The Village Specialist (1931)
12 Sep 1931 • Animation, Short • 0h 6m
This is a pretty good Flip the Frog cartoon. Iwerks had finally gotten his own studio up and running and was able to take the trouble to get the details right. So this cartoon about how village handyman Flip gets called in to deal with a piece of plumbing that won't stop leaking is well constructed, paced and drawn -- the Rube Goldberg pipes in the cellar are quite a sight.Iwerks maintain a taste for barnyard humor in these cartoons, even as his once and future employer, Walt Disney, had begun to elevate his cartoons into the strictures of middle class good taste. There's one gag early on that shows this tendency: Flip has constructed two wheels by drilling them out of a plank. He then goes into a shack with a half-moon cut on the door holding this two-hole plank.... a clear reference to now-vanished outhouses.Carl Stalling adds in his typical Mickey-Mousing score -- a score that mimics the movement of the characters, a style which he invented -- using some of the MGM catalogue. Eventually he would head over to Leon Schlesinger's outfit, where he made even better use of Warner's catalogue.
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English
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United States
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