User Reviews

When the lions get loose at the circus, it's up to Mighty Mouse to beat up on the big cats in this bog standard Terrytoon.

I don't think that Paul Terry's organization knew what to do with their break-out star character. Every time he appeared he had to beat up cats. That's what his audience of small children seemed to want. With this one, they eke it out by having mice listen to the story on the radio. This makes it clear that Mighty Mouse is derived from Superman. Yet while the Superman comic could do all sorts of stories and the radio show actually would be instrumental in fighting the Ku Klux Klan, Mighty Mouse just beat up on cats. Every time.

It's not that they didn't try. They tried to ornament the story. They used their top-of-the-line animation. They varied the setting and the details of the mice MM would save from cats. They would use alley cats, lions and cats with bat wings. But it always wound up the same.

Terrytoons Studios' output is variable but when seeing it as a completest it is also quite fascinating. Most of it ranges between mediocre and pretty decent, though there are cartoons of theirs that are more and less. The Mighty Mouse cartoons up to this point of his series were generally watchable if very formulaic (though that is not the case for all, three of them from this year alone), though there was yet to be one that was above decent level and Mighty Mouse himself is nice enough if limited.

1944 was not a bad year for Terrytoons, far from it actually with very few of them being mediocre or less. Every year up to this point of Terrytoons' output had misses and exceptions to the average and more quality and were mediocre or less, and 1944 was not exempt from that. One of those exceptions was 'At the Circus', which to me is also one of the worst of the Mighty Mouse series. On the most part Terrytoons had actually improved quite a lot, regardless of the stories (never a strong suit for the studio) and characters the animation had advanced significantly and there have been cartoons where the gags were more and funnier, not the case for 'At the Circus' for that last part.

Will start with the good things. The music is its usual lush and characterful self, not just adding to the action but enhancing it as well. The animation is equally great in quality, especially the backgrounds and landscapes, the characters are well drawn and the colours are really beautiful on the eye.

Of the characters, the most interesting are the cats being the ones to have some degree of personality. They are though not much different to most Mighty Mouse adversaries, those in other cartoons being more sinister and with more entertaining methods.

Mighty Mouse however for a lead character should have been used more and introduced earlier, when he does appear 'At the Circus' becomes standard Mighty Mouse territory of even weaker quality to before and feels too much of a different cartoon. The circus setting does not have enough colour, excitement or danger, and the circus inhabitants don't have much personality to them, basically just there.

Conflict lacks tension, with such bland characterisation and a pace that never really comes to life, and what little there is of the story is formulaic, veering on too cute and routine with not an awful lot of momentum. The gags are far too few in number, next to none, and when there are attempts at any they are not funny, tired and seen it all before. The writing is pretty corny.

In summary, weak. 3/10