Wise Owl (1940) Online

A starving owl decides that bats are good to eat and uses every trick in the book to turn them into filling for his sandwich. In a multitude of disguises, he is unceremoniously thrown out of the bat cave. It's not a great cartoon, but has some moments. By the way, those bats are really creepy.

When the green-hued bats return to their cavern to play the pipe organ and dance their hellish dance, a starving owl spots them and tries to trick them into becoming his dinner in this Columbia Color Rhapsody cartoon directed by Ub Iwerks.

Iwerks had been floundering a a cartoon producer since 1935, when Pat Powers and Metro had pulled the rug out from under him. Likewise, with Charles Mintz dead, Columbia was looking for a reliable producer for their cartoons. Alas, something went wrong. Columbia would go through several more regimes before settling on UPA, and Iwerks would return to Disney, where he busied himself for the rest of his life working on technical issues.

In the meantime, this is a good, if derivative cartoon, borrowing from Iwerks' work on SKELETON DANCE and Harpo Marx, both for the owl's initial look and one gag. It's nicely done, but perhaps its lack of originality indicates that Iwerks didn't have what it took for the top spot.