Toonboy

Still fuming at Disney's treatment of The Fox and the Hound, but at least we get a DVD box cover that isn't ugly(looking at YOU Bambi). Anyway, that's neither here nor there.

I didn't bother picking up any of the "Treasures" DVDs, but this treat came with the 25th Anniversary Edition of The Fox and the Hound. It recalls the old classic style filtered through the lens of Dumbo. Not only does it feature an old Dumbo favorite, but the animation recalls said movie's gorgeous painterly style. There's no "technical wizardry" ala the earlier, more important animated shorts. It's just beautiful hand drawn character animation.

This isn't one of those shorts you watch for stand out character personality. It's more of a parable than anything. However Lambert's mother is a joy to watch. And listening to the narration by Winnie the Pooh(lol) is always a treat.

Not one of the better shorts I've seen although I'll admit it has some clever moments and I like this short a bit better than, say, Big House Bunny. The best bits are when Bugs and the bull engage in a duel to the tune of "La Cucaracha" while the bull is dazed out of his mind and the ending when Bugs whips up an elaborate contraption to cause an explosion of TNT over the bull.

Every now and then, it's good to see Bugs face off against a foe that's not his typical antagonists of Daffy/Sam/Fudd or even the odd mad scientist. However I'm going to have to differ with Loop slightly. I actually felt the best bits of this short were in the beginning, especially when Bugs gets the opera singer to inadvertently break into a song he didn't mean to sing, which elicits a classic "murder in the eyes" look. And yeah I agree. Bugs knew EXACTLY what he was doing.

The rest of the short follows Bugs as he resorts to his classic bag of tricks. Can't go wrong when Bugs gets his hands on a stick of dynamite. However by the end, we see Bugs causing the biggest act of property damage I've ever seen him do in any short.

Yup. This is good stuff. Not a short that tries hard to be funny. It's just funny in its own right. The opening parts sort of reminds me of the scene in The Phantom Tollbooth where the sunrise is being conducted. In here, Bugs pulls off all the facial shenanigans brilliantly. Later on, the short becomes a series of sight gags as Bugs gets frustrated with his cuffs and then reenacts a battle of cowboys and indians with various instruments and then contends with a bothersome fly.

All this time that I've owned Bambi, and I never bothered to check out this short that was buried in the DVD features. This seems more like a tech demo to the more expensive feature films that would come later. You could tell that the multi-plane camera would be put to even better use later on.

However this doesn't seem like a Silly Symphonies piece at all. There's no goofy singing or dancing. No squash and stretch. Nothing cartoony about it at all. Just a bunch of (relatively) realistic animated animals going about their lives in an abandoned mill.

There's probably a good poem buried in the short somewhere. It's quite interesting to see the little slices of life for each tiny critter. I actually thought the poor little mother blue bird was going to be crushed along with her eggs. But then that sequence sort of went downhill, so I choose to latch myself onto the romantic pair of mourning doves. And that poor owl looks familiar.

All in all, a good short.