I may be biased as I love Disney and grew up with their cartoons, movies and shows, and still love most of them now. Mother Goose Goes Hollywood is an example of Disney at its finest. It is beautifully animated, colourful and fluid as animation should be with thankfully no ugly over-exaggerated character features, and as usual the music is energetic, dynamic and helps to enhance the action. The story is simple, but the revelation was the concept, so clever to incorporate big Hollywood names of the time into nursery rhyme characters. The whole in-a-book structure was also inspired. But the real delights of Mother Goose Goes Hollywood are the caricatures themselves and the jokes. The caricature of Stepin Fetchitt may amuse some, but annoy others(I didn't mind it), and while harmless the gag where the pie hits Katharine Hepburn turning her black-face can be seen as politically incorrect but the scene where the gag comes from is a great one anyway so I didn't mind that either. The running gag may be Katharine Hepburn trying to find her sheep, but I didn't think it was the best one. Even better were the MGM Lion Parody, WC Fields being heckled by Charlie McCarthy, the Marx Brothers(minus Zeppo) as the Fiddlers Three and the Simple Simon Piemen scene with Laurel and Hardy. Plus if you love the 1935 film Mutiny on the Bounty, you will be delighted at Charles Laughton as Captain Bligh saying "It's mutiny, but I love it". As for the caricatures, I don't think I have seen a cartoon with so many caricatures and so cleverly incorporated, Hugh Herbert, Charles Laughton, WC Fields, The Marx Brothers, Laurel and Hardy, Greta Garbo, Zasu Pitts and Clark Gable, and that's not even all. I also noted the brief appearance of Donald Duck jumping out of the pot in the Joe Penner sequence, and the well-choreographed swinging dance at the end. All in all, incredibly clever and enormous fun, one of Disney's finest. 10/10 Bethany Cox
Review of Mother Goose Goes Hollywood
