Mr. BUG GOES To TOWN

New Zealand Listener, Volume 6, Issue 154, 5 June 1942, Page 14

Mr. BUG GOES To TOWN

(Paramount)

MA* FLEISCHER, who made this coloured cartoon feature, is no Walt Disney, but if I were Max

Fleischer I shouldn’t let this worry me/very much. As a matter of fact, I doubt if he does: he certainly doesn’t try to imitate Disney, except in so far as anybody who now makes a full-length cartoon may be said to be doing that. As in Fleischer’s first big effort, Gulliver’s Travels (and, indeed, in many such films) his Mr. Bug employs the technique of combining essentially cartoon characters — in this case "humanised " insects- with cartooned human beings, and I have still to be convinced that the combination is aesthetically successful. My six-year-old daughter also seemed to find the intrusion of "real people" into a world of make-believe slightly confusing, and her reaction may or may not be typical of the child mind (which, with such pictures, is a not unimportant consideration). At the same time, the human element provides Mr. Bug with an ingenious theme. In a corner of ground just off Broadway lives a community of "insects under constant threat from trampling boots, smouldering cigar butts, and worst of all, the steam shovel of the building contractor. Mrs. Ladybird’s house is burnt down by a casually thrown match, Mr. Bumblebee’s honey shop is barely saved from a similar fate, every now and then an earthquake rocks the place as some heavy vehicle passes; and added to all this is Fifth Column work by that villainous capitalist, the black-coated, black-hearted C. Bagley Beetle (who plans to force beautiful Honeybee to marry him) and his ridiculous henchmen, Swat the Fly, and Smack the Mosquito. So, like many another threatened community, the insects at last decide to seek a better place in which to live and, led by the hopeful hero of the piece (Hoppity the grass-hopper), they set out on’ a trek which, in its tiny way, is just as epic as that of the Mormons in Brigham Young or of the Joads in Grapes of Wrath. After many days in the wilderness, the wanderers at last find sanctuary in the garden of a penthouse atop a New York skyscraper, from which they gaze down on the humans far below with the comment that they look " just like little bugs." There is something of Karel Capek in this comedy-drama in miniature, but while the film is not without irony and satire, and certainly not without its moments of genuine beauty, it has little of the subtlety and delicacy of imagination characteristic of a Disney opus. Instead it gains its effects in a broader, more forthright manner. But so far as tuneful songs go, it is quite the ond of the average Disney. While I should hesitate to estimate Mr. Bu@g’s general appeal, it is certainly only one grade below the top in its special class, and so it wins the award of a sit-down clap.