[jekylljuice]

Hoppity Goes To Town

Long before A Bug's Life, Antz and The Ant Bully, there was Hoppity Goes To Town (actually, it was Mr. Bug Goes To Town originally, but Paramount clearly didn't think that the Mr. Deeds homage was worth having "Bug" in the title, which they saw as detrimental, and later changed it). This was the second of only two feature films to arise from the Fleischer Studios (extra points if you knew that the first was Gulliver's Travels in 1939), most famous for the Popeye and Betty Boop cartoons - once serious rivals with the Walt Disney studio, to whom they apparently lost a multitude of employees, the poor box office performance of this particular film (not helped by the fact that it came out just two days prior to the attacks on Pearl Harbour) is sadly what finished their studio off for good. A shame, since it's quite a charming little film, if obviously now very antiquated.

I wouldn't go so far as to say that it really measures up to any of the feature films which Walt Disney was producing at around the same time - while Snow White, Pinnochio, Dumbo and Bambi all feel like properly sustained features within their own right, Hoppity comes off a lot more as a heavily extended short cartoon, with some definite pros and cons. I wasn't particularly wild about the character designs - the vast majority of bugs here are human beings, more-or-less, with antenna and wings stuck on them...I guess at time this was seen as the most logical way of convincing audiences to identify with insect characters, but nowadays it just looks twee - though the animation was nicely fluid and colourful throughout. The strongest character by far was the villainous C. Bagley Beetle, who I really liked (his only fault, which is something he shares with a lot of Disney's antagonists, I guess, is his rather questionable taste in sidekicks - Aunt Sarah from Lady and the Tramp excepted, of course). The weakest character was very easily Honey Bee, Hoppity's love interest, who never amounts to much more than a dainty little thing for the male characters to fuss over (again, this was probably much less of an issue at the time). Hoppity himself is likeable enough, but doesn't get a great deal of character development (another reason why it may have been a little better suited to a short cartoon). Yeah, it's a mixed bag for sure, but all in all I enjoyed it, and Mr. Beetle's contributions were all brilliant.