Terrible acting, screenplay and direction.

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

This film is so real. It treats its characters with so much care and sensitivity.

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...

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!

This is another strange cartoon from the collection of "Aesop's Fables" animated shorts from the very early 1930s. We get a tour of an "animated studio" because some woman is interested to see how these cartoons are made. Once inside, the crazy things start. The place is like a busy office but yet many of the animators are in an assembly line with an a band playing over them on a stage. Once again we see how important music was in this era. In many cartoons, someone is playing an instrument, or singing or dancing. Music has always been in the forefront of entertainment, but it must have been far more popular back then than today.Anyway, later we wind up seeing a movie-within-a-movie as a short, "Little Nell" is shown before an audience. That's entertaining, too. I particularly laughed at the reactions in the audience.There were very few things where I laughed right out loud, yet all of it was entertaining to a degree and certainly had the time era stamped on it. One look at this and you know it's made around 1930 with the crazy story and humor.

Makin' 'em Move takes us inside an animation studio where we see one animator draw a head, the next one draw a foot, and next one a hand, etc. Someone records music on the soundtrack by putting a record needle on the edge of the film while the band plays. Another animator draws various model poses then flips the drawings to see her dance. And a live human camera records these drawings as they are flipped. Then we see the finished product as the audience watches a melodrama with the boy's girl taken by villain to be sawed, only girl escapes by moving to front with legs on log as her arms are tied up! As movie ends, the boy and girl take a bow to applause while the villain, who's been booed and hissed all through gets "thrashed" as the audience attacks the screen which gets destroyed! There are some good gags such as the animal animators getting blown as the musicians are playing real loud but since this is a 30's musical cartoon, nothing hilarious. Worth seeing for an early Van Beuren, however.