Studio: Ub Iwerks Studio (ComiColor Cartoons)
Distributor: Celebrity Productions
Produced by: Ub Iwerks
Short Synopsis
A donkey, a dog, a cat and a rooster, each turned out by a master who has no more use for them, meet on the road and decide to go to Bremen and make their living as musicians. They practise as they travel, the donkey on the bass, the dog on the drum, the cat on the fiddle, the rooster crowing the tune, and the noise is dreadful. At nightfall they come on a house in the woods where a band of robbers is feasting. The animals climb on one another's backs at the window, the rooster on top, and burst in with a crash of music and a tangle of hooves, claws and beak; the robbers, convinced that a monster has attacked them, flee into the night. The four musicians eat the feast and settle into the house, and when a robber creeps back to investigate he meets the cat's claws, the dog's teeth, the donkey's hooves and the rooster's crow in the dark and runs for good.
Why It Matters
- The Grimm tale, with its four cast-off animals and its one great joke, the "monster" at the window, suits the Iwerks studio's rubbery animal animation well, and the robbers' terrified account of what attacked them is the film's comic high point; Carl Stalling's score makes the animals' band as bad as the story requires.
- The film is in the public domain in the United States, its copyright never renewed, and it has been widely available in public-domain prints; it is one of the ComiColors most often shown to children for its story, which has been filmed many times since but rarely this early. The Wikipedia entry is a stub.
Notes and Trivia
- The tale is the source of the Soviet musical cartoon The Bremen Town Musicians of 1969.
- Iwerks's studio turned out roughly one ComiColor a month in 1935.
- See also: The Valiant Tailor (1934), Old Mother Hubbard (1935), The Bremen Town Musicians (1969).
