Pencil Mania (1932) User Reviews

The Pen is Mightier Than The Sword

[boblipton · 8/10 · 24 November 2004]

One of the best of Van Beuren's "Tom & Jerry" series in which they pull out a pencil and proceed to draw figures in the air which join the action: an early prefigurement, if you like, of Chuck Jones' classic DUCK AMUCK.

Van Beuren was one of the cartoon factories that flourished from about 1925-1936. It released through RKO and went under shortly after RKO dropped its contract in favor of one with Disney. Although never the best of studios, its staff worked hard. Probably its best black and white series was "Tom & Jerry" a Mutt and Jeff combo that, like Fleischer's Betty Boop, started as cartoon dogs and evolved into a music-backed series. Disguised in rerelease from Official Films as 'Dick and Larry' to avoid confusion with MGM's cat-and-mouse duo, a lot of their shorts have survived. A lot of their jokes are out of favor, but some are very amusing and if you wish to give them a try, this and PIANO TOONERS are good places to start.

Fascinating cartoon which plays with the conventions of animation

[llltdesq · 8/10 · 17 December 2015]

This is a cartoon in the Tom and Jerry series produced by Van Beuren studio. There will be spoilers ahead:

The "other" Tom and Jerry duo (the human ones from Van Beuren) were actually pretty good, all things considered. For a bottom of the ladder studio, which Van Beuren most decidedly was, the Tom and Jerrys typically had a peculiar quality to them which made up for the marginal production values inherent to the studio.

This starts out with Tom doing a portrait of a dancing cow. Jerry comes along and the short starts getting even stranger. He takes a blob of paint into a pen and draws an ovoid in the sky. It falls on Tom and cracks like an egg and the chase is on. Tom tries to get the pen to work but can't. Jerry whittles a point and the shavings become wooden shoes, which are then danced on as if there are a xylophone.

Suddenly, pretty much everything morphs into something else and the cartoon becomes surreal. Then Jerry draws three fruit/vegetable shapes, which sing, "Yes, We Have No Bananas". Jerry then elongates two of them into the standard couple in a melodrama and later makes the third shape into the villain and the bulk of the rest of the cartoon becomes a melodrama, with Jerry stepping in to draw solutions or dilemmas, seemingly on a whim. The ending is very good, so I won't spoil that here.

This cartoon, along with all the other cartoons in the series, are available on a two-disc DVD set from Thunderbean and it and the set are recommended.

It's mania alright

[TheLittleSongbird · 8/10 · 23 November 2017]

The Van Beuren Tom and Jerry (as said already not the famous cat and mouse, this is a human duo that lasted for just under 30 cartoons, 29 if memory serves correct, between 1931 and 1933) series was interesting but uneven and not easy to rate as an overall whole. At the series' best, the cartoons were good, very good in a few cases. At its worst, they were really bad.

'Pencil Mania' by far is one of the best of the series. It's one of the strangest (a good thing, the humour the series aims for is absurdist but some cartoons were far more successful than others) Tom and Jerry cartoons, but it is also one of the funniest and a strong contender for their most inventive. Flaws are few, with the only real ones for me being the primitive at best animation quality, only the animation for the train is well done, and some of Tom and Jerry's more melodramatic antics being somewhat too old-fashioned and reminiscent of overly-histrionic 1920s silent film.

However, the music is outstanding. Even in the worst Tom and Jerry cartoons it was the best asset. It is so beautifully and cleverly orchestrated and full of energy, doing so well with enhancing the action.

Moreover, the gags are also among the most consistently entertaining and well-timed of Tom and Jerry's cartoons. Not just the deliciously surreal metamorphoses, such as a saxophone metamorphosing into a duck, and the ahead-of-the-time breaking the fourth wall moments (which gives 'Pencil Mania' a unique distinction not just for the Tom and Jerry series but also of any cartoon from 1932), but especially the mesmerising finale which is the best finale of any Tom and Jerry cartoon since their debut 'Wot a Night'.

Like the previous cartoon 'Piano Tooners', it is impossible to not enjoy the wonderful weirdness of the surrealist (in this cartoon that is) atmosphere, being so inventively done and true to the absurdist style of the general humour of the cartoons and using it to full advantage. Timing is done very well and all the characters are fun.

In short, one of the best of the series. 8/10 Bethany Cox

Incredibly Inventive Material Make These A Hoot To View

[ccthemovieman-1 · 10/10 · 6 July 2007]

These early '30s Tom and Jerry (human) cartoons like to start with a famous song from the old days. Most of them are very familiar to anyone over 50 years of age. In this cartoon, it's "I'm Looking Over A Four-Leaf Clover."

These short animated films, which also go under the title "Dick and Larry," are also very inventive and a ton of fun to watch. I wish there were more of them available.

Anway, in here we then see a dancing cow in her short, polka-dot skirt. From there come some very clever sight gags, such as a dancing easel as the big guy paints, a pen which works for the little guy but not his partner, and a big assortment of crazy things where one thing magically changes into another. It's tedious to write about, but really fun to watch because events are so unexpected. These Tom and Jerry cartoons are mainly just absurd humor put to use in animation and, frankly, I find it fascinating.

The imaginations these writers had was fantastic. For example, a piece of string turns into a saxophone, the notes from the music turn into ducks, the saxophone turns into a dancing animal, on and on....just wacky stuff.

This cartoon can be seen on the DVD called "150 Cartoon Classics."

Pencil Mania is one of the most creative Van Beuren cartoons

[tavm · 9/10 · 11 June 2007]

This is a very entertaining cartoon that pre-dates Chuck Jones' Duck Amuck by about 21 years in which a short fellow named Jerry draws various objects sometimes to the consternation of his tall partner Tom. Yes, this is the Van Beuren Tom and Jerry, two humans created long before the more famous cat-and-mouse team from MGM when the Van Beuren ones were already discontinued. In summation, Jerry draws an egg that spills on Tom's face, he draws a saxophone whose notes turn into ducks, he draws wooden shoes with a couple of birds dancing on them, he draws some vegetables with faces that sing "Yes, We Have No Bannanas" that then turn into a hero, his girlfriend, and a villain with pencil-thin mustache. All this makes the short one of the most creative from the Van Beuren studio so anyone interested in the early days of talkie animation especially the Van Beuren kind should seek this one out.

in some ways very creative and in others, very old fashioned

[planktonrules · 5/10 · 28 July 2006]

This is an early Tom and Jerry cartoon--but NOT the ones you are probably thinking about. Instead of a mouse and a cat, Tom and Jerry were originally a very simply animated black and white cartoons by a small-time studio. And, while the animation quality is pretty low (even for 1932), the story is so wild and different it held my interest. Tom (or was it Jerry?),...well, the little guy began to have fun with his pencil--drawing all kinds of characters that magically came to life. All these scenes were pretty amusing. At one point, he draws some veggies who start singing--then he twists them into the shapes of people and they begin acting out a fight between a good guy and bad guy. Ultimately, the good guy and his girl are placed on railroad tracks. Hmmmm,...considering how strange and disjoint this short became, I wonder if maybe somebody was on something here! Compared to most cartoons of the 40s and 50s, this is a very poor cartoon, but it's at least original and strange enough to merit a quick peek.