Noah's Lark

The Fleischer brothers had been turning out sound cartoons since 1924 with their 'screen song' series, but it was only in 1929 that they started to do full sound cartoons, most famously with 'Finding His Voice' but also with this piece. Here, we see an ark full of many different sorts of animal; spotting Coney Island, the captain announces shore leave and they all head out for some fun. There are a lot of gags, very advanced for the era, as was typical for Fleischer in this period, and some of them are very adult.

Interestingly enough, I see many signs of the sort of cartooning that Ted Geisel would do under his pen name of Dr. Seuss. The captain looks like a Seuss character and two sequences are very much in his style: the sequence where the animals head ashore to the opening bars of "The Stars and Stripes Forever" and the sequence with the kootch dancer and the snakes.

Although there is no sign that Geisel was associated with this film, he was already working as a cartoonist in this period. Perhaps some biographer will turn up a connection....

This was the first of the Max Fleischer Talkartoons. In this one, Noah has his ark stop at Luna Park on Coney Island for his animals to take on the rides and other fun. Many gags abound in musical sequence throughout. I can't really remember them all but I found many of them quite amusing and pretty funny. The print on YouTube I watched was not in the best condition but it looked as good as it probably could have been since it's almost 80 years old now. I just remembered while the ship was still at sea a monkey played on the giraffe's neck like a xylophone so that's one gag I remembered. Like I said, this was a pretty entertaining cartoon from the Fleischer Studios. So on that note, I recommend Noah's Lark.

Fleischer Studios was one of the purveyors of cartoons in animation's relative infancy. Its most famous products were Betty Boop and Popeye. A lesser known series from the studio was Talkartoons. The first entry was the unimpressive "Noah's Lark", depicting the ark landing on Coney Island, where the animals decide to party. It's kind of fun, but nothing spectacular. There's a reason why Warner Bros cartoons are more famous, and even those took a few years to get clever.

Basically, this is something to watch as a historical reference. The flat animation and awkward sound synchronization make it less enjoyable than the Bugs Bunny cartoons.

This is another example of little pieces made into a single event. The only thing these pieces have in common is that they involve primitively drawn animals, doing various things with or to one another. It is fast and joyful and frantic. Apparently, one of the very first Fleicher animations.

Around the time when sound was brand new to film & animation, a lot of studios were beginning to experiment with the technique through post synchronization (only a handful of studios used pre-recorded tracks). Around the same time, Max Fleischer's studio had just started their own series called Talkartoons, which were mainly used to experiment with musical timing to already animated cartoons. The first one created, Noah's Lark, came out in 1929, one year after Disney's Steamboat Willie. After over 90 years of existence, the cartoon remains more of a time capsule than one of the studio's crowning achievements.

As the cartoon is essentially a modernesque comedic retelling of Noah's Ark, the short does have many of the Fleischer's trademarks. Many of the gags are quite surreal and even animalistic, hence the supporting cast of anthropomorphic animals, and the musical timing is quite on point with the comical action. Unfortunately, due to the imperfections in sound at the time, the occasional dialogue tracks are difficult to comprehend and even some of the voice acting isn't very indistinguishable from one another (when you've one character in the short, you've almost heard all of them). Also, the cartoon has one of the most basic premises ever, with the animals landing on Coney Island and just having fun on the rides, with very little conflict until the very end. As a result, despite the entertainment value, it's obvious that the Fleischers crew were more focused on embracing the novelty of sound and musical timing back then as opposed to telling a cohesive story. It's not very often when gags work as substance in any form of media, and this one is not an exception at all.

However, for Fleischer and retro animation enthusiasts, this short is still worth at least one viewing for historical pleasure. Considering how much the Fleischers loved to push the envelope through content in addition to animation technologies, there's quite a lot of innuendoes and double entendres afloat in the short alright. In addition to some rather risque character designs here and there, the humor relies a lot on witty shenanigans, so you do get some occasional grunts from Noah himself from time to time. Also, once the ending of the cartoon arrives, it ends in possibly the funniest way it ever could, so in this case, humor did save the day after all. Also, given the success of this cartoon at the time, there were many more Talkartoons yet to come, and the series would introduce characters like Betty Boop & Bimbo, so in many ways, cartoon buffs do owe at least some gratitude to this cartoon, as flawed as it may be. It also helps that you could see it as somewhat of a precursor to the studio's popular sailor character who would do wonders later on.

Is it more of a product of its time given the limitations? Sure, but it's still fascinating regardless. Despite its lack of a consistent storyline and having more of an emphasis on the gags and musical timing, Noah's Lark stands as a precursor to the wild and crazy shorts that the Fleischer studio would produce within the following years. Even if we're just getting started on something like a film with sound, we all do our best with what we know, and the crew would only improve from here on out. So if you've yet to check this out, by all means give 'er a go. The Fleischers would make better stuff later on, but it sure is a good starting point.