Absolutely Fantastic

Great movie! If you want to be entertained and have a few good laughs, see this movie. The music is also very good,

The acting in this movie is really good.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

"Ko-Ko's Earth Control" is a 6-minute cartoon by Dave Fleischer and this is from 1928, which means two more years and it will have its 90th anniversary. It is about the clown Ko-Ko and his dog who enter a building, which is a somehow the center of the world as it includes all kinds of levers and regulation when it comes to creating balance on the Planet Eart, which refers to nature, but also to buildings for example and to gravity in general. And you know what happens next. The two protagonists are not evil, but they are as clueless as they are chaotic and they cause all kinds of havoc one would imagine. The perfect assistants to true evil masterminds. But these two don't even need an evil boss to come up with complete catastrophe all around. I thought this was pretty decent for a black-and-white silent cartoon. By 1928, it was not too long anymore until sound and color came and the Golden Age of Animation started. And lets be honest, compared to what we got to witness in the following 2 decades, this one here simply is not a good film anymore. I would say only watch it if you really really (really really) love old cartoons.

I had recently been reminded of Ko-Ko the clown when I saw him as a supporting character for Betty Boop and I had never really known that he and his dog Fitz were characters in their own right. Having enjoyed him in the cartoon Snow White I decided to give him a try here. The plot sees the two characters walking the Earth and finding a control room which turns on the rain, day to night etc – but Fitz seems more interested in a lever which warns that if pulled the world will come to an end. Despite Ko-Ko's efforts, how many seconds do you reckon it will be before the lever gets thrown?The thing I loved about Ko-Ko in the recent Snow White was that his section was blessed with imaginative and creative imagery and I looked forward to the same here. This was not totally the case as I felt the short could have gone further with some of the animated images and done more of the surreal touches such as the moon and sun coming together etc. As it was, the move into live action made for a nice chance of tone but also made it a bit more "ordinary" as we see people fighting changes in gravity and also having some buildings collapse in a way that looks very much like the style of Monty Python (albeit several decades before they did it!).Despite my reservations though I did enjoy the film. I much prefer Fitz to Ko-Ko as a character but both work well together and Fleischer's animation and style is a lot of fun – although I do wish it had gone further within the animated world before snapping out into the real world.

A very imaginative cartoon from the silent era,produced by the most influential cartoon pioneer of all times, Max Fleischer, and directed by his talented brother Dave.The perfect mixture of different techniques and visual tricks ( ink drawing, stop-motion animation(animation frame by frame ),abstract images painted over glass, animated paper figures, crazy camera movements, the use of archive footage and transparencies ); the intelligent use of animation and living-action and the bizarre and surreal gags and logical and sarcastic invention places it as one of my favorites in cartoon history. The action succeed in calculated crescendo and the scene of the holocaust is a happy lesson of how to get an efficient film without expensive stuff.This cartoon was produced in 1928 by Fleishers' independent studio, and connects with the European vanguards sensibility like dadaism or surrealism in its revolt against social conventions and its interest for experimentation, technique and the suggestions of dreams .

Reminds me of René Clair's surrealist short The Crazy Ray (a.k.a. Paris qui dort) which predates this by a few years. It uses the live action shots that the Fliescher's were known for extremely well, probably because they go beyond the simple inkwell creation/creator gag. Worth a look!