Excellent but underrated film

Fanciful, disturbing, and wildly original, it announces the arrival of a fresh, bold voice in American cinema.

A movie that not only functions as a solid scarefest but a razor-sharp satire.

Just intense enough to provide a much-needed diversion, just lightweight enough to make you forget about it soon after it’s over. It’s not exactly “good,” per se, but it does what it sets out to do in terms of putting us on edge, which makes it … successful?

I would say that half or more of these early Mickey Mouse cartoons involve his turning animals and inanimate objects into musical instruments. Here he faces off with dangerous characters but subdues them with tunes. He also seems able to pull their whiskers or twist their bodies without consequences. This one is loaded with these clever manipulations and comes across pretty well. No plot. Just Mickey doing his thing.

This is not a bad little musical, with Mickey playing all sorts of instruments with a band of animals in the jungle. There's quite a bit of toe-tapping music, including the Blue Danube, Turkey in the Straw, Aloha 'Oe, and Yankee Doodle. There's really not plot to the cartoon, just plenty of songs and dances. Grade B-

"Jungle Rhythm" is a black-and-white short film from 1929, that is almost 90 years old already. The title of course requires that this 7-minute production by Walt Disney has sound and this is what it is mostly about: the music. We don't (really) hear Mickey Mouse speak yet and this one is still from the early days of the world's most famous mouse character. This is not the only film from back in the days that takes place at the jungle and has a cartoon character make music with the help of everything he can find there, especially the animals. Still i must say the music was not too good except one or two occasions and the story was basically non-existent which was a frequent problem in animation before the 1930s. The animation is okay and shows that Disney was among the very best the genre had to offer, also at this point already. But the other components were just too weak for me to recommend it. Thumbs down.

Inexplicably, this cartoon short finds Mickey in the jungle. And, like most of the early Mickey cartoons, there is an absence of dialog and lots of music. While today this all seems pretty campy, it was state of the art in its day.For the most part, there really isn't any plot--just lots of jungle creatures parading past the screen--singing and dancing like they are on stage. Then, you get to hear Mickey sing--and it's pretty sad--but fortunately he mostly avoids singing and plays various animals like musical instruments--and abusing them a bit in the process.Far from a classic, there is still an odd charm about this. And, interestingly, Mickey once again plays (among other songs) "Turkey in the Straw"--the same tune he played in "Steamboat Willie" the year before--which was the first cartoon with sound.