Mariutch (1930) User Reviews

The animation, as usual, is nice, but that's as far as it goes with this Screen Song release

[llltdesq · 5/10 · 5 November 2006]

This is one of the dullest, most uninteresting shorts that I've seen from the Fleischer Studios. I will talk about the short a bit, so even though there really isn't anything to spoil, I'm giving a spoiler warning here: This is part of the Fleischer "Screen Song" series, where roughly the first half of the short is animation and the last half or so is a song being sung while the lyrics are projected and there's something pacing the lyrics in time to the music. Think of this as an early form of karaoke, only the entire audience in the theater is asked to sing along.

The title of the short is also the title of the song and, as far as I can tell, the animation seems to tell the same story (more or less) as the song they play later does-a couple have a tearful parting, the husband thinks his wife has gone to Italy only to discover that she's working as a "hootchie cootchie" dancer in a tent on the pier at Coney Isle.

The animation is excellent, which is to be expected from virtually every short the studio did and the animation deviates from the song in at least one particular-the husband isn't nearly so innocent in the cartoon portion as his song makes him out to be-a pretty girl on the boardwalk winks at him and he suddenly forgets how saddened his wife's departure has made him. There's some really fine character animation here and I really wish this had been all animation without the sing-along at all.

The song is sung in dialect, a very thick Italian dialect and it hasn't aged well at all. I'd never even heard of the title, let alone ever heard the song itself before. This makes it difficult to enjoy the whole short. There are excellent shorts in the series, but this one isn't one of them. Given the songs Fleischer used in other shorts (not all of them in Screen Songs), this one is a bit of a letdown.

If you really like the Fleischer animation style, you'll like this short, but except for some background animation in the last part of the short, once the sing-along starts, it goes off the rails.

Worth watching at least once.

Mariutch was another fascinating early Max Fleischer Screen Song cartoon

[tavm · 6/10 · 28 November 2009]

Just watched this Max Fleischer Screen Song cartoon on YouTube. It concerns a little Italian guy and his farewell to his heavyset wife. He misses her but temporarily forgets her when he sees a pretty woman flirting at him. That stops when he sees a stern policeman but that turns out to be a statue a store owner takes back for display. When he sees another cop, he kicks him thinking he's also a statue but turns to be real and chases him. This Italian guy then goes to a carnival to watch a big woman dance. He looks closely and sees it's his wife. It's at this point that he invites us to follow the Bouncing Ball as he sings the title song. This was quite an amusing animated short done by the legendary Grim Natwick who provides such fascinating drawings of women which should come as no surprise since he helped create Betty Boop and Walt Disney's Snow White. And while singer Billy Murray's stereotypical Italian dialect isn't acceptable in these Politically Correct times, the song he uses it in still has some of that Old World charm. So if you're an animation buff who's interested in all things Fleischer, I highly recommend Mariutch.