Studio: Van Beuren Studios (Tom and Jerry series)
Distributor: RKO Radio Pictures
Short Synopsis
Tom and Jerry, the tall man and the short one, find a magic pencil, and whatever they draw comes to life. Against a blank white background they become animators inside their own cartoon: they sketch a scene and step into it, draw a woman and a rival, draw themselves out of trouble and into more, and get into a drawing contest with the pencil itself, with the lines rubbing out and redrawing as fast as the gags come. The pair interact with the figures they have made, which fight back, and the film ends, as these films do, in a free-for-all of drawn and redrawn objects. The opening credits play over "I'm Looking Over a Four Leaf Clover". The film survives, is in the public domain and runs just under seven minutes.
Why It Matters
- It is the Van Beuren studio's answer to the Fleischers' Out of the Inkwell: a cartoon about drawing, in which the characters hold the pencil, and its fourth-wall games, the blank screen filled and emptied at will, are more playful than anything else in the Tom and Jerry series. The absence of backgrounds also makes it the best-looking of these cheaply made films.
- Pencil Mania is the best-known of the 26 Van Beuren Tom and Jerry cartoons and the one most often shown in surveys of early sound animation, partly because its public-domain status has kept it in circulation. Foster and Stallings, who made most of the series, were at their most inventive here.
Notes and Trivia
- The series' characters were renamed Dick and Larry for television to avoid confusion with MGM's cat and mouse.
- The magic pencil was a favourite device of the New York studios, from Winsor McCay's Little Nemo to Koko the Clown.
- See also: Magic Art (1932), Masquerade (1924), Toy Time (1931).