Another wonderful Ub Iwerks time capsule from an age when animation, though still a little stilted, had yet to be neutered by sentiment, wholesomeness and denial. Here you will find, not sickly songs, contrived emotion, or cutesy creatures, but violence, attempted murder, child abuse, sadism, lynching. In one short ten-minute cartoon, the titular hero is bitten by a mouse, crammed into a bag to be drowned, stowed to foreign lands where he is chased by an army of mice and guillotined. This is Itchy and Scratchy 30s style, and it's great, disturbing fun.
Right from his diffidently slow, slinking entrance, we realise the cat is less a hero than a loser. But the systematic abuse and neglect suffered by him is similarly undergone by his owner, a young boy virtually enslaved to a brutish chef who assaults him with depressing regularity. If animation is traditionally aimed at children to inculcate healthy morals about conformity, than the moral of this film is that the world is a short, nasty, brutish place, where the strong will always bully the weak, the majority will fascistically root out difference (this IS 1936), no matter how hard you try. The final image subverts the happy ending cheerfully, but a little sadly.
Such a bleak viewpoint does not, pace Sartre etc., necessitate a bleak film, and the animation is pure joy. The movements of the characters may seem clumsy to us today, but they have a charm of their own, and Iwerks uses his technological limitations to create some startling effects. The sequence in Persia is astonishing, from the moment the mice swarm on the helpless (though guilty - they are slave owners) adults' dinner table, and gulp the meal in front of their very eyes, hiding in beards to prevent the loss of any stray pea; and the frightening chase of the cat, who hides in a lump of cheese, and is flushed out by a huge kitchen knife; to his ultimate guillotining, a haunting scene, where the ghosts of his sliced body wreak revenge on his murderers, before fulfilling the old adage about nine lives.
Can you imagine the daring, the terror, the philosophical depth, the mischievous glee of that in the year before SNOW WHITE? The only thing that might spoil the enjoyment of today's audience is the brief racial stereotyping typical of its time, but we can't expect people in 1936 to be as nice as we are today.
Right from his diffidently slow, slinking entrance, we realise the cat is less a hero than a loser. But the systematic abuse and neglect suffered by him is similarly undergone by his owner, a young boy virtually enslaved to a brutish chef who assaults him with depressing regularity. If animation is traditionally aimed at children to inculcate healthy morals about conformity, than the moral of this film is that the world is a short, nasty, brutish place, where the strong will always bully the weak, the majority will fascistically root out difference (this IS 1936), no matter how hard you try. The final image subverts the happy ending cheerfully, but a little sadly.
Such a bleak viewpoint does not, pace Sartre etc., necessitate a bleak film, and the animation is pure joy. The movements of the characters may seem clumsy to us today, but they have a charm of their own, and Iwerks uses his technological limitations to create some startling effects. The sequence in Persia is astonishing, from the moment the mice swarm on the helpless (though guilty - they are slave owners) adults' dinner table, and gulp the meal in front of their very eyes, hiding in beards to prevent the loss of any stray pea; and the frightening chase of the cat, who hides in a lump of cheese, and is flushed out by a huge kitchen knife; to his ultimate guillotining, a haunting scene, where the ghosts of his sliced body wreak revenge on his murderers, before fulfilling the old adage about nine lives.
Can you imagine the daring, the terror, the philosophical depth, the mischievous glee of that in the year before SNOW WHITE? The only thing that might spoil the enjoyment of today's audience is the brief racial stereotyping typical of its time, but we can't expect people in 1936 to be as nice as we are today.
