Pale-Face (1933) User Reviews

Flip the lumberjack

[TheLittleSongbird · 6/10 · 7 June 2018]

Ub Iwerks's Flip the Frog series of cartoons was short-lived, only lasting from 1930 to 1933. On the most part the Flip the Frog cartoons are not great or cartoon/animated masterpieces and it is sort of understandable as to why Flip didn't make it bigger. However they are far from terrible ones either and do hold some interest.

Despite not being historically significant like 'Fiddlesticks' (a lesser cartoon in the series) was, 'Pale-Face' for me is an above average Flip the Frog cartoon if not one of the best of the series, far from one of the worst either. It is not a great cartoon, more a decent middling one, and has faults but there are things here that improve quite a bit and done much better than many other Flip the Frog cartoons.

A lot of good things in 'Pale-Face'. The animation is good, with beautifully detailed backgrounds, nice shading and characters that aren't drawn too crudely. The music makes even more of an impact, it is lushly and cleverly orchestrated, full of lively energy and not only adds brilliantly to the action it enhances it.

There are some nice sight gags, and they are amusing, if not sticking in the head long after. There is a nice natural charm and a zesty pace. Liked the lively and cute support. The cartoon is sweet and easy to like.

However, 'Pale-Face' has faults. Flip is still not a particularly compelling character personality-wise, a general fault with his cartoons. The story is very thin, there are signs of one at the start but it is completely neglected for the rest of the cartoon.

There could have been a little less sentimentality and more gags.

Overall, decent. 6/10 Bethany Cox

Not Everyone Is Cut Out to Be A Boss

[boblipton · 6/10 · 22 September 2010]

This is an amusing cartoon, as Flip plays a lumberjack who has to fight off an Indian attack. For 1933, it is pretty primitive, both because of its 'rubber tube' animation and its 'music-synchronized gags'. Everything works. With Carl Stalling doing your music and Seamus Culhane one of your animators, you could make anything work and work well with well-executed but fairly random gags.

But the feeling I take away from this cartoon is that Iwerks was content to let his artists fall into a rut. Disney, Fleischer and Lantz were producers who pushed their artists. Schlesinger and Quimby were businessmen who ignored them and let them do pretty much what they wanted -- which was to amuse themselves and each other by making funny cartoons. But Iwerks -- well, he walked from Disney because he wasn't getting enough credit. Now he had the credit, but was he cut out to be boss of a cartoon studio? This picture suggests he was not. It is, as I said, a good cartoon, but stylistically it was three years behind the time and all the advances Iwerks made between this one and the collapse of his studio seem to be playing catch up.

Eventually Pat Powers would pull financing and after another half a decade of trying to reestablish his own independence, Iwerks would go back to Disney and work on technical issues of multiplaning. I suspect he was happier doing that than trying to get Stalling and Culhane to adjust the music or the motion on every scene.