Studio: Fleischer Studios (Color Classics)
Distributor: Paramount Pictures
Produced by: Max Fleischer
Short Synopsis
Humpty Dumpty is a king, and a greedy one. From his castle he looks at the sun and decides that it is made of gold, and that he must have it. He orders his subjects, the nursery-rhyme people, to build his wall higher and higher, driving them with a whip as the courses rise through the clouds; Old King Cole, Little Boy Blue and the rest labour under him. At the top, within reach of the sun, Humpty swings his pick at it. The sun, offended, fights back, flaring and striking at the wall, and the wall, built too fast and too high, begins to sway. Humpty Dumpty has a great fall, a long one, through the clouds and past every course of his tower, and lands in pieces at the bottom. All the king's horses and all the king's men do their best, but the greedy king stays broken, and his subjects, free of him, celebrate.
Why It Matters
- The nursery rhyme is turned into a parable of greed, with the sun as the one thing a king cannot own, and the wall rising through the clouds, photographed over the Fleischers' model sets, gives the film a scale the series rarely attempted; the fall, prolonged over the whole height of the tower, is its set piece.
- The film is in the public domain in the United States, its copyright having lapsed with most of the Color Classics, and it was popular on television packages in the 1950s; it is one of several Fleischer fairy-tale cartoons that gave their nursery characters a Depression-era moral.
Notes and Trivia
- Iwerks's ComiColor Humpty Dumpty of 1935 took the opposite tack, with Humpty as a romantic hero.
- The sun with a face and a temper is a Fleischer staple going back to the Talkartoons.
- See also: The Cobweb Hotel (1936), Hawaiian Birds (1936), Humpty Dumpty (1935).
