Suddenly It's Spring

While not a personal favourite by all means, Suddenly It's Spring is a beautiful cartoon in many ways and has a lot of emotional impact.

The animation in Suddenly It's Spring looks wonderful, and it's clear a lot of care and hard work went into it. It's beautifully and smoothly drawn, the backgrounds are both picturesque and imaginative with a hint of surrealism and the colours give off a very colourful and luscious atmosphere. Also top-notch is the music score, whimsical, haunting, lively and rich in orchestration, it's typically outstanding music from Winston Sharples(whose music was nearly always one of the highlights of the cartoons they featured in, even in cartoons that don't fare as good).

Suddenly It's Spring has a couple of humorous moments, but as has been said it was not intended to be funny and any more humour or any other type of humour would have been too out of place. If anything, it's one of those cartoons that really tugs at the heart-strings without feeling manipulative, Suddenly It's Spring has a lot of heart and sentiment but in a way that's truly moving and never cloying. A good deal of the 'Color Classics' cartoons also succeeded in having a spirit that's surreal and quite unique, and some of Suddenly It's Spring comes very close to that.

The characters are likable and engaging, especially the title character, and are all solidly voiced. For me, the only thing that mars it is the crude and somewhat unnecessary inclusion of a character, in the form of a lazy cloud, that's rather racially stereotypical, which is not going to bode well with some. Sure, Suddenly It's Spring is hardly the only cartoon of that time to include racial stereotypes and other cartoons(i.e. Scrub Me Mama with a Boogie Beat) did it much worse, but with the nature of the story the character did stick out like a sore thumb in not a good way.

Overall, aside from that one character Suddenly It's Spring is a beautiful and moving cartoon. 9/10 Bethany Cox