Ub Iwerks was one of the greatest animators of the silent and early sound eras: he animated "Steamboat Willie" and other early Disney shorts virtually by himself. But the films he produced at his own studio after breaking with Walt Disney in 1930 lack the vitality of his earlier work. During the '30s, the animators with Disney, the Fleischers, Warner Bros., and MGM developed a new style of cartoon humor that centered on characters with strong, recognizable personalities. Iwerks's first recurring character, Flip the Frog, who appears in more than half the cartoons in this collection, never developed into a wholesome good guy or a sarcastic antihero. He remained an observer, rather than someone who initiated the action, as Mickey Mouse and Bugs Bunny did. The rambling plots further weaken these films. Flip stumbles into a haunted house in "Spooks" (1932), but the artists can't decide if they're trying to be funny or scary, and the film falls between two chairs. The garish colors and bizarre designs in "Balloon Land" (1935) have a camp appeal, but the inflatable hero and heroine and the spiny villain simply aren't very interesting. Iwerks's cartoons unfortunately remain less than the sum of their parts, but this disc (in unison with Vol. 1) offers an interesting historical perspective on the development of popular animation. --Charles Solomon
