Susie, the Little Blue Coupe (1952)

This Movie Can Only Be Described With One Word.

Instead, you get a movie that's enjoyable enough, but leaves you feeling like it could have been much, much more.

This film is so real. It treats its characters with so much care and sensitivity.

It's a good bad... and worth a popcorn matinée. While it's easy to lament what could have been...

This is a very neat Silly Symphony, following the life story about a little blue coupe named Susie. The plot takes you on an intriguing and entertaining look at the life of Susie, from her first purchase to her traffic adventures, and from her declining motor health to her stop on the junkyard. The cartoon has great, colorful animation, and nice narration from Winnie-the-Pooh voice actor Sterling Holloway. There's also a nice mixture of comedy and touching moments. Great Silly Symphony!Grade A

"Susie the Little Blue Coupe" is an 8-minute cartoon from Disney that was released back in 1952, so it has its 65th anniversary this year already. If you see the names of all the directors, writers, voice actors, animators etc., then you will find people who were truly successful and prolific back in the day, people who worked on some classics too. And they kinda delivered in terms of this little film we got here. You could maybe call it a really old short version of cars, even if the racing component in here is not that huge. But Susie sure is interesting enough to carry this one from start to finish and it is almost unreal how much happens to her in here, already in the first 4 minutes in fact. This was basically enough for a full feature film I'm tempted to say. The film delivers in terms of comedy, drama and emotion, not hugely in any of these fields, but solid in each. And the animation is indeed as good as you would expect it from a Disney film from the early 1950s. It sure was a great time for cartoons back then and those who love this time and enjoy old animation, canm certainly give this one a go. I myself give it a thumbs-up for sure and I'm gonna accelerate now to end my review, so you can watch this one. Recommended, although I am slightly surprised the Oscars ignored it. I would have thought it to be exactly up their alley. But maybe they struggled with the idea of combining a mechanic character, a machine, with emotion really although I think the filmmakers did a good job there. There may be a reason why Cars is not as well-received as most other Pixar stuff, especially the sequels. Now I am drifting away from this one here, so I'll end the review on this note.

If you would like to see this gem of a film, it appears as a bonus on the DVD of Disney's "Ichabod and Mr. Toad", but you have to work for it. On the menu, go to "games" and take the trivia test. If you answer all the questions correct, you will be treated with a viewing of "Suzie, the Little Blue Coupe"! If you are a fan of the children's books by Bill Peet, you will love this story. Before Peet was a published author, he was one of the top story men at Disney. Not only did he work on classic features like "Dumbo", "Sleeping Beauty", "Peter Pan" and "Lady and the Tramp", he also wrote a number of short films like "Suzie". These include: "Goliath II" (the story of a 6 inch tall elephant) and "Lambert the Sheepish Lion". His storytelling sensibilities are unmistakable in these films and bear his mark like a signature. Peet left Disney around 1965 to write children's books. He died in 2002.

A Walt Disney Cartoon.Sweet & stylish, SUSIE THE LITTLE BLUE COUPE lives a happy life with her owner until wear & tear makes him trade her in for a younger model.This is a very agreeable little film, with plenty of good humor & fine animation and once again illustrates Disney's adeptness at giving sympathetic life to an inanimate object. Susie's story was written by Disney animator Bill Peet and is very similar to those he would later author as a celebrated children's author. As always, Sterling Holloway makes the perfect narrator.Walt Disney (1901-1966) was always intrigued by pictures & drawings. As a lad in Marceline, Missouri, he sketched farm animals on scraps of paper; later, as an ambulance driver in France during the First World War, he drew comic figures on the sides of his vehicle. Back in Kansas City, along with artist Ub Iwerks, Walt developed a primitive animation studio that provided animated commercials and tiny cartoons for the local movie theaters. Always the innovator, his ALICE IN CARTOONLAND series broke ground in placing a live figure in a cartoon universe. Business reversals sent Disney & Iwerks to Hollywood in 1923, where Walt's older brother Roy became his lifelong business manager & counselor. When a mildly successful series with Oswald The Lucky Rabbit was snatched away by the distributor, the character of Mickey Mouse sprung into Walt's imagination, ensuring Disney's immortality. The happy arrival of sound technology made Mickey's screen debut, STEAMBOAT WILLIE (1928), a tremendous audience success with its use of synchronized music. The SILLY SYMPHONIES soon appeared, and Walt's growing crew of marvelously talented animators were quickly conquering new territory with full color, illusions of depth and radical advancements in personality development, an arena in which Walt's genius was unbeatable. Mickey's feisty, naughty behavior had captured millions of fans, but he was soon to be joined by other animated companions: temperamental Donald Duck, intellectually-challenged Goofy and energetic Pluto. All this was in preparation for Walt's grandest dream - feature length animated films. Against a blizzard of doomsayers, Walt persevered and over the next decades delighted children of all ages with the adventures of Snow White, Pinocchio, Dumbo, Bambi & Peter Pan. Walt never forgot that his fortunes were all started by a mouse, or that childlike simplicity of message and lots of hard work will always pay off.