Horst_In_Translation Review of Jack and the Beanstalk

Jack and the Beanstalk (1933)

Not much of a message, but still a charming watch from start to finish

[6/10 · 13 September 2018]

"Jack and the Beanstalk" is an 8-minute cartoon from 1933, so this one has its 85th anniversary this year and sadly everybody who worked on it back then is long dead, but yeah this was the year when Hitler came into power in Germany just to show you how old it is. It is a color cartoon though, which definitely helps and is one of the main reasons why I enjoyed the watch. Early on, it feels a bit like a musical as absolutely everybody is singing: the human characters, every single animal (including spiders) and even handbags and it was kinda fun. afterwards, there isn't too much dialogue anymore. i will spare you the story here. I assume everybody who reads this knows the basic plot at least about the magic beans that bring little Jack up in the skies to a castle inhabited by giants. You probably have seen the Disney version with Mickey being Jack that is much more known than this Ub Iwerks production we have here. At the core of it all, it is not really about escaping from the sleeping giant, but about the female and the male giant fighting for the human delicacy. I allso liked the way in which Jack escapes at the end and it much better than a boring "oh it was just a dream" explanation. Pretty brave too to depict death actually at the end and the giant's grave and it shows that cartoons back then were absolutely not (only) aimed at younger audiences. Did anybody else feel the giant looked a bit like the main antagonist from these many Popeye short films, Bluto I think is his name. Anyway, enjoyable film visually and audibly, I very much recommend it to those who love old cartoons. It's probably a bit on the underseen side. Everybody else can skip it I guess. Greatness it's not.