Even then, Koko can’t maintain a single shape, his legs becoming even longer and then telescoping again as he dances around to Cab Calloway’s “Saint James Infirmary.” When sings about a twenty-dollar gold piece on a watch chain, his head flattens into the gold piece and his limbs twist into the chain, and later he pops off his head and turns it into a bottle of “boo-oo-oo-oo-oooze.” And then there's the just plain inexplicable - when the Queen freezes Betty and Koko into pedestaled statues, somehow Bimbo ends up stuck as some kind of indescribable skull thing with daisies for ears. She repeats that last trick for Betty’s friend Koko the Clown, turning him into a long-legged ghost. She uses her mirror as a shovel and a magic carpet and somehow passes it straight through her body to turn into the hag, all in the space of five seconds. The Queen turns into a dragon decades before Disney would do the same for their own villainess in Sleeping Beauty, and Betty’s pal Bimbo defeats her by yanking on her tongue until she turns inside-out.

The entrance to the Mystery Cave flips over into a giant skull. And in the best dream-logic tradition, the forms of things themselves can’t stay fixed.

The characters never take a moment to stand still, and there’s dozens of them playing out their own little stories behind and below and around the leads. We’re so used to limited animation now it can be hard to comprehend the full sensory overload of the Fleischers’ limitless animation. Writing for a pre-home video audience in his essential history Of Mice and Magic, Maltin spends three pages describing the short’s events in great detail, but throws up his hands at trying to convey the full experience and says you need to watch it yourself, multiple times, since “ Snow White is so full of bizarre images and crazy ideas that it’s difficult to absorb it all in one or two viewings.” Disney would later pride itself on its attention to detail, but at this point in their respective careers, the Fleischers make them look like pikers. What separates Snow White is the quality and quantity of the images. I tried to watch some of Walt Disney’s pre-studio mogul Alice in Cartoonland shorts years ago and concluded they could have been dada, but they don’t even make enough sense for that. In fact, you could say the idea of connections between images was a relatively recent innovation in the cartoon world. Maltin surely knew that Snow White was far from unique in its disconnected imagery.

And it’s hard to say it follow the Brothers Grimm’s plot when “plot” barely describes the cartoon’s non-narrative weirdness.įleischer’s flagship star Betty Boop (at least until a certain sailor man debuted a few months later, but we’ll get to that) appears as Snow White, and bits and bobs of the fairy tale are scattered at random throughout the cartoon - Betty’s “stepmama” turns herself into a hag for no real reason, and Betty ends up in a glass coffin of sorts when she slides into a frozen river and bobs back up in an ice block.īut the story, such as it is, isn’t the point anyway. It’s also an even looser adaptation than Disney mounted - the Seven Dwarfs (in their helpfully labeled house) are barely more than cameos, for one thing. Four years before Disney’s more famous version, it’s a far better approximation of the skewed logic of fairy tales, and even dreams. The Fleischer Brothers were master frighteners, even if their reputation as Disney’s cooler cousin is based more on underdog bias than the actual quality of the shorts.īut it’s easy to see where that impression came from when you look at their masterpiece, Snow White. Series like Over the Garden Wall and video games like Cuphead and Epic Mickey have appropriated the style of the era while adding a heavy dose of the creeps, when they’re not diving headfirst into horror like Bendy and the Ink Machine.Īnd no wonder - the best of these cartoons create a nightmare atmosphere well beyond all but the best live-action horrors of the era. Even Mickey Mouse has reverted to his ‘30s design for the first time in 80 years. But Fleischer’s Snow White, made four years later, achieves some of those same goals (though unstated and likely unintended) and no one ever took notice of it until recent years.Īgainst all rules of linear time, the black-and-white cartoons of the ‘30s have replaced the color slapstick cartoons of the ‘40s and ‘50s as the face of “classic animation” in the public imagination. Snow White is a mind-boggling film…When Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel created Un Chien Andalou in 1929, their stated intention was to produce a surreal, completely nonlinear film in which one image had no logical link to the next. Originally published on The Solute as part of Year of the Month

Cartoon black betty boop