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6.2/10
Senior Film Conservator
A definitive 6.2/10 rating for a film that redefined the boundaries of cult cinema. Piano Tooners remains a cornerstone of transgressive art.
If you have seven minutes to spare and love weird old cartoons, Piano Tooners is absolutely worth a watch today. It's perfect for anyone who finds 1930s rubber-hose animation charmingly creepy, but if you're expecting the actual cat and mouse Tom and Jerry, you are going to be very confused. 😅
These are the human Tom and Jerry. They look like weird, tall noodle people with blank eyes, and honestly, they are way more chaotic than any animal.
The whole plot is just them being terrible at their jobs. Like, they "tune" a piano by literally sawing a wooden key in half because it's too long.
Who does that? It's so stupid but I couldn't stop laughing.
The cartoon has that classic, slightly dirty 1930s vibe where everything is alive and probably sweating. There is this one shot where the piano keys start moving like teeth, and it genuinely freaked me out a bit.
Then they go to an opera. The opera singer—voiced by Margie Hines, who did Olive Oyl later on—is incredibly dramatic.
She literally faints because of a bad note. Like, she just flops over like a wet noodle.
Our guys get hired to fix it, and they pull out the bad key with giant pliers. It looks like dental surgery.
Odd details I noticed:
- The piano actually has a face for like two seconds and then it's just a regular piano again.
- Why does the singer's dress look like it's made of liquid?
- The way they use giant pliers to pull a piano key out like a rotten tooth is deeply unsettling.
But once they start playing jazz, the movie gets so much better. The singer wakes up and starts scatting, and the whole theater just loses its mind.
It reminds me of the chaotic energy in Two Tars, where everything just devolves into madness for no real reason.
The music is incredibly catchy, too. I've had that weird jazz riff stuck in my head for three hours now.
The animation is definitely rough around the edges. Sometimes the characters' arms just stretch to twice their length for a single frame, probably because the animators were rushed.
But that's what makes it great. It doesn't feel like a corporate product.
It feels like some sleep-deprived guys in 1932 having a fever dream. If you want something polished like modern Disney, avoid this.
But if you want to see a piano get tortured, go find it on YouTube.
IMDb —
1927
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