Books Come to Life in Classic Cartoons from 1930s and 1940s

Remem­ber Spike Jonze’s stop motion film Mourir Auprès de Toi? When we fea­tured it last week, one of our read­ers called it “Slow, bor­ing and unimag­i­na­tive.” He then con­tin­ued:

Warn­er Broth­ers’ ani­ma­tion depart­ment did sev­er­al car­toons based on this con­cept over 50 years ago that packed much more ener­gy and humor into a very few min­utes worth of daz­zling ani­ma­tion.

The read­er was also good enough to point us to one such ear­ly car­toon, which we’re fea­tur­ing today. (See above.)

Released in 1946, the Looney Tunes car­toon Book Revue starts with a scene that may look famil­iar if you watched Jonze’s film: It’s mid­night. The book­store is closed. The lights are off. No crea­tures are stir­ring, not even … Scratch that, the books are stir­ring. They’re com­ing to life. And the hor­mones are run­ning high, a lit­tle too high. You can watch the rest, but we’ll leave you with this tid­bit. In 1994, Book Revue was vot­ed one of the 50 great­est car­toons of all time by a group of 1,000 ani­ma­tion pro­fes­sion­als. We thank Mike for send­ing this our way.

For good mea­sure, let’s also rewind the clock to 1938, when Mer­rie Melodies released Have You Got Any Cas­tles? It may well be the orig­i­nal books-come-to-life car­toon. We start again at mid­night, and the book cov­ers do their thing. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Fu Manchu, The Phan­tom of the Opera, and Franken­stein make an appear­ance, along with oth­er famous lit­er­ary char­ac­ters. When TBS re-released this car­toon decades lat­er, sev­er­al char­ac­ters from this orig­i­nal film (Bill “Bojan­gles” Robin­son from The 39 Steps, and Cab Cal­loway singing “I’ve Got Swing For Sale”) were edit­ed out because of the indel­i­cate way that African-Amer­i­cans were car­i­ca­tured here. Tal­ent these 1930s ani­ma­tors had. But also their blindspots too.…