My Baby Just Cares for Me: A Strange Little Jolt of Animation

Is it worth your time?

Look, if you’re into the history of animation or just like things that feel slightly cursed, you’ll probably find something to latch onto here. If you need a cohesive narrative or characters who make actual sense, you’re going to be annoyed by the first thirty seconds. Stay away if you're sensitive to jerky movements.

Dave Fleischer’s work always has this quality like the drawings are trying to escape the screen. It’s not smooth. It’s frantic. It’s like a sugar rush that went bad.

The experience

The whole thing has this weird, elastic physics that makes me uncomfortable. There’s a scene where the baby moves, and it feels like the frame rate is having a nervous breakdown. I spent half the time wondering if the character was made of rubber or actual biological matter.

It’s not as polished as The Big Party, that’s for sure. It lacks that sense of direction. Sometimes the animation just stops being a cartoon and starts feeling like a mechanical experiment gone wrong.

Cinematic perspective: Exploring the visual vocabulary of My Baby Just Cares for Me (1931) through its definitive frames.

• The music is stuck in my head, unfortunately.
• The eyes on the baby? Terrifying.
• The background detail is surprisingly sparse, like they ran out of paint.

I found myself thinking about Die Gespensteruhr while watching this. Both share that same bizarre, late-night-TV-static vibe. You know, the kind of movie you find when you're half-asleep and convinced you're hallucinating.

One shot lingers on a single expression for way too long. It moves from being cute to being genuinely unsettling in about four seconds. I actually checked to make sure my player hadn't frozen. It hadn't. That was just the choice they made.

It’s not a masterpiece. It’s barely a meal. But it sticks to your ribs in a way that better-made shorts just don’t. It feels raw. Unfinished. Maybe that’s the point? Or maybe they just ran out of budget. Who knows.

It doesn't have the grit of The Wrecker, but it has a weird, persistent soul. You aren't watching for the plot. You're watching to see how much they can distort a human face before it stops looking human entirely. 👶✨