Betty Boop's May Party (1933) User Reviews

Betty Boop's May Party is another of the Max Fleischer cartoons that defies description

[tavm · 7/10 · 30 August 2010]

In this Max Fleischer cartoon short, Betty Boop is queen of some steam ship party that lands on dock as various animal passengers get out and continue the celebration. One of the elephants gets his tusks stuck in a rubber tree and when he gets them out, the liquid in that tree starts spreading to some places. Animated by Dave Tendlar, this was one of the most surrealistic of the Fleischer animated shorts that I've ever seen what with the stretching of some of the scenes and characters that happen near the end. As you'd expect in many of these early '30s cartoons, there isn't much of a plot and not everything makes sense but because of the imaginative sequences, you just don't care! So on that note, Betty Boop's May Party is worth a look.

What it might have looked like if Salvador Dali and Timothy Leery had teamed up to make a cartoon!

[planktonrules · 8/10 · 22 September 2013]

Bimbo and Betty Boop are King and Queen of the May party and they take a boat ride with about 10,000,000 of their pals to an odd place where they have a wonderful time.

I heartily agree with the other reviewer for this film--it really defies description. You just have to see it to believe it! Now this is certainly NOT true of most Betty Boop cartoons, but this one is definitely mega-strange in almost every way. In many of the earlier Boop cartoons, they had a lot of strange sight gags with anthropomorphic suns, buildings and the like, but here practically everything comes to life and has a weirdness about it--but a weirdness you'll probably like. Then, after a while, rubber is accidentally shot all over Betty's party, and then things get even weirder. Again, you have to see it to believe it! Excellent animation, great gags and total weirdness--this one is worth your time.

Basically a one gag short, but it's a funny gag.

[llltdesq · 8/10 · 10 July 2002]

This cartoon revolves around the consequences of everything being sprayed with rubber and is therefore simply one long running gag. But Betty is Betty, the jokes that "bounce" (sorry) off the main premise are fairly good and a good time is had by all. In print and available. Well worth watching. Recommended.

Some dude once wrote a book or novel about the substance known as . . .

[oscaralbert · 6/10 · 27 December 2019]

. . . "Ice Nine." ("CAT'S CRADLE" may ring the bell for the exact title of this tome.) The way I remember things from my one reading of this way back in third grade (when it was on Mrs. Sharp's summer reading list, since she thought that its title suggested a kiddie story) is that one drop of ICE NINE unleashed freely into Earth's environment would almost instantly transform every ounce of H2O into ice, dooming all life as we know it. (Naturally, this produced my life-long aversion to ever having a smidgen of ice in any of my drinks, thanks to Mrs. Sharp!) BETTY BOOP'S MAY PARTY may be the main inspiration for CAT'S CRADLE, as it features a rubber tree with a "No tapping!" sign which is inadvertently tapped in the middle of the cartoon by an elephant's tusks. When the pachyderm retrieves his ivories, liquid rubber begins oozing out of the punctured tree trunk in vast volumes. By the end of BETTY BOOP'S MAY PARTY, Earth's surface--and even the pictured rivers--have been transformed into rubbery trampolines, leaving little hope for the Future of Humanity (given the unlikelihood of Agriculture being able to flourish in this newly contaminated environment).

Another Betty Boop winner

[TheLittleSongbird · 8/10 · 27 November 2016]

Fleischer were responsible for some brilliant cartoons, some of them still among my favourites. Their visual style often stunning and some of the most imaginative and ahead of its time in animation.

The character of Betty Boop, one of their most famous and prolific characters, may not be for all tastes and sadly not as popular now, but her sex appeal was quite daring for the time and to me there is an adorable sensual charm about her. The charm, sensuality and adorability factors are here and she's fun to watch. The rest of the gang are similarly enormously entertaining.

'Betty Boop's May Party' is not quite up there with Betty's best, but is wonderfully bizarre and never less than enormously entertaining, with some very imaginative, insane and very funny humour. The cartoon's thin on plot and it is somewhat one-joke, but the atmosphere, humour and visual style more than compensate and keep things afloat.

Furthermore, the black and white animation is extremely good, smooth, meticulously detailed and well drawn with the black and white not looking too primitive. A lot of it is actually very imaginative as well, some of the most inventive, fantastically surreal and eye-popping of the early Betty Boop cartoons to me. Even better is the music, which is rousing, catchy and unquestionably accessible to anybody who loves or is familiar with the composition style.

All in all, another Betty Boop winner. 8/10 Bethany Cox