Best movie of this year hands down!

Brilliant and touching

In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.

One of the most extraordinary films you will see this year. Take that as you want.

Watching the classic Looney Tunes cartoons, one can see that they had a thing for jazz. In "Katnip Kollege", the focus is on swing music, as a feline in school can't keep time and gets made the dunce...until he figures out the beat. Even though I love the classic Looney Tunes cartoons, it always seemed to me like their musical cartoons from the '30s tried a little too hard to be cute. Of course, any emphasis on swing music is something to be acknowledged. Still, I prefer their other music-centric shorts (such as "I Love to Singa", "Three Little Bops" and "What's Opera, Doc?").Anyway, this one's worth seeing as a historical reference, if nothing else.

"Katnip Kollege" is a delightful Warner Bros. musical cartoon. The plot involves a swingology class at Katnip Kollege, where all the "young cats" go to study one of my favorite subjects: how to swing! Every student in the class does a fine job of singing, clapping, dancing, and playing instruments to a tireless swinging jazz groove! That is, every student except one bespectacled cat named Johnny, who is so terrible at swinging that his classmates ridicule him, and his professor declares him to be a dunce. At the end of the school day, as all the other cats swing their way into the night, Johnny stays after school and listens to the ticking of a clock, which ultimately kicks off a tempo for him, and he finally understands how to swing! Showing off his newly-acquired skill, Johnny becomes the star of the evening as he wins the respect of his classmates and the affections of a spunky gal named Ms. Kitty Bright.My favorite moments from "Katnip Kollege" include the following. During the opening shot of the classroom before the professor arrives, Johnny quite humorously stands out from the rest of his classmates as he cannot even clap his hands in time to the beat. The professor has a Bing Crosby-type voice as he swings his rhymed speech while calling on different students to give their swinging recitations. And how could I not mention the wonderful jazz music that fills this entire cartoon? In closing, here is one final interesting observation that relates to "Katnip Kollege." Dave Brubeck, one of my favorite jazz pianists/composers, wrote a tune in 1955 titled "The Duke" as a homage to one of the greatest composers/bandleaders/pianists of the 20th Century: Edward Kennedy "Duke" Ellington. Decades later, when an interviewer asked Brubeck how he actually went about writing the tune, Brubeck replied, "Just think of windshield wipers." As Brubeck was driving his car on a rainy day, the motion of the wipers ultimately kicked off a tempo for him!

Another musical short that is more cute than humorous is this short about some swinging cats singing in music class. One cat just doesn't get it and is ridiculed unmercifully because of it. Of course he gets it together by the end, but it still made me feel sorry for him when he lacked rhythm. This short wasn't as good as "I Love to Singa" (which was over praised to begin with) But it's cute enough to at least watch one time, perhaps even twice (but not in a row) and the tunes doesn't seem to make one openly cringe. This animated short can be seen on Disc 4 of the Looney Tunes Golden Collection Volume 2.My Grade: C-

This is a cute, rather charming musical short patterned after things like Along Flirtation Walk and Varsity Show. The lead character, Johnny, might as well have "Dick Powell" stenciled on his forehead and the professor reminds me of Kay Kyser. The music is infectious and entertaining, even if the plot is as thin as a piece of gauze. Come to think of it, the plots of those old musicals this is patterned after are pretty much just as thin and this is much shorter than those were!Warner Brothers made a fair number of these musical cartoons, because the animation department had access to the entire musical catalog for the studio and the studio big-wigs saw the shorts as a way to remind people of Warner Brothers features and music (sheet music was popular and the sheet music for songs made a pretty for all involved in the loop-composers, film studio, etc.) by keeping songs fresh in the public's memory. This is on Looney Tunes Golden Collection, Vol. 2 and is well worth seeing. Recommended.