The Flying Bear

In the 1930s, the Harmon-Ising production team produced some of the most awful cartoons ever made. They tended to be sickeningly sweet and included a lot of singing--which might be entertaining to very small kids, but the average person trying to watch their films today would find them downright annoying. Unlike later Warner Brothers and MGM cartoons (two studios that they worked for), there was no edge to the toons and almost no humor--much like injecting massive doses of the Teletubbies and musicals into a normal toon! In light of this awful background, I was surprised that I actually DID enjoy this film. While it was pretty cute in its anthropomorphic airplane and early, cuter incarnation of Barney Bear, it still had good quality animation and a winning story,...and absolutely NO SINGING (hallelujah!).

Barney is building an airplane and it's a cute and tiny little thing compared to all the modern fighters and bombers. Not a whole lot happens during the course of the cartoon, but just seeing the film unfold was an interesting time capsule. Not a great cartoon by any means, still it held my interest and was a quality product.