Bosko's Holiday (1931)

What a beautiful movie!

Plot so thin, it passes unnoticed.

I have absolutely never seen anything like this movie before. You have to see this movie.

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

The Bosko cartoons may not be animation masterpieces, but they are fascinating as examples of Looney Tunes in their early days before the creation of more compelling characters and funnier and more creative cartoons.While there are better Bosko cartoons, there are also worse. 'Bosko's Holiday' is watchable, but only just a little above average, so as far as Bosko cartoons go in ranking it's somewhere in the middle. As ever with a Bosko cartoon, the story is slight, would actually agree that it's even more slight and more generic than usual. There are some inventive gags here, but they don't come consistently and others are forgettable and tired in timing.Another issue is Bosko himself, not an interesting character and not a particularly endearing one either. Honey is not a great character either, but fares better, having some charm and not being annoying. Pacing has its slow spots too.On the other hand, the animation is not bad at all. Not exactly refined but fluid and crisp enough with some nice detail, it is especially good in the meticulous backgrounds and some remarkably flexible yet natural movements for Bosko. The music doesn't disappoint either, its infectious energy, rousing merriment, lush orchestration and how well it fits with the animation is just a joy.As aforementioned, some of the gags are quite inventive, like the beginning gag, the part with the doghouse and the car and the ending.In conclusion, a one-time watch but will never be a favourite any time soon. 6/10 Bethany Cox

. . . would baby cars be called "carries?" is the question BOSKO'S HOLIDAY begs. Near the beginning of BOSKO'S HOLIDAY, he whistles for his car AS IF it were a dog, and the car emerges from a building without a garage door drawn to look like a typical doghouse, loping along dog-like on all fours (tires), soon followed by three baby cars, or carries. Of course, there are not very many current Carries of note listed on this site, and perhaps the most remembered--Carrie Fisher--passed on to a Galaxy Far Far Away, it was announced at 10 AM Hollywood time this morning. (I assume Carrie Coon still survives, but her most notable role was Nick's sister Margo in GONE GIRL, which isn't saying much, and you can only count Sissy Spacek (1976) or Chloe Grace Moretz (2013) as Carries for a year, at best. About the only other remarkable thing about BOSKO'S HOLIDAY is its closing warning about backdoor sex, when Honey's actual dog emerges from a hollow log at 6:48 and licks her rump when neither she nor Bosko can see what's going on, causing Honey--who had apparently whispered a request about going over to the Dark Side into her ear, upsetting her, earlier during their picnic--to slap Bosko in the face (as he would have deserved, had HE followed his Dark Heart and done the actual A***Ingus himself).

Bosko's telephone can't get its owner to wake up no matter how insistently it rings. The phone beats the alarm clock (also sleeping) with its receiver and orders it to wake up their owner. The panicky clock can't get him up either -- not by its own ringing nor by hitting a brush against his bedpan. In desperation, the clock stabs Bosko in the rear with its hand. Bosko wakes up screaming, and sleepily answers the phone. It's Honey. She wants to go on a picnic.Bosko cranks up the car, sends home the little baby cars that try to follow and drives to her place. Soon the two sweethearts are off to the woods. Bosko easily fixes a tire that his dog bit a hole in. He has less luck winning Honey's forgiveness after whispering an ungentlemanly suggestion in her ear."Bosko's Holiday" has even less plot than usual. There isn't even the usual calamity to provide excitement. The gags are crude and rude: at one point, Bosko tries to make Honey hungry by chewing noisily with his mouth open. The short is further undermined by later entries that have scenes and gags nearly identical to this one. The film feels like a generic-label Bosko cartoon.

I'm not going to spend a whole lot of time discussing this short in detail, as I want to discuss the character in general and his place in the history of the studio and in animation history. I will, however, discuss some details here from this specific short, so there are minor spoilers: This cartoon is cute and has some good visual bits, but it isn't anything earthshaking. It's inherently limited by the main character-Bosko. There are some very good gags in the beginning with Bosko's phone working frantically to try and wake him up (along with help from his alarm clock and the ending gag is funny, but it doesn't really do much overall. That's because Bosko isn't all that interesting. One of his "big" scenes features him exaggeratedly eating a sandwich (I guess somebody really liked that visual, because it's used in at least one other Bosko short, down to practically the last detail).At this point, Warner Brothers hadn't been doing their own animation for long and it was, at best, no better than third, behind Disney and Fleischer. Lantz may also have been ahead of them at this stage. Granted, those studios had all been doing animation longer. But they were doing significantly better work. For example, at roughly the same time that Bosko's Holiday was done, Fleischer did Bimbo's Initiation, which is considerably better, though the irony is, Bimbo fared no better than Bosko did, for basically the same reason-not much personality for him either. What Bimbo's Initiation has that Bosko's Holiday sorely lacks is better gags and much better pacing and timing (the fact that Betty Boop is in Bimbo's Initiation didn't hurt).Bosko didn't last at Warner Brothers very long-he left with the parting of ways between Harman-Ising and Leon Schlesinger. He was briefly resurrected in altered form at MGM. Though he pales in comparison to the characters later developed at Warner Brothers, he was the first "star" for the studio's animation department and there is some justice to the argument that he paved the way for what later happened at Warner Brothers. Friz Freleng, for one, had an extensive early involvement animating Bosko shorts and later became one of the key directors for Warner Brothers. Bosko certainly did well enough that Warner Brothers kept making animated shorts. He was never the strongest character, but he got the ball rolling.This is a decent short and well worth watching.