Pretty Good

Plenty to Like, Plenty to Dislike

The best films of this genre always show a path and provide a takeaway for being a better person.

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

I absolutely love this cartoon. It is engaging, it is colourful and it is extremely clever. It is enormous fun spotting all the literary references such as Heidi (who does sing like Cab Calloway), The Three Musketeers and The Thin Man, references to Frankenstein, Fu Manchu, Mr Hyde and Phantom of the Opera(the beginning was hilarious, it isn't everyday when you see monsters such as Fu Manchu dancing to Gossec's Gavotte) and the caricatures of Charles Laughton, William Powell, Greta Garbo and Paul Muni. The animation is spotless, the music is fabulous and the voice work is top notch. The gags and puns come fast and the cartoon is loaded to the brim with them. Who cares whether it is plot less, it is amazing to look at, it is entertaining and very clever. 10/10 Bethany Cox

I have always loved this short, ever since I was a little girl. I had a copy of it on VHS along with a few others, but this one was always my favorite. I was very disenhearted when my father donated the VHS that this short was on to the library, as he felt then 11 year old me was "too old" for cartoons. After many years of having not seen it, however, I was tickled when I found it in a DVD set. I enjoyed it as much as I did then, if not more so. I would recommend "Have You Got Any Castles" to anyone. It is cleverly put together and well done, and the caricatures are spot on. The animation is colourful and very well done, with more creativity put into this than many modern animated features today.

The "town crier" inside a warm house on a snowy winter night dazzles us with his vocabulary, introducing us to various literature characters who come to life in this home's big library.Most of the characters were people seen on screen in the mid '30s, actors like Paul Muni (The Story of Louis Pasteur) or Williams Powell (Nick Charles of The Thin Man fame) or, well.....there are so many I'm not going to list them all. It starts with four horror stories: Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde, Fu Manchu, The Phantom of the Opera and Frankenstein and runs the game to Topper, the Invisible Man, The Good Earth, The 39 Steps, on and on and on. We see dancers and singers like Bill Robinson and Cab Calloway represent some of the titles. With all the jokes and sight gags poured into this, you get a lot of silly, stupid, clever and funny, some of it depending on how familiar you are with the characters, and how much you enjoy puns.My personal opinion would involve three "c words" - clever, cute and colorful. Having seen almost all of those classic films, I thought this was a lot of fun to watch.

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.