Phoney Express Review: A delightfully weird 1930s cartoon trip

If you have seven minutes to spare today and love rubbery 1930s animation, Phoney Express is absolutely worth a quick watch. Animation nerds will dig the bizarre, pre-code gags, but anyone expecting modern logic or clean family humor will probably hate it.

This is a Flip the Frog cartoon, which means things get weird very fast. Flip is supposedly delivering mail, but the plot is really just an excuse for some incredibly loose physics and creepy character designs.

Ub Iwerks was clearly just throwing ideas at the wall here. The local wildlife they encounter behaves less like animals and more like annoying, stretchy demons. 🦟

There is this one bird in the background that looks completely wrong. It reminded me of the oddball creatures in The Fowl Bird, just pure chaotic energy.

Then we get the villain, Bronx Cheerio. Yes, that is actually his name.

He rides this horse that looks constantly exhausted. Honestly, the horse has way more personality than Bronx does, especially when it starts making faces at the camera.

Things get crazy when Bronx kidnaps Flip's girlfriend. It leads to a showdown in a mountain cabin that defies all laws of gravity.

Cinematic perspective: Exploring the visual vocabulary of Phoney Express (1932) through its definitive frames.

I love how the cabin literally bends and shakes during the fight. It is not smooth like the stuff Disney was doing at the time, but it has this raw, handmade charm that I miss.

It kind of has that frantic, everything-goes-wrong vibe you get in silent comedies like Crossed Wires or His Royal Slyness.

The real star of the show is the old crone. She is terrifying.

She looks like she wandered out of a nightmare. Yet, she is the one who saves the day by basically trapping the villain in "love."

By love, I mean she aggressively kisses him until he can't fight back. It is deeply uncomfortable to watch, but you cannot look away. 😂

I noticed a weird error where Flip's hat disappears for like three frames during the cabin scene. Its those little mistakes that make these old shorts so fun to analyze.

The ending is incredibly abrupt. They just run away while the crone torments Bronx, and then boom—black screen.

It is messy, slightly broken, but it has so much soul. Definitely check it out if you want a dose of pure, unfiltered 1930s weirdness.