Studio: Fleischer Studios
Distributor: Paramount Pictures
Produced by: Max Fleischer
Short Synopsis
Hoppity the grasshopper returns to his insect friends who live in the "Lowlands", a patch of weeds in Manhattan beside the garden of a struggling songwriter, Dick Dickens, and his wife Mary. Humans now use a gap in the fence as a shortcut, crushing insect homes underfoot and setting them alight with dropped cigar butts. Old Mr. Bumble and his daughter Honey, Hoppity's sweetheart, are about to lose their honey shop. The scheming beetle C. Bagley Beetle, with his henchmen Smack the mosquito and Swat the fly, wants both the shop and Honey. Hoppity leads the bugs to a new home in the Dickens garden, but Beetle plots against him. Then Dick Dickens sells a hit song and the land is sold for a skyscraper. As construction begins, the insects are in mortal danger, and Hoppity leads them on a perilous climb up the rising steel frame. They reach the top, and find a new home in a penthouse garden, with a view of the city, where they can live in peace.
Why It Matters
- The climb up the skyscraper is the film's great set piece: tiny insects dodging rivets, girders and machinery against the vertiginous city, using the Fleischers' depth effects to make the human world colossal. The insect-eye view of New York is a distinctive idea, and Hoagy Carmichael's songs add charm.
- It was the Fleischers' second and last feature, and one of the first American animated features based largely on an original story. It previewed three days before Pearl Harbor, was barely promoted, and flopped. Paramount took over Fleischer Studios in 1942 and reorganised it as Famous Studios, so the film marks the end of the Fleischer brothers' studio. Paramount made no other animated feature until Charlotte's Web (1973).
Notes and Trivia
- It was originally planned as an adaptation of Maurice Maeterlinck's The Life of the Bee, but Paramount would not buy the rights from Samuel Goldwyn.
- See also: Gulliver's Travels (1939), Ants in the Plants (1940).