Mother Goose Melodies

1931
6.2| 0h8m| NR| en
Details

A book of nursery rhymes plays for Old King Cole.

Director

Producted By

Walt Disney Productions

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Reviews

Colibel Terrible acting, screenplay and direction.
Steineded How sad is this?
TaryBiggBall It was OK. I don't see why everyone loves it so much. It wasn't very smart or deep or well-directed.
Voxitype Good films always raise compelling questions, whether the format is fiction or documentary fact.
Robert Reynolds This short is part of the Silly Symphonies series produced by Disney. There will be spoilers ahead:The animation here is very good throughout and the short starts off well, with the entrance of Old King Cole and his retinue. His "fiddlers three" are the Three Blind Mice (this blending of fairy tale characters from different tales continues later in the short) and Clarabelle Cow makes a cameo appearance.The cartoon becomes a bit disjointed once Mother Goose enters the short and her large book of fairy tales opens. There doesn't appear to be much rhyme or reason to the tales selected or the combinations and the character designs are sometimes odd. Jack and Jill seem to meet Simple Simon, but other than the name, nothing really happens which seems to relate to Simple Simon. The pairing of Little Bo Peep and Little Boy Blue works better There are some nice bits here, but it's a bit more chaotic than it probably should be. It's still worth watching.This short is available on the Disney Treasures Silly Symphonies DVD set and it and the set are well worth finding.
MissSimonetta Not a terrible short by any means and certainly as another reviewer put it "no classic", but I wouldn't call this an awful "relic". It's just uninspired. The animation, the concept, and the gags are all weak. In fact, many of the visuals and jokes are reused from earlier Silly Symphonies without any upping of the ante or reworking.It was not uncommon for Disney to reuse material from past work, as many of the Mickey Mouse shorts were essentially remakes of Oswald the Lucky Rabbit cartoons from the silent era (Building a Building (1933) is a remake of Sky Scrappers (1928), Ye Olden Days (1933) a reworking of the concept of Oh What a Knight (1928)), but at least they added new material to shake things up and improve upon past work most of the time. Mother Goose Melodies (1931) is just plain dull, even for those not familiar with silent Disney or other Silly Symphonies.
TheLittleSongbird Mother Goose Melodies is truly excellent from start to finish. The story is a very simple one, but doesn't feel like there isn't a story and more importantly doesn't feel like an excuse to string nursery rhymes and characters together. Mother Goose Melodies is fast-paced and very funny, with some great gags and scenes(in a nice mix of long and short in length) such as the Little Miss Muffet spider and the whole idea of the entire until the ending never falling out of the book, even when Jack and Jill fall down the hill, and the ending with its increasingly chaotic nature is a lot of fun. The animation is clean and smooth on the whole with the character designs not looking too exaggerated, the music is energetic and dynamic and actually includes singing rather than just dancing to music. The dancing as ever is choreographed niftily, not in a routine manner. I loved the characters also, the cameo of Clarabelle, as well as Mother Goose, Old King Cole, Little Miss Muffet, Jack Horner and Jack and Jill. All in all, a Disney Silly Symphony classic. Two years later, Disney remade this as Old King Cole, except that one is nowhere near as inspired or as good as Mother Goose Melodies, which for me remains one of the better very early Silly Symphonies. 10/10 Bethany Cox
spunky-22 Did you know that Humpty Dumpty fell off the wall because a goose hit him with Jack's and Jill's pail? This is one of the many interesting takes this Silly Symphony has on the nursery rhymes many of us have heard countless times. As in most Silly Symphonies, many of the jokes are dated, and it is all too obvious that this work comes from a time when simply cartoons put to music itself was cool and funny. However, there is still plenty left for modern audiences to enjoy. Additionally, the music is quite fun and takes you immediately to a childlike mind-set. As in many early Disney cartoons, half of the laughs come from noticing the absurdities and oddities. Before Monty Python put King Arthur on an imaginary horse and gave the king a servant with the job of clicking together coconuts, Disney put Old King Cole's trumpeters on children's stick horses and gave the king a servant with the job of holding up the king's enormous stomach. This animated piece is an excellent example of where a great amount of our humor comes from; and it's still pretty dang funny.