15. Bosko Shipwrecked! (1931)

Release date: September 19th, 1931

Series: Looney Tunes

Director: Hugh Harman

Starring: Bernard Brown (Bosko), Rudy Ising (Captain, Cannibal, Lion, Hippo)

After becoming acquainted with Foxy, we meet back with Bosko for another cartoon in the Looney Tunes series, this time Bosko Shipwrecked!. Bosko Shipwrecked! entails Bosko attempting to escape a group of cannibals after he gets stranded on an island.

A wave crashes into the title card, melting away any lettering (which is executed very smoothly!) and we see a ship rolling on mounds of waves. Bosko tries to fight back against the treacherous storm, but his body spins around on the wheel and gets jabbed in the ass by one of the handles. There’s also a shipmate of Bosko’s, just an anthropomorphic dog, who repeatedly cries for help and tries to brace against the storm. This sequence is REALLY well animated! The boat rolls like butter off of the waves, and the rocking back and forth of the boat immerses you into the experience. With that said, it is stretched out WAY too long. This sequence takes up nearly 2 minutes exactly! It’s certainly better than a long sequence with bad animation, but the impact of the beautiful animation softens the longer it’s stretched out. It has you wondering “Will this ever end??” 

The answer is yes. A wave hits the ship and we see Bosko’s face come towards us before fading to black. Fade back in to Bosko unconscious on the shore of an island.

Two monkeys notice their visitor and eagerly chatter to each other, wondering what hijinks they should do. They focus on Bosko’s hat, fighting over who gets possession of it.

Bosko regains consciousness after the monkeys shake a tree branch, causing an egg to fly out of its nest and hit Bosko right in the face. He asks “Where am i?” and is answered by a parrot repeatedly exclaiming “Yolk on you!” in hysterics. Thankfully, the bird (after a gratingly annoying sequence of obnoxious laughter) is shut up after it gals out of the tree branch and hits a log, prompting its feathers to fly off. Like in Ain’t Nature Grand!, the bird angrily fashions the feathers into a coat and stalks off.

While Bosko is busy having a good laugh at the bird’s failures, he’s interrupted by the sound of a ferocious roar and the shadow of a lion.

Initiate the chase sequence. Bosko runs for his life away from the lion, and we have some neat camera angles as Bosko slides beneath the belly of the beast to get on the opposite side. However, it suffers like the beginning of the short. Good animation, and I appreciate them for experimenting with the camera angles, but it stretches on for way longer than it needs to be.

In the midst of the sequence, Bosko hops across a lake using stepping stones, when he accidentally steps on the snout of an alligator. The alligator snaps its jaws, and with some quick thinking, Bosko dodges out of the way as the lion charges head first into the alligator’s gullet. Then, in a wonderfully morbid, cruel, yet creative maneuver, Bosko ties the tail of the lion sticking out from the alligator’s mouth to a tree branch. Bosko escapes unscathed, and the lion... it’s a goner.

Conveniently, Bosko spots a rowboat and rows across the lake, throwing an anchor onto a rock... which just so happens to be a hippo who screams in pain. The hippo takes off with the anchor (and thusly Bosko) lodged in its skin, Bosko eventually being thrown to freedom.

Or not. He lands on the outside of a boiling cauldron and screams, and finds himself in a native village full of cannibals. Bosko cartoons are already uncomfortable to watch (sorry Bosko) because of his minstrelsy, but this is extra uncomfortable. I get that it was 1931, which shouldn’t excuse it at all, but still. Thankfully, they have little screen time, probably because a third of the cartoon was Bosko being thrown around in a ship.

Bosko is ordered to be eaten by the cannibal king (a string of nonsensical garbles, and a final “And make it snappy!”). As every cartoon character does, Bosko just so happens to have a gun on him. He pulls it out and hesitates not to shoot, but the gun is a popgun instead of a real one. Bosko runs for dear life, and seeks refuge in the hippo’s mouth he has so cruelly lodged an anchor in previously.

He pops out by lifting a tile in its back, and all’s well that ends well as he blows “You’re a Horse’s Ass” (a piece that would be commonly used by Carl Stalling in future cartoons, Bugs Bunny turning into a literal jackass in Falling Hare comes to mind) out of a horn he plucked from the hippo’s (rhino? Hippo/rhino fusion?) snout. Iris out.

This was an interesting cartoon. Filled with more plot and thusly better than most Bosko cartoons, but the pacing felt either too slow or too fast with little in-between, and the entire “native cannibal village” thing wasn’t pleasant to watch. However, there ARE some good bits of animation, such as the opening sequence or the chase scene between Bosko and the lion. The cartoon is still high energy, but after the previous two Foxy cartoons, which were much more energetic, hyper, and cheery, this one feels like its coming down from a high. I’m being too judgmental though, it’s a good cartoon considering what we’ve seen thus far, and hopefully the quality will continue to rise as we go into 1932 and 1933.