Hurdy Gurdy

The 1929 Oswald short "Hurdy Gurdy" is an offbeat classic featuring all the best elements of the earliest Walter Lantz cartoons (rubbery Bill Nolan animation combined with zany, boozy, wild New York-style humor). All of this, of course, is complemented by those great, distorted, and "broken" urban landscapes that appear so often in the early Lantz films. They call to mind not only the gritty streets of New York with which Lantz and Nolan were so familiar but also the surreal settings of early German Expressionist films like "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari". There is also some noteworthy pre-Code material here as well (e.g., Oswald and his girlfriend's French kiss).