Van Beuren cartoons are extremely variable, especially in the number of gags and whether the absurdist humour shines through enough (sometimes it does, other times it doesn't), but are strangely interesting. Although they are often poorly animated with barely existent stories and less than compelling lead characters, they are also often outstandingly scored, there can be some fun support characters and some are well-timed and amusing.'Making Em Move' is reasonably different for Aesop's Fables/Van Beuren, they did not do parodies/pastiches a lot. Remember them much more for their absurdist strangeness (when executed well, when the atmosphere is strong and there are enough gags and good enough timing to pull it off) and their attempts at cutesiness (something that rarely works, because they end up overdoing it). The good news is that 'Making Em Move' does a pretty good job on the parodying side, there are far better parody/pastiche cartoons out there and on the most part with higher budgets and more iconic characters. It's not what one would call hilarious, but it's clever and ironic, the worst cartoon and film conventions are parodied to pretty amusing, if with a tendency to be strange, effect (like if something was silly, melodramatic etc. it was clearly intentional) and one who knows this cartoon and film period well will have no trouble recognising. There are a good number of gags and they are timed well, it's not laugh a minute and one won't bust a gut laughing throughout but it's not a case of sluggish timing, gags being too few and the humour being bland. Actually the humour is ironic and often wonderfully strange, perhaps not quite absurdist or bizarre but at least it doesn't try to go too much the other way (cute and saccharine).Characters, while not exactly memorable, are engaging, likewise with the formulaic but not too cheesy writing, and the audience reactions, although their animation is somewhat cheap and repetitive, cause some amusement.Best of all is the music score which agreed has always been an essential part of a Van Beuren cartoon and the one asset that is consistently outstanding and what stops the worst efforts from being worse. It is typically peppy and great fun to listen to. It is so beautifully and cleverly orchestrated and full of lively energy, doing so well with enhancing the action.It is easy to see though why 'Making Em Move' won't click with some, especially if unfamiliar with the period, if Van Beuren cartoons tend not to do much for you, if or if you have an allergy for what is being parodied. The story is non-existent and while mostly it's better paced than most Aesop's Fables/Van Beuren cartoons it does have some erratic moments that affects the synchronisation at times and how it gels with the visuals and audio.As to be expected, seeing as it is nearly always the case (with a few exceptions) even in their best efforts with Aesop's Fables/Van Beuren, the animation is less than great, most of the time with erratically sloppy character designs in particular while the simplistic background detail and lack of fluidity and crispness are just as difficult to ignore. The ending does go on for too long, it's stretched well beyond the limit and feels like an eternity for the cartoon to end. Overall, decent and amusing, pretty clever for Van Beuren and one of their more watchable 1931 batch of cartoons, but not them on the absolute best of top form and not without its problems. 6/10 Bethany Cox

Making 'Em Move (1931) ** 1/2 (out of 4) Interesting "documentary/spoof" animated film has a woman taking a tour of a studio when she comes across the animation department. She decides to take a look inside just to see how the films are made. What follows I'm sure has a tad bit of reality behind it but for the most part it's just a spoof of itself as we see one character draw a head while the next draws an arm and so on. There's also a nice section showing how the music is added as well as how the camera eventually picks everything up and takes it to the theater. I'm sure this was meant to be a comedy but it never made me laugh, although this didn't take away too much entertainment.

This is another strange cartoon from the collection of "Aesop's Fables" animated shorts from the very early 1930s. We get a tour of an "animated studio" because some woman is interested to see how these cartoons are made. Once inside, the crazy things start. The place is like a busy office but yet many of the animators are in an assembly line with an a band playing over them on a stage. Once again we see how important music was in this era. In many cartoons, someone is playing an instrument, or singing or dancing. Music has always been in the forefront of entertainment, but it must have been far more popular back then than today.Anyway, later we wind up seeing a movie-within-a-movie as a short, "Little Nell" is shown before an audience. That's entertaining, too. I particularly laughed at the reactions in the audience.There were very few things where I laughed right out loud, yet all of it was entertaining to a degree and certainly had the time era stamped on it. One look at this and you know it's made around 1930 with the crazy story and humor.

"In a Cartoon Studio" is a pastiche on how cartoons (and movies) are made. Some of it is surprisingly accurate. Some is done for laughs, like the assembly-line cartoon production set-up where a given artist is responsible for each character's right foot, as the drawings move past on the conveyor. (Actually that's how "starving artists" original oil paintings are made today.)This film includes a cartoon within a cartoon in which Little Nell is kidnapped by a villain and tossed onto a log at the sawmill. It's a send-up, done for laughs, but it's also an ironic take on the worst movie-making conventions of the day. The dialogue is strictly formulaic. The cliffhanger ending is stretched out endlessly. And the audience (of cartoon animals) just eats it up, like the undiscriminating sheep and cattle they are. Literally. (Well, cows and hippos, to be exact.)Someone must have had a lot of good reasons for such cynicism, to make 1931 sound so much like 1999.