Quiet Please!

Quiet Please! (1945)

**** (out of 4)

Oscar winning Tom and Jerry short has an angry bulldog trying to sleep but Tom keeps getting blamed for Jerry waking him up. I think this is one of the best T&J shorts as it contains non-stop action and plenty of laughs including the scene where the dog gets blown up with dynamite.

Warner has released most of the Tom and Jerry shorts onto DVD but there are storms of controversy around the releases. Many of the shorts are edited so do some homework before you buy. Foreign sets are also cut. As of right now the only way to get uncut shorts is if you were lucky enough to record them off TV years ago.

Quiet Please! like a vast majority of Tom and Jerry cartoons, is very energetic and a lot of fun. Perhaps not the very best of their cartoons, but it is great fun besides and works well on repeated viewings.

The animation, while a little more archaic than the animation in other Tom and Jerry cartoons, is still nice and colourful. Besides, I like that old style of animation. The music is quirky and memorable, and the gags come by thick and fast and work very well indeed. Spike's threats to Tom about making any noise and Tom's lullaby are other things to like, and Jerry's drum solo on Spike out cold was a nice touch. When Tom tried to get the dynamite out from under Spike, I was like "Uh oh, this is gonna get messy".

Overall, it is silly but in a hysterical way. It is also a very energetic and fun Tom and Jerry cartoon that I do recommend. 10/10 Bethany Cox

Spike the dog is desperate for some shut-eye, but finds sleeping impossible with Tom and Jerry causing a ruckus around the house. The stressed-out bulldog warns Tom that he'll skin the cat alive if he is woken one more time; Jerry naturally takes this as his cue to try and make as much noise as possible.

'Quiet Please!' won an Oscar for best animated short in 1945, but to be honest, I cannot see why (unless, perhaps, there was not a lot of competition that year). The cartoon is admittedly funny, with the usual plethora of violent gags providing laughs mostly at Tom's expense, but it is pretty standard fare for the cartoon cat and mouse and nothing we haven't seen many times before.

Spike is stressed out and in need of a good sleep. Which is kind of hard to do when Tom is chasing Jerry, blasting at him with a shotgun and trampling over poor Spike. Threatened with silence or death, Tom backs off, but has to deal with Jerry running around deliberately making noise.

This short won an Academy Award back in 1945, but I wouldn't really say that's THAT funny. For a T&J cartoon it's pretty much in the middle. Yes, there are laughs but not Oscar material laughs and it's not too inventive. There is actually some dialogue too, further proving the awful 1992 movie wrong, but no one is credited for providing the voices.

This cartoon won the Oscar and was an excellent choice! Poor Tom! The lullabye he sings to Spike is just hilarious! This is one of the better Tom and Jerry shorts and one of seven that won Oscars. The only chase cartoons that are their equal are the Coyote and Roadrunner. Not the best Tom and Jerry, but right up there. Recommended.