OllieSuave-007
This is a really nice cartoon featuring an assortment of Mother Goose and/or storybook characters, from Humpty Dumpty to the Three Blind Mice and from Bo-Peep to Goldilocks, performing a song and dance for Old King Cole. It's nice how the storybook characters come together like this in one big bash and its clever to see them literally coming out of their respective storybooks. Very imaginative.Grade B
utgard14
Disney Silly Symphonies cartoon with Old King Cole and a bunch of nursery rhyme characters springing forth from the pages of their books at night. It's a concept Disney had done before in black & white and one that would be used to great effect in many other cartoons in the years following this. A fun idea, especially for little kids who (back then) would've known Mother Goose like kids today know Pokemon or whatever else is rotting their brains. It's a good short, despite not having much in the way of a plot. The animation is excellent. The colors are just drop-dead gorgeous! There's a lot of music and singing and I know from reading so many IMDb reviews over the years that inevitably someone will hate it for that and call it corny or dated. Nuts to them! I happen to like the music and found the songs charming. Anyway it's not one of the best Silly Symphonies but it is upbeat and colorful. Try to enjoy it in the spirit it was meant to be viewed in. It's simple kid-friendly entertainment. No fart jokes or double entendres needed.
Robert Reynolds
This is an early color short in the Silly Symphonies series produced by the Disney studio. There will be mild spoilers ahead:It's hard to spoil this short because it's the blandest Disney short I can recall seeing. The basic premise is simple. That may be a large part of the problem with this one.Old King Cole is throwing a party and has invited all the characters in Storybookland to come. That's about it. You see various books open and have buildings pop up relevant to whatever fairy tale it relates to and the visuals are nice, but they can't really compensate for the lackluster music and boring characters.The short is like cotton candy. It's very nice looking and might briefly seem sweet, but in reality, it's just so much air Pretty much every fairy tail character has a brief moment in the spotlight, but nothing is developed to any degree. The Three Blind Mice and Hickory, Dickory, Dock are the only ones which are even halfway memorable.This short is available on the Disney Treasures More Silly Symphonies DVD set. The set is worth having but this short is for die-hard Disney fans who want to see everything.
TheLittleSongbird
As I have said many times, I have a lot of fondness for the Disney Silly Symphonies. Old King Cole I'm afraid doesn't really do all that much for me. It is more tolerable than El Terrible Toreador, The Merry Dwarfs and Cannibal Capers, but if I want a masterpiece status Silly Symphonies I prefer The Old Mill, The Ugly Duckling(1939), The Skeleton Dance, Flowers and Trees, The Goddess of Spring and The Band Concert. I do like the vivid colours and colourful backgrounds, the music although simpler than most cartoons is still full of energy, the nursery rhymes are nice to hear and the dancing is niftily choreographed. And there are some nice parts to the cartoon such as Peter the Pumpkin Eater and his wife and Hickory, Dick and Dock jumping out of Pandora's Box to sound the midnight bells. However, while spotting the characters are a delight most of them are not very appealing to me. They are of the cute but bland kind. And I didn't care for some of the character designs, Old King Cole's features are very over-exaggerated and some of the side characters like the mice and the Pied Piper look like stick figures. There isn't much story to speak of either, it is over-simplistic and is more an excuse for short snippets of nursery rhymes to come to life and in a less charming way than it had potential to. All in all, not much memorable apart from the spotting of the nursery characters and rhymes. 6/10 Bethany Cox
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