It's a Bird

Charley Bowers is mostly forgotten today, although his early shorts at the time were as inventive as what Walt Disney was doing. His material is largely out of copyright, and the only stuff I can find of his on DVD is in Europe, although he is an entirely American cartoonist, pioneer in stop motion, and a slapstick comedian.

This short has Charley traveling to Africa to find the metal eating bird known as a fliver. For some reason it is found under rocks and comes above ground to eat. He finds the bird, which is consuming all kinds of metal non-stop, but he needs help to get it in a cage. He finds a worm under a rock who agrees to help him trap the bird. For some reason the worm wants nothing in return for helping out, and seems to enjoy the rough and tumble with the fliver. The bird doesn't seem to hold it against Charley that he has captured it, and even lays an egg for him that hatches into an automobile.

The plot is cute, the jokes hold up, and the inventiveness of the entire thing is unforgettable, yet Bowers himself is largely forgotten and much of his material is lost or is on public domain DVDs or on youtube. Bowers developed very bad arthritis which stopped his career in the mid 1930s, and then he died relatively young in 1946 at the age of 57, never really getting a chance to gain a foothold in animation after the transition to sound.

The story may leave a lot to be desired, but excellent animation for the time. Sad he never got the acclaim he deserved! Well worth a watch for animation aficionados!

By the time he made this strange 10-minute short Charley Bowers had been a comic strip cartoonist, a pioneer animator, and a star performer in his own series of silent comedies. For his talkie debut Bowers drew upon all of these talents and concocted It's a Bird, a genuinely bizarre, unique curio.

The film begins at a radio station. Bowers is introduced to listeners as "Charley Chucklehead of Chattanooga" by journalist Lowell Thomas, of all people, looking very much as he would decades later as host of the 'Lowell Thomas Remembers' documentary TV series. For viewers who remember that show his presence here kicks things off on a surprising note, rather like Walter Cronkite popping up in a Marx Brothers movie. In any case, Charley is introduced as a man with a tall tale to relate, and as he talks his story a illustrated in flashbacks. The style is very much like Bowers' silent comedies of the '20s, consisting of gags set at the junk yard where he works. Bowers himself resembles a cross between Stan Laurel and Buster Keaton in his baggy overalls and derby. His wizened face appears heavily powdered with clown white makeup, and his delivery of dialog is noticeably awkward.

Things get decidedly more interesting when, abruptly, Charley goes on a quest for a rare metal-eating bird. He meets with a Professor Ditterhoffer of the Natural History Museum who illustrates his points with several cartoon-y illustrations (undoubtedly drawn by Bowers himself) which bear a striking resemblance to the work of Dr. Seuss. And then Charley is off to the Belgian Congo, accompanied by a German Oompah band, where he locates the goofy-looking bird and manages to capture him with the help of a talking worm who inexplicably sounds like a Brooklyn thug.

The bird and the worm are impressively animated puppets. In the mid- to late '20s puppet animation was a major element of Bowers' comedies, and even today these sequences are dazzling to see. The puppet scenes in It's a Bird are weird and delightful, and feature a number of characteristically off-the-wall motifs familiar from Bowers' earlier films, such as animals eating scrap metal and then laying eggs which produce "baby" machines.

It would be nice to say that It's a Bird marked the first of a new series of Charley Bowers novelty shorts. Unfortunately, however, his eccentric style was not properly appreciated by his contemporaries, and he worked only sporadically after this. Still, for connoisseurs of vintage animation, surreal sight gags, and Le Cinema Bizarre, Charley Bowers' films are essential, and this one is a prime example of what he did best.

This wonderfully weird short comedy features some of Charley Bowers's strangest conceptions, plus many other amusing gags and an interesting combination of material that also includes Lowell Thomas. "It's A Bird" is as surreal as anything that Bowers did, and it is also very good entertainment.

While part of the story is to some degree a device to set up the appearance and the activities of the bizarre "metal eating bird", the whole thing works well. It starts with Charley having a chat on the radio with Lowell Thomas, and then it moves into a Chaplin-style sequence of a resourceful Charley working in a junkyard. This whole stretch is very good, and the sequence with the policeman on the park bench is particularly funny - and all this is just for openers.

When Charley hears about the bird, he first constructs a Keatonesque kind of contraption for his expedition, and then he confronts his quarry. The last part reprises and elaborates upon some of the best gags from Charley's silent features "Egged On" and "Say Ah-h!". It's the kind of imaginative sequence that can be watched numerous times without getting bored with it.

How fortunate it is that a few more of these Charley Bowers features can now be seen. This surreal comedy is particularly enjoyable.

From what one can piece together on IMDB, the real talent behind this film is star Charley Bowers, who wrote and directed many early films using stop motion animation, very early on in the life of the movies. From the summary, you only get a slice of "It's A Bird" on the Johnny Legend Weird Cartoon tapes (the longer slice being on Vol II).

What is here, however, is strange and facinating, and suggests Bowers is a real forgotten man in the history of movie fantasy. See whatever version you can.