Buddy and Towser (1934) review - A weird, bouncy little relic

Honestly, you should only watch this if you have six minutes to spare and a soft spot for dusty, black-and-white cartoons from the Great Depression. Animation nerds will find it neat, but anyone expecting actual jokes or a coherent plot will probably turn it off after thirty seconds. 🐶

The setup is incredibly basic. Buddy—that incredibly bland early Warner Bros. mascot who looks like a round lump of dough—tells his dog Towser to watch the chicken coop because it's freezing outside and a fox is lurking.

And that is pretty much the whole story.

What follows is just a bunch of bouncing. Seriously, every single thing in this cartoon bounces to the beat of the music, even the snow drifts on the roof.

It is kind of hypnotic, but also a little exhausting if you stare at it too long.

The highlight for me is definitely the chickens.

Cinematic perspective: Exploring the visual vocabulary of Buddy and Towser (1934) through its definitive frames.

They don't look like real birds at all; they look like weird rubber gloves with eyes glued on them. There is this one shot where a chicken is shivering, and its feathers just start vibrating in a way that feels totally unnatural.

I laughed out loud at how cheap it looked, but in a nice way.

Ben Hardaway's writing here is... well, there isn't really any writing. It is mostly just physical gags we have seen a hundred times before, like the fox disguised as a freezing traveler to trick the gullible dog.

If you have seen Puss in Boots or even Disney's The Pied Piper from around this same era, you know how much better the animation could actually be in the early thirties. Buddy cartoons always felt like they were running a year or two behind everyone else in terms of tech.

But there is a weird, cozy charm to how clunky it is.

The sound design by Bernard B. Brown has that tinny, hollow quality where the wind sounds like someone blowing directly into a cheap microphone. And the voice acting is mostly just weird grunts and high-pitched gibberish that doesn't match the mouth movements.

Some random notes I took:

• The fox has these incredibly long, spindly legs that make him look like a creepy spider when he sneaks around.
• Why does Buddy wear those giant white cartoon gloves just to go to bed?
• The dog's ears seem to have their own gravity and float around his head.

It’s definitely not a masterpiece. But if you want a quick hit of nostalgia or just want to see some very silly 1930s chickens, it’s worth a quick search. Just don't expect it to stay in your head for more than five minutes after the screen goes black. 🤷‍♂️