User Reviews

Hector is a watchdog. However, he wants to be a hunting dog. He trains and on the first day of hunting season, he goes after some rabbits -- a clear mistake for anyone who has ever watched a Bugs Bunny cartoon -- in this good Terrytoon version of those rascally rabbits.

Using Bugs Bunny cartoons as a standard, the tendencies of Paul Terry's cartoons stand in stark relief. The rabbits are smaller, cuter, more numerous and undifferentiated. That is because the folks over at Warner Brothers' cartoon department were doing cartoons to make themselves laugh and to annoy their boss, Eddie Selzer. Selzer had been assigned by his bosses. Terry had started out directing his own cartoons and had built his own studio. His watchwords were competence and budget. If the competence was at a very high standard in this period and the budgets lush before post-war inflation and crumbling of movie audiences killed the market, still, Terry saw his audience as small children who would delight to see themselves on the winning side -- the small rabbits.

None of which affects the fact that this is a very good cartoon, which uses appropriate variations of the usual comic tropes; for example, while Bigs Bunny might pull out a stick of dynamite to give to the dog, Terry's rabbits have strings of firecrackers. Same gag, really, just aimed for the audience.

Terrytoons Studios were an inconsistent studio, though of great historical and curiosity value (my main reason for seeing their output is as a completest of them and lower-budget animation). Their output was seldom great, the best of Heckle and Jeckle came closest. It was on the most part not awful, though the namely very early years and mid-50s onwards years did have some weak offerings. Most of it ranged from mediocre to pretty good.

1945 was a year for Terrytoons that predominently saw Gandy/Sourpuss and Mighty Mouse cartoons, but there were a few cartoons with non-re-occuring characters. 'Aesop's Fable: The Watchdog' (not to be confused with the 1939 cartoon also from Terrytoons, also not a bad cartoon at all if unexceptional) is one of those. It is part of the Aesop's Fable series and is a not half-bad entry in it and towards the better end. As far as Terrytoons' 1945 cartoons go, the best of the previous cartoons was 'Post War Inventions' (the studio's best in a long and one of their overall best) and there were no failures, 'Aesop's Fable: The Watchdog' is somewhere around high middle.

Will start with the many good things. Can't fault the music, the one consistently good asset of all of Terrytoons' output. It is full of energy, very sumptuously orchestrated and fits with everything beautifully (the best moments enhanced by it). Something that improved significantly overtime was the animation, and one can see that here in 'Aesop's Fable: The Watchdog'. The attention to detail in the backgrounds particularly over-time became more ambitious, nothing about the character design unappeals really and the colours are suitably vibrant, so much better than the very simplistic and unrefined black and white seen in the early-mid-30s.

'Aesop's Fable: The Watchdog' goes at a quite lively pace when the action gets going, the set up is a little slow but at least it doesn't take too long to get to the point. There is no shortage of gags, and most are very amusing if never exactly hilarious and don't feel tired (the timing quite lively), regardless of their lack of originality (very little of that here admittedly). The dog is a likeable character and a rootable one. The ending is cute, if foreseeable, and not heavy-handed and the material is not as corny as that in other Aesop's Fable cartoons.

Having said that, although it was good that they weren't cutesy and did have a personality the rabbits were the complete opposite and although their antagonistic side was deliberate parts were a little extreme. While enough of the gags work, others do feel a little mean-spirited.

More freshness wouldn't have gone amiss too.

On the whole though, definitely worth watching if not an essential. 6/10