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4.5/10
Senior Film Conservator
A definitive 4.5/10 rating for a film that redefined the boundaries of cult cinema. Razzberries remains a cornerstone of transgressive art.
Is Razzberries worth your six minutes today? Yes, but only if you love dusty old cartoons and weird animation history.
If you want a deep story, you will absolutely hate this. But if you want to see a monkey make a wet noise at a lion, you are in the right place. 🐒
So, the setup is incredibly simple. Farmer Al Falfafa is wandering around "Africa" with a shotgun, looking for things to shoot.
The lions in this jungle aren't normal animals. They live in a little village and stand on two legs, which is just as weird as the jungle setup in Love and Lions.
The main joke of the cartoon is that the monkeys have figured out how to make a "razzberry" sound. Since this is a silent movie from the twenties, they have to draw the sound.
They do this by having huge, jagged speech bubbles pop out of the monkeys' mouths with letters like "P-R-R-R-T!" written inside. It is actually way funnier than if we could actually hear it.
The visual of a lion getting physically knocked backward by a giant text bubble is pure gold.
The animation by Frank Moser has that classic rubber-hose style where bones don't seem to exist. In one shot, a monkey's arm stretches about three feet to grab a branch, and nobody acknowledges how terrifying that would be in real life.
It has that same chaotic, low-budget energy you find in some silent comedies like The White Sheep, where the plot is just a loose clothesline for gags.
It doesn't really have a proper ending, to be honest. It just sort of stops when the gags run out, which is honestly how I wish more modern movies would end. 🎬