Like numerous cartoons from Disney and others, Old King Cole is a storybook come to life. It starts with the old king's castle springing out of a pop-up book, after which assorted characters - the Pied Piper, Little Boy Blue, Old Mother Hubbard, and so on - emerge from similar books. What a cast!
Everyone is eager to attend King Cole's ball, where other fictional folks provide the entertainment. Almost all come from nursery rhymes, although Mary Mary Quite Contrary dances on top of Pandora's Box, an item from ancient Greek mythology. Out of the box come Peter the Pumpkin Eater, skinny Jack Sprat and his plus-size spouse, Goosey Gander, Humpty Dumpty, and more.
Before long everyone is dancing, and even the old king gets out of his throne to whoop it up. When the mice from "Hickory Dickory Dock" strike the chimes for midnight, the partiers go back to their own books and Old King Cole sings goodbye, still dripping wet from a dip in the ballroom fountain. At the end he leaves an empty milk bottle outside his door for pickup in the morning, suggesting that he's a democratic monarch, happy to do his own chores.
Old King Cole has been credited with influencing cartoons made between the 1930s and 1950s by Max and Dave Fleischer, the Warner Bros. animation unit, and Disney's own animators. It was certainly a feather in the cap of director Hand, who went on to be the supervising director of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) and Bambi (1942), two of Disney's finest animated features. Old King Cole is a more modest offering, but it's still fun viewing.
Director: David Hand
Producer: Walt Disney
Animation: Ferdinand Horvath
Music: Frank Churchill, Bert Lewis
With: voices of Allan Watson, The Rhythmettes, Marcellite Garner
Technicolor-7m.
by David Sterritt
