Talkartoon

This is the first appearance of Bimbo (as yet unnamed) the dog. Also the first Fleischer cartoon to feature grey tones, previous toons having been all black and white — not sure why grey should have seemed harder or more expensive, but I guess the Out of the Inkwell films had a built-in rationale for keeping things either paper-white or ink-black.

Bimbo’s flivver is an obscenely bio-mechanical affair — Cronenberg would flip over it. The original soft machine.

Our young hero’s first adventure sees him kerb-crawling, the little shit. Which gets him in bad with a mounted policeman whose talking horse is the one in charge. Hey, it’s the thirties, barely, and abducting and molesting girls in one’s roadster is very much a sympathetic trait. Aspirational, even.

Still, the Fleischer’s admit some downside to the operation, as Bimbo is arrested, prodded in the rear with a night stick (so named because it gets shoved where the sun don’t shine) and forced to perform a blues number in court. The seeds of crime bear bitter fruit indeed.

But once that’s over with, Bimbo converts his banjo into a unicycle (they’re the same sort of shape so this would totally work) and makes his getaway, vanishing over a briskly-sketched horizon, where, safely out of view, he can be redesigned and rewritten as a more appealing and child-friendly pooch.

Dish Grace

Early Bimbo and Betty! She’s still a literal dog at this point, before her spaniel ears retracted and transmuted into earrings, leading to the uncomfortable spectacle of a human cartoon dating a canine one. Bimbo is a lanky figure, before he turned into a more conventional squat one, like Mickey, Bosco et al.

Lots of good creep factor in this one: in the recurring shot of applauding night club patrons, the characters have stationary, detailed painted heads, with only their clapping hands and arms animated. The switch in media reminds me of the macro inserts in Ren and Stimpy, which were also disturbing for the way they violated the format.

Bimbo gets on stage and dances with a plucked and headless duck, which then lays an egg which hatches so that a similarly unfeathered zombie duckling, conveniently pre-decapitated in the egg, can join the routine, anticipating the Bros Quay’s work in Peter Gabriel’s Sledgehammer vid by a half-century.

Quite a nice gag where a literal big gorilla customer, frustrated by the poor service, breaks a leg from his table and skins it, to reveal a juicy table bone, which he swallows in two pieces.

Betty appears only briefly, and is a weird creature. When she boops (likewise doops) her mouth extends into a bovine OO form.

There’s a chase that feels like slow motion, indicating that the principles of cartoon movement are still not quite settled at this point (only 1930, after all), and then Bimbo chops lots of meat up until it turns into a small locomotive (?), rips the gorilla’s pants off, and drives off through the nearest wall, thereby, one presumes, terminating his position at this establishment.

Yokai for Sound

Too much enjoying the disintegration of Boris Johnson and his wretched chums to do much today, but this crazy thing is almost as delightful. Creepy in all the wrong ways — not cosy spook comedy but genuinely unnerving, hallucinatory, effed-up, at times racist, always a peephole into a vanished and unknowable era.