Old MacDonald Had a Farm (1946) User Reviews

Good fun

[TheLittleSongbird · 7/10 · 14 June 2015]

Famous Studios' output is hit and miss, with some good, even great, cartoons in their early- middling years, and then got cheaper-looking and a little repetitive around the mid-50s. Old MacDonald Had a Farm, as far as Famous Studios goes, is neither one of their best or weakest, instead ranking near the very solid middle, while ranking as one of their better sing-a-long shorts.

Old MacDonald Had a Farm is virtually plot-less and felt more of an excuse to string along a series of familiar tunes and gags. Seeing as it is not the first cartoon to have this and not the worst-affected, I can forgive. More could have been done with the actual sing-a-long section which takes up half the cartoon, the visuals are good and the song arrangement even better, but it does lack the vibrant energy and inventive cleverness of the first half and felt somewhat over-stretched. Most of the gags are terrific, but one didn't really work for me and it was lambs' blackface gag, that it's racially stereotypical(animation, vocals and lyrics) is part of the problem but the bigger problem was how truly misplaced it felt within the rest of the cartoon.

The animation is very good however, everything is bright and colourful, the backgrounds are lively and detailed and it's all smoothly drawn, the characters drawn with little ugliness either(the lambs and chicks were very cute-looking in fact). The first half of Old MacDonald Had a Farm was filled with some brilliantly entertaining and clever moments and sight gags, like with the choice of instruments and how they were used(i.e. the pig and the stovepipe for a tuba). The funniest was the duck with the balloon and the chicks do an adorable jitterbug routine. The farmyard animals are great fun and have colourful personalities and the farmer is a nice character too. The high point of Old MacDonald Had a Farm was the music, with the use of familiar tunes arranged by the great Winston Sharples. And these tunes are arranged brilliantly here, with vibrant orchestration and lively rhythms, the most fitting was the use of Three Blind Mice and the most entertaining being the horse playing the jazz trumpet. The last minute and a half or so consists of the characters doing a charmingly upbeat Conga.

In summary, a good fun cartoon. 7/10 Bethany Cox

This short is one of the better "Sing-a-Longs" done by Famous Studios

[llltdesq · 9/10 · 21 October 2006]

Fleischer Studios did a regular series of shorts with a mix of live-action and animation with featured "sing-alongs", where the audience would sing along with a musical performance. The lyrics would appear on the screen and a guide would pace the audience in time to the music. When Paramount switched their animated shorts to an in-house production studio (called "Famous Studios"), one of the things they kept, at lest for a time, was these types of shorts, which followed the same type of format, but were entirely animated and used a "Bouncing Ball" as the cue. This short is one of the better ones they did. As I will discuss a little of the detail in this one, this is a spoiler warning:

The cartoon opens up with a farmer going out to his barn and setting up a music stand to conduct an animal symphony orchestra. There follow brief snatches of familiar tunes with animated gags more or less tied to the music. For example, a mouse playing a trombone is playing "Three Blind Mice", while a cat tries to catch the mouse by using a violin bow. In another bit, three lambs sing "Mary Had a Little Lamb" while a pig tries to play a stovepipe as if it were a tuba. These bits are very clever and the timing on the bits is very good.

Then, the farmer talks to the audience, inviting them to sing along to "Old Macdonald Had a Farm". The sing-along takes almost half of the short's running time, but there's some nice animation as background in spots.

The short finishes up with a short animated sequence, as was typical for the Famous Studios series and this is almost the highlight of the cartoon, as the farmer is in a tuxedo and the various animals form a Conga line and sing until the end of the short.

This is available on at least one low priced DVD that I know of and shouldn't be that hard to locate. Well worth watching.

Deserves to be a lot more famous

[Horst_In_Translation · 8/10 · 6 January 2018]

"Old MacDonald Had a Farm" is an American 7-minute cartoon from 1946, briefly after WWII, and this one is already over 70 years old. It is a Famous Studios production and if you see the names here, Kneitel, Turner and Messmer, then you will perhaps realize that these are heavyweights in terms of cartoon filmmaking from back in the day. Very prolific and very successful. It's a pity their work here has not really reached the masses as I thought it was a nice watch and even better listen. The first half takes us to the farm where we meet all kinds of farm animals and their passion for music brought to them by Old McDonald. And I hope there's nobody here who thought this is about Donald Duck. And I hope everybody knows the song from the title. The second half then is where you join in with everybody else or just with your fellow males/females. It so inspired me to sing along and I am not even big on singing, which says it all really. So the joy is highly contagious here and all the great music, not just the title song, makes it very easy for me to give this one a thumbs-up. I highly recommend checking it out. This one is still as much fun as it was when our grandparents were our age. Severely underseen and underappreciated. Don't miss out.

Credits listed above don't match the ones in the movie

[scorseseisgod-1 · 15 January 2011]

Just popped in Cartoon Marathon Vol. 1 and this is the first short on the disc. After watching the short I checked IMDb to see if there was any trivia, reviews, etc. about the short. Something wasn't right. I did not remember seeing the names of either Seymour Kneitel or the legendary Otto Messmer appear during the credits. (This is a faded, non-remastered 16mm print from National Telefilm Associates, Inc.) The year jibes with the title and studio, but the credits as listed on IMDb appear to belong to another cartoon. According to the film's opening credits, the cartoon was directed by I. Sparber. The three animators listed are Myron Waldman, Morey Reden & Nick Tafuri. Story credit is given to Bill Turner and Larry Riley.