Strictly average movie

A Brilliant Conflict

Just intense enough to provide a much-needed diversion, just lightweight enough to make you forget about it soon after it’s over. It’s not exactly “good,” per se, but it does what it sets out to do in terms of putting us on edge, which makes it … successful?

This movie feels like it was made purely to piss off people who want good shows

This is a cartoon in the Aesop's Fables series produced by the Terrytoons studio. There will be spoilers ahead: Since the inception of Terrytoons, there was a series of shorts done, first in the silent days and then with the advent of sound. The series was called "Aesop's Fables" and included a moral at the end. Something short and often funny.This is a short in that series. There's a short done by Terrytoons in 1939 entitled The Watchdog. The two are a bit different. This one concerns a watchdog named Hector. He's an excellent watchdog, but one day he sees a hunting party, complete with hunting dogs and decides he wants the life of a hunting dog.He leaves the estate and goes to train as a hunting dog. He excels in class, but a real hunt is something else altogether. A large quantity of rabbits whose sole intent is to abuse Hector and drive him to drink. They trick him, tease him, set off firecrackers and laugh at him. Nothing he does is successful. After a particularly painful encounter, Hector decides being a watchdog wasn't that bad a life and goes back to the estate. The presentation of the moral is cute, so I won't spoil it here.This cartoon is worth watching.

Hector is a watchdog. However, he wants to be a hunting dog. He trains and on the first day of hunting season, he goes after some rabbits -- a clear mistake for anyone who has ever watched a Bugs Bunny cartoon -- in this good Terrytoon version of those rascally rabbits.Using Bugs Bunny cartoons as a standard, the tendencies of Paul Terry's cartoons stand in stark relief. The rabbits are smaller, cuter, more numerous and undifferentiated. That is because the folks over at Warner Brothers' cartoon department were doing cartoons to make themselves laugh and to annoy their boss, Eddie Selzer. Selzer had been assigned by his bosses. Terry had started out directing his own cartoons and had built his own studio. His watchwords were competence and budget. If the competence was at a very high standard in this period and the budgets lush before post-war inflation and crumbling of movie audiences killed the market, still, Terry saw his audience as small children who would delight to see themselves on the winning side -- the small rabbits.None of which affects the fact that this is a very good cartoon, which uses appropriate variations of the usual comic tropes; for example, while Bigs Bunny might pull out a stick of dynamite to give to the dog, Terry's rabbits have strings of firecrackers. Same gag, really, just aimed for the audience.