Pale-Face: A rubbery trip to the Wild West

Is it worth your time?

If you have a soft spot for 1930s animation history, Pale-Face is a must. If you get annoyed by cartoons that barely have a plot and just want to throw things at the screen, skip it. It’s a short, weird, jittery experience that feels more like a fever dream than a narrative.

Flip the Frog is just kind of there, wandering into a saloon scenario that feels like a dozen other western tropes mashed into a blender. The movement is wild. It’s that early Ub Iwerks style where everything has to wiggle, stretch, and snap back into place every two seconds.

There is a moment involving a saloon brawl that goes on just a little too long. It’s not funny in a "haha" way, but it’s fascinating to watch the frame-by-frame chaos. You can tell they were just figuring out how much ink they could smear before it looked like a total mess.

Cinematic perspective: Exploring the visual vocabulary of Pale-Face (1933) through its definitive frames.

Comparing this to something like Felix the Cat as Romeeow, you can really see the difference in how they handle character personality. Flip is... well, he's a frog. He does frog things. He doesn't have the same magnetism as the big studio stars, but he makes up for it by being consistently stuck in bizarre, high-stakes cartoon peril.

The Good, The Bad, and The Ink

• The background art has these weird, scratchy textures that look surprisingly dark for a "fun" short.
• The rhythm is completely unpredictable. Sometimes it's fast, then it just hangs on a single punchline for way too long.
• The sound design? Honestly, it’s mostly just aggressive piano stabs and frantic sliding noises.

It’s a bit messy. It doesn’t flow like a modern Pixar thing, obviously. But there’s a grit here—a literal ink-on-paper grittiness—that you just don't get with digital clean lines. It’s not a masterpiece, but it’s an artifact. 🐸

If you're interested in the evolution of these shorts, it’s interesting to see how it stacks up against weirder stuff like Snookums' Tooth. Both have that manic energy where you wonder if the animators were on their fifth cup of coffee. It’s frantic, it’s short, and it’s done before you can even get bored.