Studio: Animated Pictures (Ub Iwerks), for Celebrity Pictures
Distributor: Celebrity Pictures (Pat Powers); MGM from 1930
Produced by: Ub Iwerks
Short Synopsis
Flip the Frog, a frog in shorts who looks a great deal like Mickey Mouse with a wider mouth, dances across the lily pads of a pond, reaches land, dries himself and walks to a party in the woods, where he performs for an audience of insects and animals. He dances, climbs by mistake into a spider's web, and then sits down at the piano for a duet with a mouse who plays the violin, the two of them trading solos and clowning through a hot number, with the audience joining in and the furniture swaying to the beat. There is no story beyond the concert; the film is a music cartoon of the first sound year, and the frog's performance is the point.
Why It Matters
- Fiddlesticks is the first sound cartoon made in colour, in the two-colour Harriscolor process, released a few months after the Technicolor cartoon sequence in Universal's King of Jazz; its soft reds and greens, and Carl Stalling's score, make it look and sound unlike any other 1930 cartoon. The piano-and-violin duet is as well animated as anything Disney released that year, which is no surprise.
- Ub Iwerks had been Disney's chief animator, the man who drew Mickey Mouse, and he left in January 1930 to start his own studio with the backing of Disney's former distributor Pat Powers; Fiddlesticks is his first independent film. His studio never found a character to match Mickey and he returned to Disney in 1940, but the Flip the Frog, Willie Whopper and ComiColor cartoons are a lively alternative history of the early 1930s. The film's copyright was renewed in 1959, and it entered the public domain on 1 January 2026.
Notes and Trivia
- Flip was redesigned within a year to look less like a frog and more like a boy, and the series ran to 38 films.
- Carl Stalling, Disney's first composer, followed Iwerks out of the Disney studio and later wrote the music for Warner Bros. for twenty years.
- See also: Steamboat Willie (1928), The Brave Tin Soldier (1934).
