Snow Use (1929) Online

Despite Oswald the Lucky Rabbit and his cartoons being popular and well received at the time, they have been vastly overshadowed over time by succeeding animation characters. It is a shame as, while not cartoon masterpieces, they are fascinating for anybody wanting to see what very old animation looked like.

Not all the Walter Lantz cartoons are bad, 'Permanent Wave' for example is perfect proof of that, but some of them are not good representations of Oswald or Lantz and for historical interest only. There have been worse cartoons of theirs before and since 'Snow Use', but almost all the Disney and Winkler era Oswald cartoons are much better and 'Snow Use' is not a patch on the best of those two eras.

This may sound like a re-iteration of what was said about the previous Lantz Oswald cartoons (excepting 'Permanent Wave', which was a good one), mainly because it shares the same good and bad points. It is of historical interest, being an early sound Oswald cartoon, but it is not bad enough to say it is for historical interest only.

'Snow Use's' sound quality for a cartoon so old and techniques still in its early days is not as primitive as it could have been. It is agreed too that most of the gags are fun and inventive especially with the giant snowball.

The music is as energetic as ever too, and Oswald, while having much better material and deserving of it, is still pretty endearing. The bear is a decent enough character.

On the other hand, even for an Oswald cartoon (which are not exactly to be seen for their stories), to say that the story is flimsy is an understatement, it's barely there that it's easy to say that there isn't one. It's also very repetitive and the pacing lacks sharpness with some of the bear's antics feeling like filler. Some of the synchronisation is sloppy, and a couple of the gags could have been significantly sharper.

Unusually, the animation is not great when most of the time in Oswald cartoons it's good. It's crudely drawn, the transitions has a tendency to look choppy and incomplete and the backgrounds lack detail and yes primitive.

On the whole, average stuff. 5/10 Bethany Cox

Oswald the Lucky Rabbit was a character created and animated by Walt Disney and his employee, Ub Iwerks. However, in a very shortsighted move, Universal Studios took control of the character from Disney and gave control to Walter Lantz...all in a bid to save money. However, the Lantz era Oswald cartoons were amazingly bland and although they looked better, the weird and chaotic nature of the character was gone...and Oswald eventually disappeared from films.

This is one of the earlier Walter Lantz Oswald cartoons. And, like the earlier ones, it looks much more like a Disney film AND features a villain who looks amazingly like Pete. It also features a girl cat who is remarkably like Minnie Mouse. So much for originality!

In this short, Oswald steals the girl away from the faux Pete and the pair then frolic about...and this tends to make the short a bit dull. Fortunately, faux Pete returns for her and the action picks up a bit and for the rest of the film it's Faux Pete and Oswald trading violent barbs.

Overall, better than the average cartoon of the day but not even close to being the equal to a Disney or Fleischer Brothers cartoon. However, it's a billion times better than the hellishly cutesy and awful Oswald cartoons Lantz would make after the character was redesigned a couple years later.

This is a short in the Oswald the Lucky Rabbit series, Lantz variation. There will be spoilers ahead:

There really isn't a whole lot to this cartoon. The big deal here would have been the novelty of sound and the synchronization of music to the animation. The plot is minimal and the animation is mostly of the "Look how stretchy I can make everything!" variety.

The short is basically a series of largely unconnected gags, most of which have some connection to snow and winter, though some of the connections are loose. The best of the gags in the beginning center around Oswald and his sled team dodging a giant snowball. Some of the gags here are decent.

A large bear comes up to a cabin/saloon with a moose and proceeds to tie the hitching post around the moose. That this may well be the best gag in this section of the short speaks volumes. The bear begins to dance (if you can truly call it that) with a cat and then Oswald comes in and causes the bear to lose his pants. There follows a combination of more "dancing" and wooing between Oswald and the cat.

The bear re-enters the short and starts choking Oswald, the cat tries to save Oswald, the bear starts trying to force himself on the cat and Oswald puts a Franklin stove in the rear of his pants, causing the bear to run.

Oswald and his lady love leave on skis, but the bear catches them. The last minute or so of the short is quite predictable and I'll leave for the viewer to enjoy if and when they watch this.

For completists.

This is a very early Lantz sound cartoon, so early that it merely makes use of simple synchronization, matching the music and tempo to the action at hand -- for example, when Oswald sticks a burning stove in Pete's trousers, we hear "There'll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight". The real master of this technique was Carl Stalling, who had stayed with Disney; so strong was its identification that the term for such musical/visual match-ups was "Mickey-Mousing".

Visually, we're right in the rubber tube phase of animation. Notice how infinitely stretchable Oswald is. Such are almost all the visual jokes and it quickly becomes boring in its repetition. Happily, within a year, Lantz' staff would improve and the quality of his cartoons would rocket.