The Shriek (1933) Review - Seven minutes of pure, beautiful nonsense

If you have seven minutes to spare today and love weird, rubbery black-and-white cartoons, The Shriek is absolutely worth a quick look.

It is perfect for anyone who likes early, chaotic animation where the laws of physics do not exist, but if you need things like a deep plot, you will probably hate it.

This is an old Oswald the Lucky Rabbit short from 1933, and it is basically a wild parody of those old desert romance movies. The story starts with a peg-legged sheik who just swoops in and kidnaps Oswald's girlfriend.

He drags her off to a extremely weird pyramid, and honestly, the pyramid is where things get fun.

Inside, we get walking skeletons, hieroglyphics that come to life, and all kinds of bizarre visual gags.

There is this one skeleton who does a little dance, and his bones make this clacking sound that is oddly satisfying to listen to. It reminded me a bit of the strange, lively objects you see in The Tree's Knees, where everything has a creepy face.

Cinematic perspective: Exploring the visual vocabulary of The Shriek (1933) through its definitive frames.

Tex Avery worked on this, and you can already feel his crazy, energetic style starting to poke through. The way Oswald uses his own ears as helicopter blades or ropes is just classic.

It does not have the slow, dramatic build of something like Sunset Trail, but it does not need it. Some of the jokes are incredibly dumb, like a camel that seems to be wearing actual leather shoes.

But that is the charm of this era of animation. The print I watched was a bit scratchy, which actually made the skeletons look even creepier.

One weird detail: the sheik's peg leg keeps changing which side it is on in a couple of shots.

I love mistakes like that in these old hand-drawn shorts. It shows you how fast they had to churn these things out back then.

If you want a double feature of weird old-school stuff, maybe pair it with The Cheeky Devil for a complete trip.

Anyway, it is short, it is silly, and it has a camel that looks like it has totally given up on life. Go watch it on YouTube if you need a quick break from reality.