Hey Diddle Diddle Review: A wonderfully weird six minutes of 1920s cartoon chaos

If you have six minutes to spare and love old, scratchy cartoons where logic goes to die, Hey Diddle Diddle is absolutely worth your time. Anyone else who needs a plot or, you know, normal physics will probably turn it off in thirty seconds. 🐱

It is basically a fever dream from Paul Terry and Frank Moser. They took the classic nursery rhyme and just ran with it until the ink ran out.

There is a cat playing a fiddle, but his bow keeps turning into a snake or something. I honestly had to rewind it twice to see if I was seeing things. It's wonderfully stupid.

The cow doesn't just jump over the moon. It sort of gets launched like a clumsy missile, and its face looks incredibly worried the whole time.

I love how these early animators did not care about anatomy. Characters' limbs stretch out like warm taffy, which is way more fun than modern CGI realism.

It reminded me a bit of the theatrical madness in The Idol of the Stage, just with more barnyard animals. But this cartoon is much faster.

There is this one dog character who keeps laughing at everything. His mouth opens so wide it swallows his entire head, which is both impressive and slightly terrifying.

The music is just this relentless, bouncy piano loop. It gets stuck in your head and feels like a tiny circus is living in your ears for hours.

If you've seen other shorts from this era, like Smile, Darn Ya, Smile!, you know the vibe. But this one feels even more unhinged and less polished.

Some of the backgrounds look like they were drawn in about five seconds. You can literally see the pencil smudges on the screen if you look close enough.

That's what makes it great, though. It feels like real people sat at a wooden desk and drew these silly lines by hand.

It is not some grand work of art, but it's a great little time machine. Just don't expect it to make any sense. 🐮🌙