I just took a look at this cartoon at the National Film Preservation Board site and it is a dull little thing, concerned with the current hit song "Yes, We Have No Bananas", which was so overexposed by this time that Eddie Cantor would have his own hit with "I've Got the 'Yes We Have No Bananas' Blues". The tall tale that the Colonel tells of how he ended the Great Banana Shortage involves the usual comic tropes of the period, including cannibals.
If you go to the NFB site and look at the cartoon to make up your own mind -- always a fine thing to my way of thinking -- you will find that whoever wrote the commentary on the film seems to think that the real problem is that this was made by people who did not think the way the commentator did, like a 21st individual. This failure caused all of Bray's first-rate talent to leave him and form their own successful cartoon studios -- where they made cartoons invoking the Black Cannibal trope for the next quarter of a century.
Like I said, I don't like this cartoon, but you might -- or might not. In either case, it will be for your own reasons. I do think that when you look at a cartoon, it makes some sense to regard it in the context of its own era. Otherwise, we should get upset with it because it doesn't concern itself with Global Warming or whatever fashionable Overwhelming World Problem assaults you when you read this. I only hope it's as important as a banana shortage.
If you go to the NFB site and look at the cartoon to make up your own mind -- always a fine thing to my way of thinking -- you will find that whoever wrote the commentary on the film seems to think that the real problem is that this was made by people who did not think the way the commentator did, like a 21st individual. This failure caused all of Bray's first-rate talent to leave him and form their own successful cartoon studios -- where they made cartoons invoking the Black Cannibal trope for the next quarter of a century.
Like I said, I don't like this cartoon, but you might -- or might not. In either case, it will be for your own reasons. I do think that when you look at a cartoon, it makes some sense to regard it in the context of its own era. Otherwise, we should get upset with it because it doesn't concern itself with Global Warming or whatever fashionable Overwhelming World Problem assaults you when you read this. I only hope it's as important as a banana shortage.
