Studio: Laugh-O-Gram Films, Kansas City
Short Synopsis
A cat, a dog, a donkey and a rooster, a four-piece band so bad that they are chased out of every town with vegetables, wander into the countryside. They try fishing with the cat's music as bait, which brings up a swordfish that chases them across the landscape and into a house full of robbers. The robbers flee, the musicians settle in, and the bandits return with a cannon. The second half of the film is a pitched battle between the animals and the robbers in which the cannon's shells chase the cat around the room, a cannonball comes to life, and the musicians end up on the roof, from which the house, and the film, come to a slapstick finish. Little of the Grimm tale remains except the premise; the rest is chase.
Why It Matters
- This is the twenty-year-old Walt Disney's second fairy tale, and his Kansas City staff, Harman, Ising and Iwerks, are already visible in the fluid, rubbery movement and the way the chase builds: the swordfish gag and the living cannonball are the kind of transformation jokes that would run through Disney's silent work. For a tiny Midwestern company the animation is remarkably confident.
- The Laugh-O-Gram fairy tales were Disney's first independent productions, made before the move to Hollywood and the Alice Comedies; the company went bankrupt in 1923, but the staff and the style went west with him. The seven surviving Laugh-O-Grams are the earliest look at the studio that would make Snow White fifteen years later.
Notes and Trivia
- The Laugh-O-Grams were sold to Pictorial Clubs of Tennessee, which went bankrupt and paid Disney only a down payment.
- Hugh Harman and Rudolf Ising later founded the Warner Bros. and MGM cartoon studios.
- See also: Goldie Locks and the Three Bears (1922), Alice's Spooky Adventure (1924).