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The 1930s often gave audiences cartoons chock full of happy singing animals and tons of cuteness. The edgier cartoons were mostly absent, though Disney's stock of reliable characters were awfully good. Today, these "sweet" cartoons are a pretty sad lot when you can compare them to the wonderful (and much more violent) cartoons of the 40s and 50s. However, making this comparison isn't 100% fair--this sort of cartoon was still waiting to be born.

For 1935, this cartoon is much better than average but I am frankly not particularly fond of it. My score of 7 represents it compared to the films of the day, though today I'd be hard pressed to give it a 4, as it's amazingly dull despite some very nice animation. The kittens bounce about the house and get into mischief--and this isn't enough to sustain a film. Speaking of animation, I loved the snow scenes--they were just so beautifully done. Ditto for the backgrounds. As for the three kittens, they actually were not as well animated as many of Disney's films of the day, but apparently the cuteness and the rest of the film was enough to propel it to the Oscar for Best Animated Short. Though, if you were to compare it to the other nominees that year, it is the best short. However, my nod would have been to award the Oscar to a more traditional Disney film--such as THE BAND CONCERT or MICKEY'S POLO TEAM.

By the way, you probably will notice that the film presents Black people as rather hard-hearted servants or as "pickaninny" dolls. Thank goodness times have changed.