There is just so much movie here. For some it may be too much. But in the same secretly sarcastic way most telemarketers say the phrase, the title of this one is particularly apt.

The acting is good, and the firecracker script has some excellent ideas.

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.

. . . and never just plain Ol' "Topia." Perhaps this philosophical question can be answered in the context of INKI AT THE CIRCUS. There are four characters in this Warner Bros. animated short: the young male African-American circus entertainer of the title, a brown dog, a red beret-wearing Scottish gray dog, and (of course) the mysterious Black Minah Bird who is partial to classical music (especially Mendelssohn). Fingal's Cave notwithstanding, many if not most Americans would equate the Inki character here (and in his four other Looney Tunes outings) with Red Commie KGB Chief Vlad "The Mad Russian" Putin's White House Sock-Puppet-in-Chief, Don Juan Rump. Though the Minah Bird is usually taken by "those in the know" as the stand-in for Putin himself, as drawn by Warner's prognosticating Prophets of Doom, an argument might be made for the gray dog fitting that role during INKI AT THE CIRCUS, since he's wearing a RED beret. However, if we ignore the pending Rain of Nuclear Warheads soon to sprinkle down amid the sea of corpses left by Back-sliding America's Heaven-sent Punishments including Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, Maria, Nate, Wildfire Mariah, and the 600 laid low by Repug Party Massacre Shooter Steve Paddock, perhaps a few simple folks can see INKI AT THE CIRCUS simply as a product of Topia (that is, a kiddie cartoon).

Probably the only place where you can easily find the Inki cartoons is on YouTube, given that most people would rather not show such images of Africans (when I was really young, I found "Little Lion Hunter" on a video cassette and even made a copy of it, but I don't remember which cassette it was). In this case, Inki is in a circus, billed as an African wild man; that's the kind of talk that I would expect from white Americans of the 1940s. Anyway, two dogs start trying to yank the bone out of his hair (one might interpret this as a representation of how the colonial powers sought to carve up Africa: they all wanted it for themselves, and never gave any thought to letting the indigenous people have their own land). But, sure enough, the silent-but-aggressive Minah bird has also come to the circus...and he's looking for a fight.I guess that as long as we understand what these cartoons portray, it's easier to accept them. Worth seeing.

This was a strange cartoon. It was obviously produced in an era when cultural commentary in films was considerably different from our days of political correctness. One reviewer said that Inki was a Hottentot. That comment intrigued me simply because I did not know what a Hottentot was. This cartoon character would be described today as an African-American child about three years old. His hair is adorned with a large white soup bone, and this bone is depicted as an object of desire for the two dogs in the piece. The cast of characters is rounded out with a strange bird who apparently possesses incredible strength. He arrives on the scene locked inside a steel safe, and with no apparent effort, smashes the door to the ground. The plot in this cartoon is virtually nonexistent. The dogs are chasing the little kid to get the bone and whenever they succeed, they promptly bury it. Naturally, the bone and the kid pop back up, and the chase begins anew. The bird more or less wanders around with no apparent purpose other than to look and act weird which he does with aplomb. The cartoon ends when the bone has been captured, and in order to find out who captures the bone, you'll have to see the cartoon. We don't want to spoil the suspense for you. Frankly, you can find better things to do with your time than to watch this.

Chuck Jones' Inki cartoons are rarely seen these days, because Inki is a small, stereotyped Hottentot with a bone in his hair, and we have come to see such images as racist and demeaning. Here, on exhibit in a circus and deviled by two dogs, one of whom would be developed into the high-pressure Charlie Dog of half a dozen cartoons, Inki is pursued and bedeviled -- and pursues and bedevils the dogs.But Inki, although the protagonist in these movies, is not the key character. The real star is probably the greatest of the Warner Brothers characters, a black mynah bird who has the best entrances in the business -- here he bursts out of a heavy safe -- and who walks, hunched over, through the cartoons with a stuttering, hopping step, underscored by Sibelius to a jazz beat. And whenever the mynah bird appears, so does chaos, because he's getting where he's going no matter what you do. The mynah is the trickster, even more than Bugs Bunny's take on Rabbit. In some ways he is a precursor on the Roadrunner, but much purer and funnier.It is a pity that he was always paired with Inki, because this makes him obscure -- the only other time I have seen him appear is in a meaningless turn in one of the Tweety-Sylvester mysteries that the Cartoon Network ran about the turn of the millennium. But these movies do turn up occasionally, if maddeningly infrequently. If you have a chance to see one, don't miss it.