User Reviews

They certainly try to do the right thing by old Falfa. There's a parade and everyone stands outside singing a song and the mice shoot him in the behind with a 17-inch shell. Surely they didn't do that every year.

Nor did Paul Terry have his staff short on any of the technical details. The background work is as good as anything they had produced the previous year and the uncredited in-betweeners do a fine job. However, while the gags progress in violence, getting bigger and bigger as the cartoon goes on, there's never any indication of why.

Well, there were plenty of unexplained celebrities when I was a kid. Charles Nelson Reilly. John Cameron Swayze. Come to think of it, they all had three-barreled names. Maybe Falfa's first name is really "Farmer".

The Terrytoons are oddly interesting, mainly for anybody wanting to see (generally) older cartoons made by lesser known and lower-budget studios. They are a mixed bag in quality, with some better than others, often with outstanding music and with some mild amusement and charm and variable in animation, characterisation and content.

Like with the Terrytoons from 1930 and 1931, the 1932 batch has been very mixed, the best being above average if not mindblowing and the worst being weak. 'Farmer Al Falfa's Birthday Party' is a long way from being the worst of the 1932 batch, but to me it felt rather lacklustre.

As said a few times already in my previous reviews for the Terrytoons, the main reason for viewing is mainly for anybody striving to see every Terrytoons available like me.

Best asset is the music, which predictably is incredible. It is so beautifully and cleverly orchestrated and arranged, is great fun to listen to and full of lively energy, doing so well with enhancing the action. Some of the backgrounds are detailed and ambitious enough and it's a little more elaborate looking than the previous 1932 cartoons. Synchronisation is pretty neat.

There are a couple of semi-amusing gags and Farmer Al Falfa is watchable enough.

However, the animation is still, outside of the backgrounds, primitive at best with a fair bit of crudeness, over-simplicity and choppiness.

Story is not much of time at all and doesn't really go anywhere, the premise is a fairly familiar one and 'Farmer Al Falfa's Birthday Party' brings nothing new to the table. It's too short too, needed a couple more minutes, and felt choppy as a result. The characters generally are bland, parts gets too saccharine and the gags are too few and not all of them are particularly funny or memorable. Hurting it further is the lack of charm, as a result of the cartoon getting increasingly violent and in a way that doesn't make much sense or have much reason to be, it feels like violence for the sake of it.

To conclude, lacklustre. 4/10 Bethany Cox