bed, despite being pestered by his mum to get up and go to school. Staying snug under his blanket, a distinctly autumnal wind blows some leaves through the open window and those leaves turn into the ones on his calendar and an array of characters from holidays ranging from Easter to Christmas and Thanksgiving arrive just in time for "Father Time" to take the young lad on a celebratory tour of eggs, turkeys, carols and jollity. When he awakens, though, is he ever going to get out of bed again? Though it might have been the quality of the copy I saw, the animation is a little too subdued but it doesn't hang about and for the most part is simply a joyous exercise that sees the young lad having the kind of unconditional fun that we all wish were having.