Paco Perico en Premier Review: Five Minutes of Weird Cartoon Chaos

Is this worth watching today? Only if you have five minutes to spare and a deep love for dusty, scratchy pieces of film history. Animation buffs will dig it, but anyone expecting actual logic or Disney-level charm will probably hate it and turn it off in thirty seconds. 🦜

So, this is Paco Perico en Premier. It’s widely considered one of the very first animations to ever come out of Mexico, made by a guy named Alfonso Vergara Andrade.

The plot is... well, it is barely a plot. A little bird named Paco Perico walks into a saloon, and then some weirdly aggressive guy starts trying to torture him.

That is literally the whole movie. It just starts and then it ends.

The bird itself looks incredibly strange. He walks with this jerky, awkward bounce that makes him look less like a parrot and more like a broken wind-up toy.

And the bad guy? He has this giant mustache that seems to have a life of its own.

At one point, he grabs Paco, and the animation gets so chaotic you can't really tell who is hitting who. It has that same frantic, slightly exhausting energy you find in other early cartoon oddities, like The Chicken Parade, where things just happen without any real setup.

Honestly, the physical comedy is so rough it reminds me of Accidental Accidents. It’s just pure, unfiltered slapstick from an era where people were still figuring out how to make drawings move on a screen.

The background is super simple, almost like it was drawn on a napkin right before they started shooting. You can actually see the pencil lines trembling in the corner of the frame.

I kind of love that raw, imperfect feel. It makes you realize how hard it was to make anything move back then, even a bad guy shaking a cartoon bird. 😅

There is this one shot where the bad guy looks directly at the camera with this manic grin. It goes on for about three seconds too long and it is honestly a little creepy.

Why is he so mad at the bird anyway? The movie never tells us.

He just really, really hates this bird.

Didja notice?

• The bird's legs seem to detach from his body for a split second when he jumps.
• The bar background looks like it was drawn with a dying pencil.
• That creepy mustache twitch. Seriously, it's hypnotic.

Don't expect a masterpiece here. It's a rough, scratchy little relic from 1935.

But if you want to see where Mexican animation took its very first baby steps, it is absolutely worth a quick look.