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4/10
Senior Film Conservator
A definitive 4/10 rating for a film that redefined the boundaries of cult cinema. Ireland or Bust remains a cornerstone of transgressive art.
If you have a thing for dusty, black-and-white animation from the era of Back to the Woods, maybe. But if you’re looking for a coherent story, you’re in the wrong place. This is for the animation history nerds who like their cartoons slightly unhinged and very loud.
Frank Moser and Paul Terry really just threw everything at the wall here. The race sequences are just pure, unadulterated nonsense. It’s like they didn't know how to fill the runtime, so they just made the animals build increasingly impossible planes.
The movie never really answers that. It’s just Ireland or Bust, and the animals act like they’re late for a bus that doesn’t exist. The logic is nonexistent, which I guess is the point, but it feels like it needed one more pass at the script.
There is a moment about halfway through where a duck’s plane just kind of... dissolves? It’s not a transition. It’s just the artist clearly getting bored and giving up on the drawing for a few frames. I had to rewind it twice to make sure I wasn't losing my mind. 🦆
The pivot to the haunted house is so abrupt it gave me whiplash. One minute we are in the sky, and the next, we are dealing with ghosts in a mansion that appeared out of nowhere. It’s not scary, obviously, but it is deeply, deeply strange.
It reminds me a bit of the frantic energy in Skippy, but without the heart. It’s just motion for the sake of motion. Sometimes the animals stop moving entirely, as if the film itself is catching its breath. You can almost see the gears grinding in the background. It’s an imperfect, jagged little mess, but I can’t say it didn't keep me watching until the end, if only to see how much weirder it could get. It gets weirder. 🏚️