Fin 'N Catty (1943) *** (out of 4)A cat is hungry and wants a goldfish for dinner but catching him isn't going to be all that easy.FIN 'N CATTY is pretty much what would eventually become Sylvester and Tweety. Instead of a bird the cat is dealing with a goldfish but you really can tell that this here probably influenced the future series. If you're a fan of animated shorts from this period then you'll certainly enjoy this as there are some nice laughs along the way. The highlight is certainly a scene where the cat and goldfish end up in a shower together but the cat doesn't realize what it's gotten into. This certainly isn't a classic but it's charming and has some nice laughs.

. . . from the Koch Brothers (you know, the guys who appoint the U.S. President at least half the time), or a spot from Kohler pushing a new Non-Locking, Open-Access shower stall during America's Innocent (or Pre-PSYCHO) Period. In FIN 'N CATTY, "Catty" is a dim-bulb hydrophobic feline chump compared to Warner Bros. Sylvester the Super Cat of a decade later. Though Catty swallows "Fin" the Goldfish 4:52 minutes into this animated short, Catty's dreamy demeanor throughout this tale resembles NOT the cat-who-swallowed-the-canary so much as the-cat-who-swallowed-a-Zoloff-overdose. In keeping with this theme, Catty winds up asleep (or possibly drowned) in Fin's fish bowl as this cartoon ends. This, of course, is a far cry from Catty's reliance upon a wad of Brawny Paper Towels at the merest hint of wetness in the early going here. Fin implausibly exploits this dependency by substituting flypaper for Brawny with an end-run into the kitchen ahead of Catty. (Since when can goldfish walk on walls and ceilings? Mine just swam around for a few weeks, floated to the surface, and disappeared down the toilet.) Fin's calendar desert ruse here is an animated treat; Catty's shower stall turning into THE CELL's nightmare scene not so much.

This is one of the special features on the DVD for Warner Brothers' "Old Acquaintance". I love how the classic Warner films on DVD always seem to come with various extras--including a short and a cartoon from the same year as the feature film.This Loony Toons cartoon is a lot like the later Sylvester and Tweety cartoons, but as these two characters were not created until later, this film stars a cute cat and an equally cute goldfish. And, like the Sylvester and Tweety cartoons, the cat spends the film trying to eat the fish and the fish outwits him again and again---but not nearly as easily as Tweety did, but in ways that still were quite funny. I loved the scene with the shower...but I won't say more as I don't want to spoil it. Plus, it turns out to have a very cute ending...one I certainly didn't expect!! Well made and funny--this is a marvelous little cartoon.

As we all know - cats hate water and goldfish hate cats. So when a cat wants to try and catch a goldfish in his bowl, how does he go about it? Well, here we see a cat trying to catch a fish without getting wet while the fish, realising this weakness, does all he can to get the cat wet.Despite a dodgey narration start this cartoon actually is pretty funny. The use of running gags which are funny the first and last time make the material a lot better. Some of it doesn't totally work and the end is weak but that isn't too much of a problem as the laughs were pretty consistent for me the whole way.The cat character is good - witness his repeated panicked run to get paper towels for himself, but the fish character is not as good as he could have been. Given that the audience were meant to get behind him, he is drawn (in both sense) a little bland and I enjoyed the cat more.Overall though this was an enjoyable cartoon which uses running (literally) gags pretty well to create a consistent vein of humour that works.