Excellent, a Must See

While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

One of the worst ways to make a cult movie is to set out to make a cult movie.

Story: It's very simple but honestly that is fine.

Have You Got Any Castles? (1938)*** (out of 4) Extremely entertaining Merrie Melodies short has a familiar plot but it's taken to the limit here. The animated film pretty much takes place on a book shelf as various forms of literature comes to life. We get various stories including Frankenstein, The Invisible Man, The House of Seven "Gables", So Big, Dracula, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Little Women, The Thin Man, The Good Earth and countless others. The animation is quite good throughout this short with a lot of great attention to various details. There are a few Hollywood celebs who make appearances here including W.C. Fields and a funny spoof with Clark Gable. Mel Blanc does fine work in the form of several of the characters but we'd come to expect nothing less. What really makes this film stand apart from countless others that tried the same story is the actual music, which is incredibly entertaining. Carl W. Stalling and Milt Franklyn hit all the right notes and really keep the action moving. Everything mixed together makes this one of the better ways to tell this familiar stories so fans of animation or any of the books mentioned should have a grand time.

A previous reviewer wrote "The reference to Ferber's "So Big" makes fun of a vain actress. (I'm not positive about that caricature. Katharine Hepburn perhaps? She had been box office poison for some time.)"That was Greta Garbo. The urban legend about the size of her feet was current at the time, and several of these shorts (e.g., Hollywood Steps Out) reference that.The part about these 'topical' shorts that surprises me - my nine year old son, who has NO idea who any of these people are, watches these with almost as much enjoyment as the more timeless episodes. Some of the bits - Bill 'Bojangles' Robinson tap dancing up The 39 Steps, or the hideously dated images in the Cab Calloway sequence - which may strike him as offensive in years to come, just blend in with the rest for him right now.

If cartoon characters can interact with each other in "Who Framed Roger Rabbit", why not literary characters? Instead of producing another wacky cartoon about Bugs Bunny, Tweety or another silly character, Merry Melodies did a wise move in crafting a musical/short story about book characters.Opening with a dance number with Mr. Hyde, Fu Man Chu, the Phantom of the Opera and Frankenstein, it next moves to Green Pastures, Old King Cole, Louis Pasteur, Mutiny on the Bounty, Heidi etc. etc.But the interaction is also interesting. For example, Thin Man becomes fat after visiting a cook book, Rip Van Winkle tries to prevent himself from hearing Old King Cole...After that, a plot develops: the Three Musketeers steal the 7 keys to Baldpate in order to free the Prisoner of Zenda. They are instantly chased and they have to flee from the cannons of the Light Brigade, Robinson Crusoe and All Quiet on the Western Front. Ultimately, Rip Van Winkle blows everybody with a Hurricane and it's all Gone With the Wind...I can't stop myself from watching it, because it's simply a highly imaginative and entertaining musical story and it's funnier than some Disney and Looney Tunes cartoons. I (disappointingly) think that it's the kind of story that we won't find in today's children's videos and for a long time, if it's not for ever. It's desolating, because it's some great stuff.

There's a great deal to say about this short and some detail is necessary, so spoilers are ahead.This short is an excellent example of a type of cartoon that Warner Brothers did very effectively: Characters from books and/or magazines coming to life or being used as part of a sight gag. Generally set in a bookstore, the first done was Three's a Crowd, done in 1933.Castles originally featured a caricature of Alexander Wollcott doing an opening and a close as the "Town Crier", but the studio heads were afraid Wollcott might take offense and the framing sequences were removed. Caricatures were a staple of animation by this point and Castles features a number of them.Why did the animators do these type of cartoons? I suspect it was because it gave them the advantage of using material that would be very familiar to the audience on at least two levels: books that were familiar to a fairly well-read public (or magazine titles familiar to that same public) as well as a visual connection, given that many of these books had also been made into films. Given that animation is a very visual medium by it's nature, audience familiarity with titles and faces allowed the animators to fire dozens of short sight gags at the audience in a short time-frame. Audience recognition of W.C Fields or Greta Garbo, coupled with wide familiarity with books like So Red the Rose and So Big makes the gags work in different ways for different viewers. They did these for the same reason books were adapted into films: audience familiarity with the subject matter. Studios routinely optioned film rights to best-selling books on the not unsound theory that someone who read the book and liked it would pay to see a film version as well. Back in the 1930s, the four principle forms of entertainment were radio, movies, reading and music. Cartoons strip-mined all four for material and Warner's did this superbly. They even re-used themselves on occasion, including a bit in Castles that was first used in Clean Pastures and is used here ("Swing For Sale").This short is in print on Looney Tunes Golden Collection, Vol. 2, with the original Wollcott framing sequences included. Highly recommended.