Studio: Bray Studios
Distributor: Pathé Frères
Short Synopsis
Detailed plot records for this early entry are thin, and what follows is based on the surviving film. The Colonel, a short, round boaster in a pith helmet with a rifle under his arm, marches across a bare African landscape under a blazing cartoon sun, looking for big game to bag. The hunt goes the way the Colonel's adventures always go: the hunter quickly becomes the hunted. Confronted by a large animal, he drops his heroics and scrambles up a skinny tree, where he clings to the top while the beast settles down at its foot to wait him out. The comedy lies in the gap between the swaggering explorer of his tall tales and the frightened little man up a tree. How he finally gets down is not described in any source this book could check, so the ending is left for the viewer to discover.
Why It Matters
- The drawings are spare, a horizon line, a tree, a few palms, so the joke is carried entirely by the Colonel's body: the bustling walk, the frantic climb, the clinging pose at the top. Bray keeps the character's proportions consistent as he moves, which Leonard Maltin singled out as technically adequate and accurate for the period.
- Colonel Heeza Liar was the first recurring cartoon star created specifically for animation, rather than adapted from a newspaper comic. Bray's studio used him to prove that animated shorts could be made as a regular series, and Bray's assembly-line methods and patents on backgrounds and cels made his studio the template for the commercial cartoon industry.
Notes and Trivia
- The Colonel is a caricature of Theodore Roosevelt, whose 1909 African safari was widely publicised, combined with the stock figure of the tall-tale-telling old adventurer.
- The series ran from 1913 to 1917 and was revived from 1922 to 1924, with Walter Lantz animating the later films and adding live-action interaction.
- This short followed the first entry, Colonel Heeza Liar in Africa (1913).
- See also: Colonel Heeza Liar on the Jump (1917).