The Headless Horseman

While not one of my favourites, Ub Iwerks was responsible for a lot of interesting work. Especially when working with Walt Disney, his oldest friend and one of his best, and co-creating one of animation's most famous characters in Mickey Mouse. His career since opening his own studio had interest value but the quality was variable, often being successful in the animation and music but wanting in the story and variable in gags, lead characters and tone.

1933 to 1936 saw twenty five cartoons, mostly based on famous fairytales and familiar stories, as part of Iwerks's "ComiColor" series. The "ComiColor" series is very much worth watching and interesting, as is the case with many series some cartoons are better than others but there are no real animation nadirs. 1934's 'The Headless Horseman' is watchable enough it is a little disappointing, comparing this and Disney's version it is a no-brainer which is the better one of the two.

'The Headless Horseman', while faithfully adhering to the basic details of the story, is slight and is too saccharine, like at the beginning, and does take far too long to get going. This affects the pacing which generally needed more kick. There is just not enough content to the poem to fill the cartoon's length and the middle especially is where one feels the over-stretching.

Its characters should have been much more interesting, their personalities are bland excepting the titular character. The wit and imagination has been more frequent and stronger in other cartoons in the series before and since, apart from with The Headless Horseman there was not an awful lot to it. The character design for Ichabod is pretty poor, going overboard with the ugliness.

However, 'The Headless Horseman' in no way disgraces the story and has enough interest to stop it from being completely dull. There are a few amusing moments that aren't too corny and never repetitive (like the Clark Gable caricature), and there is a genuine likeability and charm. The Headless Horseman is suitably creepy, without being traumatising, and the part with him is where the cartoon is the most interesting.

Furthermore, the animation is great generally, apart from the character design for Ichabod. Meticulously detailed, fluid in drawing, vibrant in colour and often rich in imagination and visual wit. The music is cleverly and lushly orchestrated, is infectiously catchy and adds a lot to the cartoon, along with the titular character it is by far the best asset.

Overall, another example of a worth a look once but not repeat viewings cartoon. 5/10 Bethany Cox

While Iwerks was a technical genius in many respects, his strong suit was not plotting or scripting and it seems as though he couldn't care less about any aspect that wasn't visual. Thus, the series of shorts based on tall tales, fables and legends provided ready-made stories that worked to varying degrees. Here, in the short, "The Headless Horseman", except for the score and some sound effects and laughter, this is a visual cartoon-there is little to no dialog here. There are some suitably creepy visual effects at times, but the cartoon is average at best. Cannot even compare to the later adaptation done by Disney of the same Washington Irving story. Has its moments, but doesn't hold up too well. Worth watching, but Iwerks did better and the Cinecolor process was occasionally jarring. Recommended for Iwerks fans.

Headless Horseman, The (1934)

** 1/2 (out of 4)

Animated version of the classic story has a group of people meeting up at a party where the legend of Sleepy Hollow is told. Soon, a headless horseman is running loose but is he the real one or a fake? This is a pretty unique little film as it's pretty much told silent with the exception of a few sound effects. The animation itself is pretty vividly done and best of all are the night scenes with the horseman, which looks really good. The biggest problem is that the story itself takes quite a while to warm up and take off. The actual story doesn't take place until nearly the five-minute mark and the final gag doesn't work too well.

Ub Iwerks (his name was Dutch) was an early colleague of Walt Disney's, a prolific animator who was almost single-handedly responsible for such classic works as Steamboat Willie and The Skeleton Dance. But after Iwerks had a falling-out with the boss he struck out on his own, and established a studio under his own name in 1930. There, for the next few years, he and his crew produced dozens of cartoons. The best of them are pretty good, and even the weaker entries always offer a nice moment or two, but Iwerks never recaptured the spark of inspiration that fired his earlier work with Disney, and his studio finally went under in 1936. A chastened Iwerks returned to the Disney factory as a technician and worked there for the rest of his career.

The Headless Horseman was one of a series of "ComiColor" cartoons Iwerks produced, usually based on fairy or folk tales, not unlike Disney's concurrent Silly Symphonies. It's a decent cartoon with both good and bad elements, and serves as an exemplar of the strengths and weaknesses of the overall Iwerks output. On the plus side, the musical score by Carl Stalling (who left Disney's employ alongside Iwerks) is outstanding, extremely catchy and atmospheric, and really carries the viewer along. The color is nice, too, at least in the print I've seen; the Cinecolor process Iwerks was using was cheap, and not as dazzling as Disney's product at the time, but the blues and reds look strong here, and the backgrounds, such as sinister-looking trees against night skies, are especially atmospheric. Iwerks was also experimenting with an early version of the multi-plane camera in this cartoon, a device which would later be used to great effect at the Disney studio in The Old Mill, Pinocchio, etc. The gliding camera movement seen here during the climatic chase is the technical high point. This cartoon has no dialog but there are some amusing visual gags, and for classic era Hollywood buffs there's a cute moment when Katrina imagines her beau Brom Bones as Clark Gable, who is amusingly caricatured.

On the debit side, however, character design in The Headless Horseman is poor. Ichabod Crane is supposed to be ugly, at least he was described as homely in the original Washington Irving story, but everyone else in this cartoon is goofy-looking too, and we start to wonder if that was intentional. More significantly, not one of these characters is the least bit sympathetic, which is important even in a small-scale enterprise such as this one. The viewer has to care what happens to at least one character, or else why watch? We root for Bugs Bunny, we dig Betty Boop, and we might even root for Donald Duck if he isn't being too obnoxious, but there is no one in The Headless Horseman we can even like, much less root for, and this was too often the case in the Iwerks cartoons. Another debit: clownish racial caricatures of black servants, although Iwerks certainly wasn't the only offender in this area at the time.

All in all, sort of a C-plus/B-minus experience, and although Iwerks made better cartoons than this one it's an indication of why he didn't succeed as an independent producer. But Carl Stalling's work is terrific, and he went on to do great things with the Termite Terrace gang at Warner Brothers. And eventually, a very good Headless Horseman cartoon was produced in 1949 -- by Disney, of course!

Who gets the girl: Icabod Crane or Bom Bones? They both are after Katrina Von Tassel in this famous tale, brought to cartoon life in this UB Iwerks production. This story had been done once in animation, back in 1922. This one offers up the story in color.

As with a lot of these Celebrity Productions, made in "Cinecolor," the story takes precedence over the humor. At least, that's the way it appears today. Maybe people laughed a lot more 70 years ago at this kind of cartoon but I don't think it would happen today. Now, it's more of a curiosity piece and a quick, condensed (eight minutes, usually) version of a famous tale with new twists added sometimes.

Not having read the novel, I can't tell you what's bogus in this cartoon story, only that it offers very little. The only clever animated scene was the grandfather clock going to sleep. The ending was a bit of a surprise and I did smile at the very last scene. Overall, however, this not recommended.