100 Greatest Animated Shorts / Popeye the Sailor meets Sinbad the Sailor / Fleischer Brothers
USA / 1936
Impossible to dislike, Popeye the Sailor meets Sinbad the Sailor is a little gem right from the very first scene. It shows what great work the studio could achieve and how with better management they could have maybe rivalled Disney in the long run. The brutish, Bluto-like Sinbad stomps through the lovely 3D island, bellowing out a swaggering song to his menagerie of monsters: “Who’s the most remarkable extraordinary kind of fellow..?” The ‘rubber pipe’ style character animation is smooth, flowing, and funny and the film remains a treat through to Popeye’s climactic battles at the end.
This was the first of three 16-minute-long colour specials, three times as long as the normal Popeye cartoons, made by Max and Dave Fleischer at the height of Popeye’s popularity. The draw these specials had at the box office was such that they were often billed higher than the main feature. This was an era when Popeye was voted by the public as the most popular cartoon character, ahead of Disney’s massively popular Mickey and Donald and ahead of the Warner Brothers Porky Pig.
The entertaining story features Sinbad declaring that he is the world’s greatest sailor, before Popeye shows up, leading to the hard-bitten New Yorker having to undertake a series of challenges and battles to prove his worth, ending with a battle with Sinbad himself. Lots of scenes include the Fleischer’s ‘tabletop’ technique, in which the character drawings were photographed in front of three dimensional model sets on a revolving tabletop, which produced the fantastic looking illusion of three dimensional scrolling backgrounds.
The film hinted that the Fleischer’s building up for a feature film, and perhaps shows how colourful and popular that film could have been if they had done something in this raucous Popeye / Betty Boop style with its more grown up appeal. The popularity of Fleischer shorts like this also gave Disney, in the years leading up to ‘Snow White’, a big impetus to produce something special and different, to top the Fleischers growing success and re-establish his studio as the ground breaking market leader. After the monumental success of Disney’s ‘Snow White (1937) the Fleischer Brothers seem to have decided (or were pressured by their financiers Paramount) into going down a more traditional fairy tale kind of route.
The Fleischer features rather paled beside Disney’s bold emotional masterpieces of the era. Instead of producing something wild and exciting like Popeye, Betty Boop or even their later Superman shorts for their own feature, the joyful freedom of their animation wasn’t much apparent in the lacklustre ‘Gullivers Travels’(1939). Opting for rotoscoped realism rather than the tabletop system, the Fleischers were no doubt influenced by Disney’s more subtle use of the technique in Snow White, although Max Fleischer actually invented this system back in the early part of the century. The follow up ‘Mr Bug Goes to Town (1942) showed some improvement, but soon after this the studio collapsed due to financial mismanagement, in fighting between the brothers and interference from Paramount.
Note: The 100 greatest animated shorts is an list of opinions and not an order of value from best to worst. All suggestions, comments and outrage are welcome but please don’t shoot us, it’s only a list!