Wow! Such a good movie.

It's funny watching the elements come together in this complicated scam. On one hand, the set-up isn't quite as complex as it seems, but there's an easy sense of fun in every exchange.

If you're interested in the topic at hand, you should just watch it and judge yourself because the reviews have gone very biased by people that didn't even watch it and just hate (or love) the creator. I liked it, it was well written, narrated, and directed and it was about a topic that interests me.

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

An early sound cartoon from the company responsible for all those Aesop's Fables cartoons, this is animation of the really dated kind. It's the type where the only really recognisable creatures are the elephants who wear clothes. All the other creatures look similar to each other but don't truly resemble real animals. They often kind of bounce where they stand with fixed smiles on their faces.Anyway, this black-and-white cartoon is reasonably amusing but rarely raises a laugh and would probably seem pretty dull if watched again. A squeaky-voiced woman creature is taken on a tour of a cartoon factory by an old doorman and we see how cartoons are drawn. Basically, it's a production line comprising of rows of desks at which creatures each draw one component of a cartoon character before passing the sheet of paper to the drone on their left. They work to music - a frenetic rhythm designed to keep up the work-rate. Watching it, you can't help wondering whether there was some kind of veiled grievance being voiced by the real animators - after all, the van Bueren studios used to turn out one film every week...

Making 'Em Move (1931) ** 1/2 (out of 4) Interesting "documentary/spoof" animated film has a woman taking a tour of a studio when she comes across the animation department. She decides to take a look inside just to see how the films are made. What follows I'm sure has a tad bit of reality behind it but for the most part it's just a spoof of itself as we see one character draw a head while the next draws an arm and so on. There's also a nice section showing how the music is added as well as how the camera eventually picks everything up and takes it to the theater. I'm sure this was meant to be a comedy but it never made me laugh, although this didn't take away too much entertainment.

As a history teacher and lover of films, I occasionally like watching cartoons that have been banned, as they tell us a lot about our society and how far we have come over the years. What was perfectly acceptable decades ago is now, in some cases, seen as gross and inappropriate. Occasionally, these cartoons which have been removed from screening aren't particularly offensive but often, as in the case of this cartoon, they are so god-awful it's hard to imagine that people would have laughed at and enjoyed these films! Thirteen of these cartoons have been packaged together on a DVD entitled "Cartoon Crazys: Banned and Censored" and while the print quality of many of the cartoons is less than stellar, it's a great chance to see how sensibilities have changed.Oddly, I really saw nothing offensive about this cartoon and it was the most perplexing film in the set because of this. Instead, it's a cute look at how cartoons are supposedly made--and fortunately the film never took this very seriously! While this was cute, it wasn't super funny--but compared to the average film of the time, it was. Thankfully, cartoons improved by light-years in the following decade!

"In a Cartoon Studio" is a pastiche on how cartoons (and movies) are made. Some of it is surprisingly accurate. Some is done for laughs, like the assembly-line cartoon production set-up where a given artist is responsible for each character's right foot, as the drawings move past on the conveyor. (Actually that's how "starving artists" original oil paintings are made today.)This film includes a cartoon within a cartoon in which Little Nell is kidnapped by a villain and tossed onto a log at the sawmill. It's a send-up, done for laughs, but it's also an ironic take on the worst movie-making conventions of the day. The dialogue is strictly formulaic. The cliffhanger ending is stretched out endlessly. And the audience (of cartoon animals) just eats it up, like the undiscriminating sheep and cattle they are. Literally. (Well, cows and hippos, to be exact.)Someone must have had a lot of good reasons for such cynicism, to make 1931 sound so much like 1999.