Have You Got Any Castles? (1938)
Another entry in the "books come alive" subgenre, with possibly more books coming alive than any other. We begin with some musical numbers, notably the various pages of Green Pastures all joining in on a song, The Thin Man entering The White House Cookbook and exiting much fatter, and The House of Seven (Clark) Gables singing backup to Old King Cole. The Three Musketeers break loose, become Three Men on a Horse, grab the Seven Keys to Baldpate, and set the Prisoner of Zenda free. They are soon chased by horsemen from The Charge of the Light Brigade and Under Two Flags and beset by the cannons of All Quiet on the Western Front. All this disturbs the sleep of Rip Van Winkle, who opens Hurricane so that everyone is (all together now) Gone with the Wind.
- Frank Tashlin
- Friz Freleng
- Jack Miller
- Washington Irving
- Thorne Smith
- Jacob Grimm
- Daniel Defoe
- Gaston Leroux
- Wilhelm Grimm
- Johanna Spyri
- Robert Louis Stevenson
- Dashiell Hammett
- Sax Rohmer
- Charles Dickens
- Mary Shelley
- Alexandre Dumas
- H.G. Wells
- Harriet Beecher Stowe
Rating: 6.42/10 by 25 users
Alternative Title:
Country:
United States of America
Language:
English
Runtime: 00 hour 07 minutes
Budget: $0
Revenue: $0
Plot Keyword: cartoon, snake charmer, musical, prison escape, musketeer, book comes to life, short film
A rather annoying cuckoo clock summons us all to the town crier who rather monotonically introduces us to figures from fictional history. Amongst them are "Fu Manchu", "Frankenstein" and "Dr. Jekyll" - but they are not so menacing after all as they indulge in something akin to the dance of the "Sugar Plum Fairy". That's the start of our ensuing jolly and quite innovative trawl through a library of books that gives the animators an excuse to use the titles as some creative inspiration for the drawings and for the musicians to imaginatively score along to, too. I especially liked "Whistler's Mother", "Bulldog Drummin" and that has to be Charles Laughton on the front of "Mutiny on the Bounty"... Do we get to castles? Well not really - but that doesn't seem to matter as the snake charmers and even Henry VIII get in on the act. Who knew little boy actually blew!!?
