Stylish but barely mediocre overall

Purely Joyful Movie!

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.

This is a 1944 (during World war II) animated 12-minute short film by Hans Fischer from Kösen. Fischerkoesen is actually one of the most known animation movie makers in German film history. However, I was fairly underwhelmed by his effort here. For the entire, film, we follow a snowman, first half in winter, second half in summer. And right when I got used to the fact that this snowman does not melt when it gets warm, he did melt at the end and a family of rabbits enjoyed his cylinder and nose. He keeps playing harmless pranks on animals, such as chicken, cows and even ladybirds. What stays most memorable, however, to me is how much this film resembled American cartoons from that time. If you know a bit about (German) animation from over 70 years ago, you know that it was usually fairly easy to see that this was not an American production, because the style was entirely different. Not so Fischerkoesen's work here. Especially the cows looked as if they were taken right out of a Mickey Mouse cartoon. Finally, as you may have read between the lines already I was not impressed by this work at all. Not recommended. It's just not very funny.

Just watched on YouTube as linked from Saturday Morning Blog this German cartoon known in the U.S. as The Snowman or Snowman in July. Whitey Snowman comes to life one winter day and enjoys running in the snow and ice skating. When he falls in the ice river, he comes back much thinner but gains all his weight by rolling in the snow. He also loses his head at one point but gets it back quickly. Then at home, he looks at a calendar and wishes it was July. So he hibernates in a fridge (guess the idea of suffocating in there doesn't pertain to snowmen) and waits for the coming spring...This was a very touching and amusing cartoon that I had read about but didn't get to see until now. I liked seeing that dog snatch Whitey's butt in the beginning before he threw back a snow that reattached said butt and when that bug in the spring segment skied on the snowman. The version I saw had an English-speaking narrator that made the short quite entertaining from beginning to end. So on that note, I highly recommend Der Schneemann which was directed by one Hans Fischerkoesen. P.S. There seemed to be some of that 3-D like tabletop background one usually associates with Max Fleischer. Additional P.S.-I just watched the original German version that had different music and had the snowman singing in that language at the end. Still excellent.

As the others have said, we here in western NC got to see this film often on the old Mister Bill Show on local station WLOS. It was part of a series of old Euro cartoons that were distributed to local TV stations with an English soundtrack.It is a lovely film. The animation flows seamlessly. I grew up remembering this film fondly.I have never seen this film anywhere else. The copy that WLOS showed on Thanksgiving Day is a video copy of the original film that ran on WLOS from 1958 to 1966. It shows its age, and lack of proper storage in the video transfer. Western NC folks were lucky to see this gem from our past. Hope to see it again one day.

"Der Schneemann" was a work of Hans Fischerkösen for the NSDAP Regime, especially for Goebbel. Hitler was very deceived, Germans were not able to create a pendant to the very successful Mickey Mouse. So he asked Goebbels to set up a counterpart to Disney. One of the first, and few apolitic comic films of this period, "Der Schneemann" is a wonderful story of a snow-man who wants to see one time in his life the wonderful colors of spring, knowing well that the sun will melt him. A wonderful film, although now 60 years old, still very funny.