Recently I attended an animation festival at which 'Uncle Joey' was shown, and the audience booed this cartoon so viciously that I really felt I ought to speak up in its defence.
'Uncle Joey' isn't funny, but it doesn't really try to be. It isn't very well animated, but then none of Paul Terry's cartoons from the Terrytoons studio were well-animated, at least not before the arrival of Gene Deitch. 'Uncle Joey' is a very gentle cartoon, intended for very young children ... so it lacks the vicious humour and surreal effects which adults prefer in their animation.
When animator Paul Terry noticed that film comedian Joe E. Brown was extremely popular with small children, he decided to create a cartoon character based on Brown's screen persona. 'Uncle Joey' is the result; this is the first cartoon in a brief series that never really caught on.
Basically, this is about two little mouse-children who are sad and lonely until their Uncle Joey shows up. The mouse-children (mice-childs?) look like standard-issue Terrytoons animated mice, but Uncle Joey is a cartoon mouse drawn to look like a caricature of Joe E. Brown, with a huge mouth. He moves a bit like Joe E. Brown too. The mice have fun with their Uncle Joey, and there's a happy ending. That's about it.
The one bit of cleverness occurs when Uncle Joey runs directly towards us whilst he's laughing. The camera tracks directly into his wide open mouth ... or rather, the image of his mouth gets larger to make this seem to be a tracking shot.
The real Joe E. Brown had a very elusive form of humour; I've never found him especially funny. He tended to play clumsy little weaklings, but in fact he was a former acrobat: he was immensely strong and agile even in middle age. (Brown once lifted the massive wrestler Man Mountain Dean over his head with only one hand.) Just occasionally, Brown's remarkable agility would briefly show up in one of his movie routines. I wish that Paul Terry had taken advantage of the possibilities of animation, and depicted Uncle Joey as a mouse with acrobatic abilities. Or would that be too much like Mighty Mouse?
'Uncle Joey' deserves credit for an original idea, but nothing more than that. Still, it certainly isn't bad enough to deserve the terrible booing which I witnessed.