Studio: Fleischer Studios
Distributor: Paramount Pictures
Produced by: Max Fleischer
Short Synopsis
On a winter evening, a brother and sister in ragged clothes pull a wagon through town, collecting firewood. They stop to gaze at the cakes in a bakery window. The kindly baker comes out with cupcakes for them, but they have gone, and he, the tailor and the grocer put their heads together to help. At home, the children's supper is hard bread and water. The boy says he is still hungry, and when their mother begins to cry because she has nothing more to give, he takes it back to comfort her. She kisses them goodnight, and they sing themselves to sleep under their tattered sheets. In their dream they enter Dreamland, where a merry-go-round is made of cake, fields grow ice cream cones and popcorn, and there are toys, fine clothes and soft beds. They lie down on the beds, and wake up in their shabby room. But on the kitchen table is a feast, and around the room are toys and new clothes, brought by the merchants. The children ask twice whether it is all for them. Then the boy, suspicious, sticks himself with a fork to make sure he is awake.
Why It Matters
- The contrast carries the film: the grey, freezing town and the bare supper table against the saturated colour of Dreamland, where a cake turns into a merry-go-round and ice cream grows in fields. The children's wish-fulfilment is drawn with real appetite, which makes the waking up hurt.
- It is one of the most direct portrayals of the Great Depression in Hollywood animation: hungry children, a crying mother, a town that has to step in. Few cartoons of the period confronted poverty so plainly, and the film has been restored by Fabulous Fleischer Cartoons Restored with Paramount, premiering on MeTV in December 2021.
Notes and Trivia
- The fork gag at the end gives the sentimental story a typical Fleischer punchline.
- See also: Poor Cinderella (1934).