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5.8/10
Senior Film Conservator
A definitive 5.8/10 rating for a film that redefined the boundaries of cult cinema. Toyland Premiere remains a cornerstone of transgressive art.
If you have a soft spot for the really early, scrappy days of animation, you will probably find Toyland Premiere charming in a dusty, basement-tape kind of way. If you expect a coherent narrative or characters that act like real living things, you are going to be bored out of your mind within three minutes. It is a weird, frantic, and oddly specific little artifact.
The whole premise is just an excuse to cram as many cameos and visual gags into a single frame as possible. It starts with Oswald hosting a party for Santa, which is fine, I guess. But then the movie gets hijacked by this bizarre sequence where Laurel and Hardy show up inside a dragon suit.
It is the kind of surreal logic that only makes sense in old cartoons. Why are they a dragon? Why do they want the cake so bad? Nobody explains it, and honestly, asking questions feels like you are missing the point. The animation is jittery, almost like it is vibrating on the screen.
There is a lot of frantic energy here that reminds me a bit of the silent era madness seen in La princesse aux clowns, though much less polished. The Rhythmettes pop up and do their thing, and it feels like the movie is just checking off a list of performers they managed to get into the booth that day.
The dragon design is honestly the highlight. It is lumpy and moves in this disjointed way that makes you wonder if the animators were just making it up as they went along. There is one shot where the dragon tries to snatch the cake, and the frame rate just kind of… gives up? It is delightful in a broken way.
It is definitely not as tight as other shorts from the era, and it lacks the weird, dark edge you see in something like Luch smerti. It just sort of ends, leaving you wondering if you missed the actual climax. But hey, it is short, and you get to see a rabbit feed Santa, which is exactly the kind of nonsense I look for on a Tuesday afternoon. 🐰🍰