Guided Mouse-Ille (1967) User Reviews

Beast and bot wars

[fayremead · 7/10 · 11 June 2007]

This Tom and Jerry cartoon celebrates the Space Age by setting the cat-mouse rivalry in a laboratory on another planet. Tom uses a robot cat against Jerry, who fights back with more than matching violence (at one point he pounds Tom to a fraction of normal height with an electromagnet and hammerhead). A particularly powerful explosion disintegrates the station and everything in it, but the miracle of reincarnation allows T. to resume his pursuit of J. in a primitive mode.

Apart from the too-long electromagnet bit, this episode is brisk and stylish. As in other Chuck Jones productions of the 1960s, the animation is above average for the time and the backgrounds are handsome. The alternate title alludes to the movie drama "Seance on a Wet Afternoon" -- an odd but sophisticated touch. Overall, "Guided Mouse-ille" is the best of Tom and Jerry's 1966-7 outer-space trilogy (which also includes "O-Solar-Meow" and "Advance and Be Mechanized").

-Tony

A futuristic cartoon with our favourite cat and mouse...

[TheLittleSongbird · 7/10 · 1 July 2010]

From Chuck Jones comes a pretty good Tom and Jerry cartoon. Guided Mouse-Ille I admit doesn't hold a candle to the wonderful Tom and Jerry cartoons of the '40s and '50s, most of which are cartoon classics and even the weakest of them are worth watching, but it is a huge improvement over any of the Gene Dietch cartoons, Switchin' Kitten should never have been made especially.

Guided Mouse-Ille also in my opinion is one of the better Chuck Jones-produced Tom and Jerry cartoons, and I actually found it funnier than Advance and Be Mechanized. The story is a little on the predictable side and the ending doesn't quite work. I had mixed feelings on the animation, the backgrounds are very handsome with unique colouring, however the characters don't look the same, Tom especially looks odd. On a more plus side, the soundtrack is nice, jazzy and upbeat, and the visual and sight gags are fun and clever- Invisibility and electrocution in typical Tom and Jerry fashion. Plus the pacing is very brisk. So overall, Guided Mouse-Ille isn't outstanding but it is a good cartoon. 7/10 Bethany Cox

excremental

[planktonrules · 1/10 · 10 June 2006]

Everyone associated with this film deserves to burn in cartoon Hades for making this abominable cartoon and calling it "Tom and Jerry". It is simply wretched and about as terrible as the few Tom and Jerry cartoons made in Czechoslovakia in the early 60s (that's another story that I won't get into here).

Tom and Jerry are living in the distant future. And, being the future, they use robot versions of themselves to wage war. The entire chemistry of the old Tom and Jerry cartoons is absent and the film just isn't funny or entertaining. Additionally, the animation quality is just bad--both the characters and the backgrounds look cheap. The bottom line is this franchise in the 1940s meant quality and fun--2 things entirely missing here.

As bad as anything that Deitch made.

[BA_Harrison · 1/10 · 29 May 2017]

I've mentioned in some of my comments that a few of the Tom and Jerry cartoons produced by Chuck Jones have come dangerously close to matching Gene Deitch's dreadful output in terms of overall quality. With Guided Mouse-Ille, director Abe Levitow has finally equalled Deitch for sheer horribleness, his cartoon a thoroughly joyless mess from start to godawful finish.

Following on from the space theme of the pretty crappy O-Solar-Meow, Guided Mouse-Ille is set in outer space in the year 2565 AD, where Tom and Jerry carry out their chases with the use of remote controlled robots. When the robots are destroyed, the pair get to work on powerful bombs, eventually blowing themselves back to the stone age, where Levitow utilises some of the ugliest animation imaginable (even Deitch would have thought twice about using drawings this bad!).

No seasoned viewer could fail to notice that . . .

[pixrox1 · 8/10 · 13 November 2022]

. . . GUIDED MOUSE-ILL would become a major influence upon director Stan Kubrick's subsequent masterpiece, 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY. This earlier film is also subtitled, of course, as SCIENCE ON A WET AFTERNOON. Such alternative headings were a hallmark of Warner Brothers animated shorts, such as THE DOVER BOYS AT PIMENTO UNIVERSITY; OR, THE RIVALS OF ROQUEFORT HALL, a landmark cartoon directed by Along-Came-Jones, 25 years prior to GUIDED MOUSE-ILL and more than two decades before Warner sent Jones and the rest of their animation division to the notorious movie shack of Leo the Groaning Fat Cat on Tinsel Town's tawdry Poverty Row with the prime objective of scuttling the over-rated Tom & Jerry plagiarized series in revenge for the RHAPSODY RABBIT scandal. By the way, THE DOVER BOYS also is the primary source material for the Harry Potter series.