Studio: Paramount Cartoon Studios
Distributor: Paramount Pictures
Short Synopsis
No written plot summary of this Honey Halfwitch short has turned up, so this account is based on the surviving film. Honey, the little apprentice witch in her pointed hat, is at work on her magic. In a dim room lit by a guttering candle, a tiny figure in a top hat hovers over a huge open spell book. Outside a cottage door, a stout man in a nightcap and a tall witch in a pointed hat stand side by side, one holding a mug, and elsewhere a shadowy, snaking trail of magic spreads across a floor. The title promises potions, and the frames suggest a story of brewing and spell-casting with unexpected results, in keeping with a series about a witch whose magic rarely goes to plan. The details of the potion, the mix-ups it causes and how the story resolves are not described in any source this book could check.
Why It Matters
- Like the other Honey Halfwitch films, it shows the angular, loosely drawn, flat style of Paramount's last cartoons, with Shamus Culhane's studio deliberately breaking away from the rounded, cute look of its 1950s output. The candlelit spell-book scene uses simple shapes and strong shadows to good effect.
- It is one of the last cartoons made by the studio that began as Fleischer Studios in the 1920s, released in the final year and a half before Paramount shut down its animation department in 1967. Honey Halfwitch was among the last new characters the studio produced.
Notes and Trivia
- The title plays on "potions" and "notions", a witch's brews and a young witch's bright ideas.
- Its music is by Winston Sharples, who scored Paramount's cartoons for more than two decades.
- See also: From Nags to Witches (1966), I Want My Mummy (1966).