Be Human

Be Human (1936)

** (out of 4)

Betty Boop is in her home singing when she sees that her neighbors is severely beating his dog. Later she sees him abusing another animal so she calls Grampy to come and take care of it. BE HUMAN isn't a good film but at the same time you can't help but recommend it to adults who enjoy really weird films. I'm really not sure what the filmmakers were going after but it's hard to get any sorts of laughs out of the torture scenes. I use the word torture because the animals are really beaten to a pulp so you have to wonder if the director thought this was going to be funny and you also have to wonder how many kids saw this back in 1936 and were left terrified. Obviously this thing isn't meant to be seen by kids and especially those of today's generation because this thing would probably leave them in tears. As you'd expect from the series, the quality of the animation is quite high and I actually thought the title number was quite good. There's some great imagination at work during the finale of the film but by this time you're still not over what you've already seen.

Betty is singing a song about being human. Suddenly, she hears the cries of a dog. A man with a whip is beating the dog profusely. He then punches a cow and strangles a chicken. Betty's cries do no good, so she calls in Grampy, who works for an animal's rights group. Some of this is pretty brutal and would have been hard for children to watch.

Geeze! If you want a Most Violence Against Animal Award winner,

this is it. Let's see, a cow gets it's face punched in, a dog is tied

down and whipped viciously (and I mean mercilessly so), a

chicken fails to deliver eggs and gets it's neck wrung, and then a

horse suffers the same fate at the dog, another merciless

whipping. Luckily, Betty Boop was right next door, heard the poor

animals cries, and telephoned Grampy's animal rescue center.

Grampy comes racing to the rescue with a very flexible paddy

wagon (they have to be bendable - otherwise it wouldn't be a

Fleischer cartoon). The deviant alpha animal torturer is kidnapped,

thrown onto a treadmill, and, in that timeless eye-for-an-eye spirit,

whipped mercilessly in retribution. He sees what it's like to be

brutalized and tortured, and resolves to change his ways.

I always warn people about this one. It's definatly not for the faint of

heart. While the message, be kind to animals by being human

(hence the title), is indeed admirable and welcome, the leering

and exaggerated way that the violence is treated is questionable to

me. Maybe I'm just reading too much into it, but you never know...

The "be nice to animals" message is presented with some unsettlingly violent images of cartoon animal abuse. It's just a little shocking, which is exactly what the creators intended. It's probably best not to spoil any of the gags; sufficient to say that the mixture of cuteness and brutality is certain to startle present-day cartoon watchers.

The basic problem is if the episode or yourself are too , too old. Because in this ball of cruelty against animals, the punishment against the farmer making a hell the life of his dog, horse and chicken , absolutely bizarre songs, stupefiant scene of eggs as pieces of snooker , all seems too much and too wrong. Including the last scene , with a kiss indecent today, to. But , it is Betty Boop , so provocation to every step.