The Ol' Swimmin' Hole review: Oswald is way more fun than Mickey

If you have six minutes to spare today, you should probably just watch this. It is a perfect little slice of history for anyone who likes seeing how animation used to be before it got all *corporate* and clean. 🐰

People who need a deep plot or high-definition visuals will hate it. It is grainy, it is flickering, and it makes absolutely no sense if you think about it for more than a second.

Oswald is such a different vibe than Mickey Mouse. He is a bit of a jerk, honestly, which makes him way more relatable when he is just trying to have a nice day at the pond.

I watched this right after sitting through The Big Adventure and the difference in energy is honestly hilarious. This cartoon is just pure, frantic motion from the first frame.

There is this one moment where Oswald undresses behind a bush and his clothes just sort of fly off in a perfect, rigid stack. It is that weird **rubber-hose logic** where objects have a mind of their own.

The dog in this—or maybe it is a donkey, the drawing is a bit loose—has these incredibly long ears. He uses them like oars to row through the water, which is a gag that feels very of its time but still works.

The water doesn't really look like water. It looks like black ink and white paint swirling around, but it has this heavy, viscous feeling to it.

I noticed a tiny bit of dust or a scratch on the film during the diving scene. It actually made the whole thing feel more *real* than some of the stuff we see in theaters now. 🌊

The scene with the "No Swimming" sign goes on a little bit too long. You get the joke about five seconds before the movie stops making it.

But then it jumps into another gag so fast you don't really have time to be annoyed. It has a similar mechanical franticness to Vintik-Shpintik, even if the styles are totally different.

One reaction shot of Oswald looking frustrated lingers just long enough to be funny. He just stares at the screen with these big, empty eyes like he is asking the audience why his life is so difficult.

The way his ears move independently is still some of the best character work Disney ever did. They are almost like extra hands that express whatever he is feeling without a single word of dialogue.

There is a bit with some soap that feels very random. It just appears, and then there is bubbles everywhere, and then the scene just... shifts.

I love that there is no moral here. Nobody learns a lesson about friendship or being brave; they just fall in the water and get chased around.

It is alot more violent than you would expect for something this old. Not real violence, obviously, but characters get kicked and stretched in ways that look painful if they weren't made of ink.

The ending is very abrupt, like the animators just ran out of paper or time. It just stops right in the middle of the chaos.

I kind of miss when movies could just be a series of weird ideas that don't need to lead to a big emotional climax. It is just a rabbit, a pond, and some **pure nonsense**. 🥕

Definitely watch it if you want to see where the whole Disney empire actually started. It is way more punk rock than the modern stuff.