Studio: Famous Studios
Distributor: Paramount Pictures
Produced by: Sam Buchwald
Short Synopsis
A cuckoo in a cuckoo clock is sick of his job: every hour, on the hour, he must pop out and say the one word he knows, and he has said it for years. Through the window he sees the free birds in the garden and falls for a pretty canary. He breaks out of the clock and tries life outside, courting the canary and discovering that a bird who has never flown further than the end of his perch is not equipped for the world: the cat, the weather and the other birds all have their way with him. He also finds that the household, without its cuckoo, is in chaos, nobody knowing the time. The cuckoo comes home to his clock, wiser, and the canary, as it turns out, comes with him, so that the hour is now announced by two.
Why It Matters
- Bill Tytla's Noveltoons are the most carefully animated films Famous Studios made in the late 1940s, and the cuckoo, a small mechanical bird who discovers feelings, gives him a character to build; the clockwork interior and the garden outside are nicely contrasted, and Winston Sharples scores the hourly cuckoo as a motif.
- The film is in the public domain in the United States, its copyright among the pre-1950 Noveltoons that National Telefilm Associates let lapse, and it was reissued theatrically in October 1954; it is among the Tytla films that animation historians cite when arguing that his post-Disney work deserves a second look.
Notes and Trivia
- Tytla had animated Stromboli in Pinocchio and the devil in Fantasia's Night on Bald Mountain.
- Bunny Gough, co-writer, was one of the few women in the Famous story department.
- See also: The Wee Men (1947), The Mite Makes Right (1948), Tarts and Flowers (1950).