When I’m super tired, there’s sometimes nothing better than an old PRC film or maybe even a good Pre-code Warners, preferably with Cagney if possible, but I’ll take a Van Beuren if there’s one laying around…

A Cat-Fish Romance (1932) is a cartoon we haven’t cleaned up yet for the new Aesop’s Fables, Volume 2 Blu-ray set. It’s about to go into the restoration pipeline though, and as I looked at the main print we’re using I thought it would be a fun one to post.

Of course, the best Van Beuren shorts keep things moving right along throughout, while the not-as-good ones tend to meander around the idea while this or that musical interlude interrupts things. Sometimes if there’s enough of those musical interludes you can end up with a pretty solid little musical short. I don’t know if they were particularly worried about how the mix of the elements would come together in the end, honestly. Perhaps a basic outline was good enough, then the layout would basically be the storyboards.

Mannie Davis and his solid rubber characters start things off in this short with a cat fisher-man bouncing along happily as Mexican fish play a mean guitar. A mermaid cat (voiced by Margie Hines, who by this point was the majority of the female characters in Van Beuren films) sees our hero on her sunken-submarine house Television, and within moments she manages to pull his fishing pole and him underwater. Happily, he has no trouble changing from breathing to whatever underwater (this is never explained — am I wrong to find this odd?). They sing and swoon together as Margie (uh, I mean the mermaid cat) sings “I Can’t Give You Anything But Love”. This also allows the studio to reuse animation from past underwater cartoons, including an extended sequence from The Haunted Ship (1930) and scenes from Rocketeers (1931).

For the conclusion (and a little conflict) at the end of the picture, a big spider (?) shows up and takes our Mer-cat-girl away. A fight ensues, with our cat-boy hero stabbing the spider with a sword. He meekly cries “Mammy!” As he floats up out of the scene at the end in a strange moment of silence. Doesn’t it seem like a sea creature would’ve been a better idea? All is well in Cat-love land again as our heroes ride a fish while singing. Somehow our hero cat never loses his hat throughout.

Manny’s well-drawn animation really dominates this film, and brings the quality up of the studio in all the pictures he works on. Even though there’s a lot of reuse here, it works just fine, and of course the audience would never know or care. As a rising animation star, I find it surprising that he didn’t end up over at Fleischer’s during this period. After It makes some sense they would trust him to carry the Cubby Bear series soon after this. Davis of course would spend a good amount of his career at Terrytoons after Van Beuren. I wonder if his brother, Art, ever visited the Van Beuren studio during this period. There’s way too little documentation of the Van Beuren Studio in general, compared to other shops.

While this picture will never make the AFI’s top cartoon list, it’s a solid little picture, and a great example of where Davis was going in terms of character animation, especially in appealing action and drawing.

Have a good week everyone!