Lulu in Hollywood

Little Lulu was a playful if stoic child who began life as a single-panel print cartoon character before being featured in animated cartoons produced by Paramount/Famous Studios. In "Lulu in Hollywood" (1944), her fourth cartoon short, Lulu is seen getting an offer from Hollywood to star in movies for $10,000 a week. Without a word—and she never says a word in the entire cartoon—she heads off, alone, across the country to Hollywood, accompanied by a suitcase filled with her ever-handy lollipops. A middle-aged Mittel-European-accented director at the studio becomes enchanted with her and puts her through a screen test, directing her to act out a gamut of emotions. Lulu responds each time by unfurling a fan, covering her face, and then closing the fan to reveal the same deadpan expression each time no matter how extreme the emotion called for, to which the director responds each time, "Mah-velous!" She is then cast as a princess in a lavish epic, although we only see two scenes with her, only one of which has other people in it—all attendants waiting on her. At the film's gala premiere, Lulu arrives alone on her ever-reliable scooter, which she then chains to the "No Parking" sign.

Not a heck of a lot happens in the cartoon. And none of it is exactly laugh-worthy. The cartoon misses a serious bet by not having any movie star caricatures. The only actual contemporary Hollywood reference is when Lulu is photographed with her hair covering one of her eyes, in the style of then-popular Paramount star Veronica Lake. The best gag scene is the aforementioned screen test which recalls the famous editing experiment by Soviet filmmaker Kuleshov in which closeups of actor Ivan Mosjoukine were intercut with different objects to show how one expression can be "read" different ways depending on how it's edited.

The most notable aspect of the cartoon is the bold production design on display in a couple of scenes, which I'm assuming is the work of the artist given the unusual credit, "Scenics by Anton Loeb." Both scenes offer insanely long perspectives into the distance in seemingly endless interiors. The first is in a conference room where Lulu meets with the studio executives and has to sign the contract. She's at the far end of a very long table with the contract at the other end. She puts on ice skates and skates speedily down the glassily smooth surface of the table, skidding to a stop at the other end and spilling the ink, before dipping her index and pinky fingers into the ink and signing her name in two quick flourishes. In the second such scene, during the shooting of the movie-within-the-cartoon, a succession of servants travel through a series of impossibly long hallways, chambers and stairways stretching up to the throne to pass along an ornate container holding something valuable to the princess. (You can guess what it is.) It's a visually clever sequence in a cartoon that could have used some cleverness in the writing.