User Reviews

Somehow, Papa rabbit is inundated with progeny. He has rabbits up the you know what. The storks deliver the en masse and now Papa has to figure out what to do. He washes huge amounts of clothing, tries to feed them, as they go berserk in the house. If you think the first wave is bad...watch and see what happens next.

The interesting thing about this refound "pilot" for the Oswald the Lucky Rabbit series is how different it is from the succeeding films and hos easy it is to describe that difference. In this film, unlike all the others, the rabbits look and behave more or less like rabbits and they are confronting what might in some sense be described as a realistic rabbit-problem - the multiplication of their progeny. It is common to say that, after the initial rejection of this cartoon, Werks "refined" the character of Oswald the Rabbit, but it would truer to say that he simply anthropomorphised the character (a stage evidently on the road to Mickey Mouse).

I do not in the least like the "Oswald" series and I am not much of a fan of "Mickey Mouse" either, and however much it may be an "advance" in the direction that, for better or worse, US animation was destined to go, it is certainly not an advance in any other respect on the much more interesting and more varied "Alice" cartoons that preceded (in my view amongst the best short cartoons Disney ever produced). But "Poor Papa" is an intriguing glimpse of an alternative path that the animalière cartoon might have taken....and has, to my taste, a charm that the rest of the "Oswald" series singularly lacks.