Swing You Sinners!

They don't make them like this anymore. The complete surrealism of early Fleischer cartoons is working on all six cylinders here- everything has a life of its own and the very background pulsates to the jazzy soundtrack.

It starts out simply enough with some pretty basic cartoon gags, but it slowly builds to a completely mind-blowing finish: as if tombstones growing rubbery faces and singing weren't weird enough, once the scene switches to a barn, there's no turning back from this nightmarish world: a bag of grain becomes a pig, a rake becomes a scythe which then grows a mouth and speaks, the animation becomes more and more grotesque and the imagery becomes completely abstract, with random shapes and strange creatures forming from out of nowhere: a scat-singing quasi-frog, a big human face sprouting from a tree-like shape, until the final, macabre image of a skull zooming towards the camera.

It's hard to believe this dark, insane, Daliesque phantasma was a TYPICAL product of the Fleischer studio at this time, and even harder to believe that something like this was produced in an era before marijuana and LSD were commonly used. If you can find this cartoon, watch it- it might scare the hell out of you, but it's an absolutely incredible film!