The Cat's Canary (1932) Online

"It serves the cat right," is how I would give my two cents on this animated story, which was pretty interesting. A little birdie, a canary apparently from the title of this cartoon, is eaten by a cat, who wears a little bowlers' hat.

Anyway, after he swallows the little bird and all you can hear now are "tweets" coming from the cat's mouth. He can't stop making bird noises, he's freaking out, so he rushes over to see "Dr. Snutz," who looks down this throat. We get our first funny sight gag with that as the doc pulls out a very long tongue and looks at it like it was ticker tape with stock quotations. He then presses the cat's nose and the tongue winds back into his mouth.

A look with a camera - those old-fashioned accordion-like ones - reveals there is hope for the bird. We see him flying in an around all the cat's ribs and singing madly in distress. The doc does everything he can to shake the bird loose, giving the cat a rough treatment. They get into a fight and the doc boots him out of the office.

I don't want to spoil things, so suffice to say that that some really unusual things happen after that. It gets weirder and weirder and all of it is pretty humorous. That's a main attraction in cartoons - you see the impossible. By the end of this cartoon, all I could do was shake my head in amazement at some of the things I just seen. This is a fun cartoon.

I found this as an extra on a $1 DVD (Hunted & Haunted/Detour) from PC Treasures, Inc. In it, a cat (looks like Felix the Cat, though with less charm)eats a canary early on. However, the canary is flying around inside, and whenever the feline opens his mouth, canary sounds come out. Frustrated, he goes to Dr. Snutz, a canine doctor. The X-Ray shows the canary, but before long the cat and the dog start scrapping, leading to the cat getting kicked out. At this point, the cat starts attracting large birds who fall in love with the cat (sort of the opposite of Krazy Kat) and after getting away, the cat joins four kitty comrades on a fence. The other four cats meow, and when our the canary cat let's out canary sounds, the cats are astounded, but go on trying to woo a girl cat in a skirt on a clothesline. Neighbors who are not pleased with the cat wailing throw objects at the five cats. An empty bird cage covers the canary cat's head, and sure enough, the canary flies out. He soon is free of the cage, and reports to an aggressive stork, and a squadron of small birds, who attack the helpless cat in droves, mimicking fighter planes and bringing out a real cannon (Max Fleischer's Popeye would expand on this technique). The U.S. Flag is imprinted on the big bird's wings (this is 1932, so I don't think this is a war allusion.) The cat is soundly thrashed and the movie ends.

The story may sound random and unentertaining, because it is.

On the other hand, it is high quality animation, despite lightly detailed backgrounds. It is true full-motion, with non of the cheapening tricks that would become a trademark for Hanna-Barbara decades later (save for one sequence where the same animation is clearly run in reverse). This is in the early days of sound, and it appears that the music and sound effects only approach is employed largely to reduce the necessity of perfect synchronization.

I'm glad I saw it, but I don't think I'd watch it again.

Van Beuren cartoons are extremely variable, especially in the number of gags and whether the absurdist humour shines through enough (sometimes it does, other times it doesn't), but are strangely interesting. Although they are often poorly animated with barely existent stories and less than compelling lead characters, they are also often outstandingly scored, there can be some fun support characters and some are well-timed and amusing.

Just when one thinks that Van Beuren were stretching themselves, putting more imagination into their work and getting more ambitious, 'The Cat's Canary', while not quite back to square one, shows that quality had significantly dipped. There are certainly far worse Aesop's Fables cartoons, but 'The Cat's Canary' is hardly a representation of Van Beuren being good.

Best asset about 'The Cat's Canary' is the music score, pretty much the best thing consistently of Van Beuren's output. It is so beautifully and cleverly orchestrated, is great fun to listen to and full of lively energy, doing so well with enhancing the action.

A few neatly synchronised sound effects here and there and the visuals are not as out of sync with the audio as much as other cartoons in the series, despite being sloppy still. The backgrounds also have invention, visual quality in the Aesop's Fables series is improving.

However, although the backgrounds have improved the character designs haven't, erratic, sloppy and at best primitive the characters, especially the cat, are poorly drawn. That the story is slight would have been forgivable if it was also still engaging and made sense. Instead 'The Cat's Canary' is dull, with a couple of throwaway scenes, and so disorganised and increasingly weird,

'The Cat's Canary' is never remotely amusing, with gags being too few and the gags there are being both bland and overly strange without ever being imaginative. None of the characters engage, the birds show little personality and the cat is hard to root for and inconsistently characterised.

All in all, lacklustre. 4/10 Bethany Cox