Excellent adaptation.

Beautiful, moving film.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

Worth seeing just to witness how winsome it is.

Goofy seems to have a lot of these stories where the plot in his cartoons are experimental. In this case, a narrator tells the story of the crazy strategies and play of a football game - with the competing teams composed of Goofy lookalikes.This cartoon is more like a sports game got crazy - not much plot in this one and Goofy hardly speaks, but there are some funny sequences like the oddball coach. It's not an awful cartoon, just a little mediocre.Grade C

After your average Disney short - especially one from the 1940's that centers itself around a "how-to" demonstration of a specific sport - it almost feels as if you need a nap or a reassuring breather. The Disney shorts progress at a briskly-paced rate that almost defies all sense and time and even at their average length - a brief seven to eight minutes - they often race by at such an inconceivably quick rate that one needs to take a look at the time again. Jack Kinney's How to Play Football is no exception to the rules and the content and approach is the same as other "how-to" shorts from the global empire that included golf, baseball, and swimming. The film stars Goofy and gives us a simple yet kinetic look at the sport of football through the use of slapstick and anarchy, pitting together Taxidermy Tech against Anthropology A&M in a rousing and lawless game. The short features the trademark and expected traits of Disney's shorts, being very colorful and involving, but also, just plain entertaining and fun.Directed by: Jack Kinney.

With having found Disney's Goofy short film How To Play Golf to be a sharp and witty short movie,I started to hope that Goofy would match his golfing skills when taking on a game of American football.The plot:Showing a football arena to be jammed packed with fans from above,the moves goes down to earth and heads to the pitch,where the players soon reveal that this game is going to be as far away from a "friendly" as you can get.View on the film:Taking over from original voice artist George Johnson,Pinto Colvig gives Goofy an electric spark,which perfectly matches the excellent frantic animation that touches down on the screen.Unlike the previous Goofy shorts,director Jack Kinney gives every single player in the opposing teams their own distinctive look,and rough-edge personality,which leads to this being a Goofy movie that defiantly hits the whole nine yards.

This short, nominated for an Oscar, is likely the best of the sports cartoons Disney did (most of them centered around the lithe, atheletic and graceful Goofy) and is a classic, although Tex Avery was there ahead of them, with Screwball Football in 1939. Tex more than holds his own, but How To Pay Football is hilarious and yet another in a long line of works with which Disney can be justifiably proud. This airs on the Ink and Paint Club periodically. Recommended.