Animators' Delight

Rating: 8/10 (20 August 2005)

This film is a good entertainment, with detective Eddie Valient suffering the slings and arrows of trying to solve a crime in a town where logic goes out the window. Although I don't consider it a family film, most of the stuff that likely might concern parents would probably go over the heads of the little children watching it.
The film, though, is full of animators' in-jokes. Only someone with an historical perspective of cartoons is likely to get some of the throwaways sneaked into the film. For instance, at one point, Valiant is falling from a height in Toontown, and He's saved by being caught by a Toon woman. We first see her from the back, and we think that possibly she might be Jessica Rabbit. But then we see her face, which is Coyote ugly.
Spoilers follow: That's a funny enough sight gag, but the capper is that her face was the winning entry in a contest run by the newspaper comic strip, Li'l Abner. In that strip, there was supposed to be a woman so ugly that her face was never shown. She was Lena the Hyena. Finally, the strip ran a contest to see who could come up with the best face for her, and the result, which I seem to recall, may have been drawn by Basil Wolverton, was what you saw on the screen.
Another: near the close of the film, after the brick wall of the warehouse broke open, the first glimpse of the Toontown area we see shows trees and flowers swaying in the breeze. That view was from the first Disney color cartoon, Trees and Flowers. There are other cartoon tidbits scattered throughout the film, and they're fun to spot.
A really good film for animation historians, as well as being entertaining.