Animated Short of the Day: "Old Mother Hubbard" (Ub Iwerks, 1935)

For the past few days, I've been posting one animated short per day on Facebook and Twitter. I decided it would be a better idea to post them here at the old blog for easier access. The goal of this project is simple - introduce people to animated shorts they might not have seen before. Some of them shorts featured will be well-known, others will be more obscure. There's about a trillion animated shorts online - shorts really are ideal for online viewing - and most people don't think to seek them out.

(Previously featured were the 1973 E.B. White adaptation "The Family That Dwelt Apart" directed by Yvon Mallette and Chuck Jones's hilarious Sherlock Holmes parody "Deduce, You Say" from 1956.)

Today's entry is "Old Mother Hubbard" made by Ub Iwerks in 1935.

Iwerks is best known for his collaborations with Walt Disney, especially his work on the Silly Symphonies series. He left the studio in 1930, feeling overworked and under-credited. (His grand-daughter Leslie has created an excellent documentary about his life and work entitled The Hand Behind the Mouse: The Ub Iwerks Story. It's on the Disney Treasures: Oswald the Lucky Rabbit DVD, and also currently on Daily Motion in five parts.)

He would eventually return in 1940, but today we're going to look at something from his between-Disney years. During that time, he released the "ComiColor cartoons," which contained a bunch of these weird cartoons based on nursery rhymes. "Old Mother Hubbard" is one of my favorites. There's an old mother, and a dog, and a cupboard, but it mostly just uses the rhyme as a jumping off point for a bizarre story.

I especially like the sequence in the middle where the king sings about his poor health. Look at all that pain on his face!