Tall Timber (1928)

Winkler/Disney


Here we have one of the last Disney Oswald cartoons. Also alliterative with its Ts like Trolley Troubles.

Love: The design is much more cute than it was before. It has rounded shapes instead of harsher, flatter forms.



The music is at least just an organ this time. So, while it is irritating in the way silent film music is irritating, it's better than a fake orchestral arrangement. Again, not the fault of the cartoon itself, but the restoration. In terms of restoring soundtracks on cartoons, Disney would be better off following the axiom that simpler is better.


The backgrounds are far lusher than in Trolley Troubles, tho this cartoon is only a year newer.


A V of ducks is cool. Even if they're in lock step identical movement all at the same time.



A lack of gun safety or the safety of the audience is sure to lead to entertainment. That's a barrel pointed straight at the screen in the image below.


Fuzzy moose. Always go for the fuzzy moose. Sure, it doesn't look quite right. But it still looks good.




The boulder take. The boulder has a lot of momentum to it (tho it is very floaty, anchored to a spot on screen that it spins on), and the take is unusually extreme for what I usually think of in Disney cartoons.


Lightning head effects. It wasn't considered gauche to use visual cues in common with, say, a comic strip. Why did everyone seem to stop using this kind of thing after Tex Avery left MGM except in not consciously noticeable FX frames?


The running bear looks good.


Fish eye lens Oswald: not sure if it's love or hate. It's something tho.



Naked mama bear bloomers and bra


Oswald in the bear coat; except the smoking which is ugly.

Hate: While looking exponentially better than Trolley Troubles, this is still ugly much of the time.

It's still incredibly repetitive.

Oswald crushed into 6 little Oswalds is just poorly done. It's like they'd heard the idea, and just floatily executed it. There is much floatiness to the cartoon's action, actually.

The long bear hold. While the little bears keep moving, the big bear just stays and stays and stays like it went to the Stepford Etiquette Academy.



So, TT is much better than, uh, TT was. But if this was reinventing the wheel 80 years ago, the novel nature is lost in standards that became entrenched and enhanced. A reasonably decent and semi-watchable cartoon.

Next time, we will skip to the end of the story, and then eventually wade back into the middle (which is better than the beginning or end, at least in its best moments of its hundreds of cartoons) of Oswald's animated bio.