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6.7/10
Senior Film Conservator
A definitive 6.7/10 rating for a film that redefined the boundaries of cult cinema. Doughnuts remains a cornerstone of transgressive art.
If you love weird 1930s animation where logic goes to die, Doughnuts is absolutely worth nine minutes of your afternoon. Normal people who need things like "plots" or "sane audio" will probably want to throw their screen out the window. 🍩
It stars Tom and Jerry—no, not the famous cat and mouse, but the weird human-ish guys from the Van Beuren studio. Here, they are trying to win a baking contest, which mostly involves dodging a room full of absolute freaks.
The whole thing feels like a fever dream you would have after eating way too much sugar before bed. The animation style is that classic rubber hose stuff where bones dont seem to exist.
There is this one baker who looks like a melting candle and his dough keeps trying to crawl away. The animator clearly had some weird things going on in their head when they drew this.
I love how the background characters just bounce up and down to the music. It’s like the studio only had the budget to draw three frames of movement for the crowd scenes.
It has that same scratchy, chaotic energy you get in Chemical Ko-Ko, where the world feels slightly unsafe. Everything is constantly moving, even the walls.
At one point, a dog starts barking but the sound effect is clearly just a grown man shouting "Ruff!" into a cheap microphone. I laughed out loud at how bad it was, and I think they just left it in because they were in a rush.
Also, the way they fry the doughnuts is kind of gross. They just throw them in a tub of grease that looks black as motor oil.
It made me never want to eat a pastry again, honestly. 🤢
If you have seen other shorts from this era like Swing High, you know how these early sound cartoons can get. They just didn't know when to stop with the sound effects.
It is just noise, noise, and more noise until your ears ring.
Still, there is something so charming about how cheap and fast this was made. They didn't care about making a masterpiece, they just wanted to get people laughing in theaters.
Go watch it if you want to see a doughnut machine turn into a literal weapon of mass destruction. It's short, dumb, and very fun.
