Flying Fists

No, it's not Flip the Frog in an early Kung Fu cartoon. At this stage, few in America knew about jiu jitsu, let alone the Chinese martial arts. It's a boxing comedy. The IMDb credits it as being produced in two-strip Technicolor; the copy I looked at was black & white. However, the simplicity of the character design supports the color credit.

The cartoon is sustained by the tying of every action to the musical score. This was a technique musical director had perfected in silent days and he carried it into the sound era with Walt Disney. So strong is the association that a score in which every action is echoed by the music is referred to as "Mickey Mousing." Here, though, it works.

Ub Iwerks's Flip the Frog series of cartoons was short-lived, only lasting from 1930 to 1933. On the most part the Flip the Frog cartoons are not great or cartoon/animated masterpieces and it is sort of understandable as to why Flip didn't make it bigger. However they are far from terrible ones either and do hold some interest.

Despite not being historically significant like 'Fiddlesticks' was, both 'Little Orphan Willie' and 'Flying Fists' for me are marginally better cartoons. Again, 'Flying Fists' is not as technically impressive as that cartoon and still don't care for Flip, but it does improve in the pacing, which is much livelier here, and the humour, which there is more of ('Fiddlestricks' was lacking generally in the laughs department) and provides mildly amusing moments. Still consider it on the average side.

Not bad at all by all means. The animation is decent enough, apart from the looping that does betray low budget, with beautifully detailed backgrounds, nice shading and characters that aren't drawn too crudely. The music makes even more of an impact, it is lushly and cleverly orchestrated, full of lively energy and not only adds brilliantly to the action it enhances it.

'Flying Fists' does amuse and charm in places, with a few nicely engineered gags and has a lively pace. Not a dull or completely humourless cartoon. The turtle is lively enough and shows more personality than Flip. The chemistry between them does have a little charm and tension.

However, Flip doesn't really have a very interesting or compelling personality which is a very big problem in general in the series. Willie Whopper who came later was an even more short-lived character and to me while also limited he was a much better character. Generally there could have been more gags and while there are amusing parts others veer on the childish. With Iwerks, there was the danger of having too much sentiment and, while other Flip the Frog fare worse in this regard, 'Flying Fists' is at times too cutesy and the danger and excitement of the sport isn't always there, which makes things feel a bit bland.

Also problematic is the very thinly plotted story, which actually is not much of one at all and is very predictable, taking a fairly familiar premise and doing very little if anything new with it. Structurally, it also feels very cobbled together, like an episodic series of events that's not always cohesive.

Overall, average but watchable. 5/10 Bethany Cox