When the Cat's Away

I really love this short! I remember seeing it on TCM's "Cartoon Alley" one Saturday morning. It is about a bunch of mice throwing a party while the cat is out for a nighttime rendezvous with her beau. The party was going well until the music woke up a dreadful 'normous big rat. Then the rodent cad eyes the hero mouse's girlfriend and wants her for himself. Oh dear! Well, that's all I could tell you, folks; you will have to see the film for yourself to see how it ends.

I love the hero's singing of "Little Brown Jug." I thought it was really cute. And I also love how the mice are designed. I enjoy every minute of this cartoon, despite being shocked by the negativity directed at it. Anyway, it's another "Happy Harmonies" favorite.

I am a huge fan of Hollywood films from the 1930s. I simply adore the movies and shorts and can't get enough of them. There is, however, an exception--most cartoons of the 30s were pretty insipid. Sure, there are some notable exceptions (such as SNOW WHITE), but Disney, Warner Brothers and MGM (among others) insisted on cranking out a huge number of terrible musical films that were just awful. Please understand I am NOT knocking Mickey Mouse or Donald--but the musicals referred to as "Silly Symphonies" (Disney), "Merry Melodies" (Warner) or "Happy Harmonies" (MGM). These cutesy films were often pure drivel (except for some of the "Silly Symphoneis") with practically no humor and no edge--just lots of awful singing and characters so treacly sweet that they are just about unwatchable. The edgy Bugs Bunny or Tex Avery cartoons we know and love today were produced in the following decades. You know it was a bad decade for toons when Popeye and Betty Boop were among the BETTER toons of the age!!! Despite these films being so bad, I recently forced myself to watch a trio of Happy Harmonies shorts. Part of this must be because I am a masochist, but part of it is because I love reviewing the more obscure films--as there is a real scarcity of reviews for older and seldom-seen movies and shorts.

The first of the films shown on TCM was WHEN THE CAT'S AWAY. It featured a female house cat leaving home to run around with a cute male cat. And so, when this cat was away, the mice ran amok in the home--eating everything in sight. Oddly, the lead mouse was kind of cute and wore clothes, but the rest of them really looked and acted like vermin. Instead of the usual cute mice, these looked almost like a cartoon version of WILLARD and they were far from endearing or cute. But, despite them being unlikable, they sang and danced and had a great time. However, I am left wondering how those watching the film could have been anything other than bored or horrified by the mice. And then there was the god-awful music...YECCH!! Watch at your own risk--don't say I didn't warn you!

When the Cat's Away (1935)

** (out of 4)

A cat leaves its house to go into an alley with other cats so the mice decide to come out and eat everything in the place before breaking out into a song and dance. This Harman and Ising short was produced by MGM and has the added benefit of being in color but unfortunately there's not too much entertainment to be had. It's clear that mice were a big part of early animation but the story here is rather bland but the biggest problem is that there's just nothing too catchy going on. Yes, the mice go through the house causing trouble but none of it is entertaining. The most entertaining sequence has a full banana going into one of the mice and what happens to him will get a split-second smile but that's not enough to carry a film even one that just lasts 8-minutes. The animation looks decent enough but the story doesn't bring us any memorable characters and even the songs aren't all that impressive.

Harman and Ising had a long and checkered career producing cartoons. They started out with Disney, spent the middle part of their career creating Warner's Merry Melodies and Loony Tunes, then wound up at MGM in charge of their cartoon department until they gradually.... stopped in the mid forties. This is a fairly typical production of theirs from thirties: beautifully drawn, in lavish Technicolor, the full use of the MGM symphony orchestra, and they turned out cartoons with bad gags that would offend no one, adorning puerile adaptations of banal stories "fit for children." It wasn't until the mid-forties, when the pair of them went off to do war work, that Hanna & Barbera invented Tom & Jerry, with their elaborate violence, and Tex Avery showed up to spread mayhem that MGM's cartoon department took off.

If you have a technical interest in the history of cartoons, you might want to see this. Otherwise, give it a miss.

When the Cat's Away, the Mice will Play. That's it. That's all folks. It's an MGM Harman-Ising cartoon. The old style animation has a bit of ugliness to it. It's old and not particularly funny. The rats are a little creepy and the cockroaches are worst. I do also wonder if the rats and cockroaches are meant to represent certain races. One of the songs is a bit nails-on-the-blackboard. This is an old style cartoon and it's fine for what it is.