Joyeux mutines

This early Columbia Color cartoon was directed by Ben Harrison and Manny Gould, who spent most of their career in the 1920s and 1930s producing Krazy Kat cartoons, nominally based on the George Herriman strip. This one, however, is a one-ff in which children sail their toy boats around a pond and imagine getting into a sea battle with them.

Like many of the early color efforts from Charles Mintz' cartoon factory, it's far too sentimental for my taste. The color work is not particularly good. While the background art is nicely tinted in a watercolor style, the characters are painted in a very simple manner, with large, undifferented areas of a single color and density.

Like many a cartoon of this period, it has a "celebrity review" segment. The sailors aboard the toy boats are depicted as movie stars of the era. They include Charles Laughton, W.C. Fields, Jimmy Durante, Laurel & Hardy, the Marx brothers, Bing Crosby, George Arliss, and Joe E. Brown.

Archaic swashbuckler spoof in cartoon form which, for no particular reason, includes several Hollywood caricatures. Two kids ‘battle’ their toy ships in a pool; we then go into the ‘clash’ proper: the crew of both vessels are made up of film-stars of the era, from dramatic actors such as Wallace Beery and Charles Laughton (who had just appeared in classic examples of the genre – TREASURE ISLAND [1934] and MUTINY ON THE BOUNTY [1935] respectively) to comedians including Laurel & Hardy, The Marx Bros., The Three Stooges and Jimmy Durante. Of course, at a mere seven minutes, it’s certainly harmless – but there’s very little genuine invention on display…especially since the comics are there mainly to individually engage in the familiar but corny ‘sailor dance’ routine!