Jazz Rhythm (1930) Online

Once again the anthropomorphic takes center stage. It has been said that the animators had not yet been able to sync the words with the mouths of the cartoon characters. So instead, they roughly attach recorded music with visual images. This whole offering involves a battle between two pianists. One is a lion. The other is Krazy Kat. There is the usual use of instruments on characters. Heads as xylophones, for instance. The most clever of all the bits involves the performance within a boxing ring. After the bell, they rest up like boxers. The pianists get a rest, but so do the pianos. One piano does the water drinking bit where the water is expelled outside the ring. They also huff and puff like boxers do. The rest is more of he same stuff I've already seen in numerous Mintz cartoons.

1930 was a year of musical cartoons. In large part, this was because the cartoon producers had been putting soundtracks onto their cartoons since 1928, but they hadn't figured out how to match words to mouth movements yet. Instead, they offered synchronized cartoons, in which musical soundtracks to take the place of theater accompanists -- just the way the Warner Brothers had sold their sound movies in the first place. Harman & Ising had figured out how to do the coordination necessary for talkie cartoons and had gotten a contract on that basis. The smaller producers were a bit more conservative. They paid for sound effects and they paid for a musical track; there seemed no reason to pay for voice artists when they could continue to make the same sort of cartoon they had in the silent era.

Instead, they worked out cartoons like this one, in which the sound track was the point. In this one, a lion plays classical music (including the earliest use of the "Storm" sequence from the William Tell Overture I've heard in the movies) and Krazy counters with jazz music, including a nice hot version of W.C. Handy's "St. Louis Blues". There are a few gags scattered in, but that's basically it.