Stormy Seas (1932) review: Rubbery, pre-code cartoon madness

You should absolutely watch this today if you have six minutes and love old, rubbery animation where physics don't exist. If you need things like a coherent storyline or characters that behave like real living creatures, you will probably turn it off in thirty seconds.

Stormy Seas is a 1932 Flip the Frog cartoon, and it is basically pure chaos on water. Ub Iwerks and Grim Natwick clearly just sat down and decided to draw whatever popped into their heads after a long lunch.

Flip is the captain of this tiny, pathetic ship. The boat itself doesn't seem to be made of wood; it behaves more like cooked spaghetti. It stretches and bends over the waves in a way that makes my stomach hurt a little bit.

I love how the water is animated here. It is not wet. It is a giant, angry sheet of grey jelly that occasionally grows arms to swat at the ship. 🌊

There is this one gag where the boat literally climbs up a wave like it is going up a steep hill. It even has to gear down. It is stupid, and I laughed out loud.

If you have seen some of Iwerks' other weird stuff like Spooks, you know he loves giving inanimate objects faces. Here, even the ship's anchor gets scared. It shivers and tries to hide. Why is metal afraid of drowning? Don't ask questions.

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

Then we get the rescue. Flip has to save this girl frog who is trapped on a sinking wreck. She has these massive eyelashes and looks suspiciously like Betty Boop. That is probably because Grim Natwick worked on this, and he basically invented Betty's look.

The music is just... always playing. It does not care if the characters are about to die. It just chugs along with this jaunty, tinny jazz beat. It makes the near-death experiences feel very casual.

It is definitely more fun than some of the slower, more observational shorts from the same era, like In Holland. This one actually has some real bite to it.

The ending is incredibly abrupt. The storm just sort of... stops? Or they just ran out of film. It is hard to tell.

But honestly, it is a great little slice of pre-code weirdness. No lessons learned, no deep thoughts. Just a frog, a girl, and some very angry water.

Didja notice?

• The way the stove in the galley behaves like an angry dog.
• Flip's hat seems glued to his head, even when he is upside down.
• That one wave that literally has a giant face and tries to swallow the boat whole.