A delightful Dave Fleischer cartoon and its unexpected revival at the heart of 1990s hipster filmmaking.
The 1935 Dave Fleischer cartoon Dancing on the Moon is the very epitome of ‘charming’ – 8 minutes of fluff that has no greater meaning than to entertain without the frantic slapstick of a Tom and Jerry or Bugs Bunny or the saccharin blandness of Mickey Mouse. Like most of Fleischer’s work, it feels as though it belongs to another time while being essentially about nothing, much like many of the most entertaining Betty Boop and Felix the Cat cartoons. The animation, the sound and the style don’t have the timeless that makes many of the cartoons produced by MGM, Warner Bros, Hanna-Barbera and Disney still feel very modern, and like much of the Fleischer output, the public domain status of the film means that even the best print will be a little rough around the edges – not a bad thing, as it turns out because it adds a certain uniqueness and magical weirdness to the animation when seen now in worn-out prints.
Dancing on the Moon has a basic premise – The Honeymoon Express offers trips to the Moon for one dollar per couple, an offer taken up by a Noah’s Ark collection of animals. Only the cat couple arrive late, with Mr Cat just making it onto the rocket ship but Mrs Cat being accidentally left behind. While his fellow passengers enjoy a romantic interlude, Mr Cat is left playing solitaire and dancing what looks suspiciously like a mopey moonwalk by himself. On arrival home, each couple is given a delivery from the stork while Mr Cat receives a sound thrashing from his neglected missus.
It’s all very lightweight but the title song, which runs throughout the cartoon permeated by snatches of vaguely risque dialogue, is delightful and the whole experience is a lot of fun.
The cartoon would later become a central part of the 1992 indie movie Another Girl, Another Planet, one of Michael Almereyda’s early experiments with the Fisher-Price PXL 2000 Pixelvision camera, the toy camera that recorded grainy black and white images onto audio cassette tapes and was briefly the darling of indie filmmakers and music video producers. The appearance of the cartoon, filmed off TV screens via the PXL 2000, added a new sense of otherness to it and briefly brought it to the attention of a new generation of film hipsters.
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