Mighty Mouse and the Kilkenny Cats (1945) User Reviews

Decent short with the limitations inherent in the series as a whole

[llltdesq · 6/10 · 22 August 2015]

This is a cartoon in the Mighty Mouse series produced by Terrytoons. There will be spoilers ahead:

The Mighty Mouse cartoons are entertaining for the most part, but rarely are they more than competent, average cartoons. That's because the main character is quite limited and the opportunities for dramatic effect are also limited. The ending is not in doubt for a moment. Mighty Mouse comes into the short about two-thirds of the way through and saves the day. The success of any individual cartoon thus rests on that part of the short serving as the lead-in for Mighty Mouse's appearance.

Here, the opening is actually reasonably good. A gang of cats is terrorizing the mice, the mice hold a meeting and decide they must fight back. There's a brief section showing the mice preparing for war against the cats and for a while, they have the advantage. Gradually, the battle starts going the other way, as it must. But when the mice are winning, the cartoon is a bit more creative.

Then, per formula for the series, Mighty Mouse swoops in to save the day, rout the cats and rescue the mice. There are some good bits even in this part of the short, like a bit with a chimney and another with a manhole cover, but the inevitability of Mighty Mouse winning takes the edge off. If the character were more interesting, there would be other ways to make the shorts more interesting, but Mighty Mouse is one-dimensional.

This short is worth watching.

The Kilkenny Cat battle

[TheLittleSongbird · 7/10 · 29 November 2019]

Terrytoons Studios' output is interesting to watch but most it ranges between lacklustre and decent, seldom great but major misfires tended to be in their very early years or in their later output. Although drastically uneven and all their different year batches (cartoons from 1944 for example) are all very mixed bags, generally their cartoons are watchable and are mainly worth seeing for completest sake. Or at least that has always been my main reason.

1945 was quite a prolific year for Terrytoons' most used regular character Mighty Mouse, a likeable enough if somewhat limited and one dimensional character. The cartoons that he did feature, tending to feel like he was featuring in a major role rather than starring considering he was the titular character, in are worth at least one-time watch though none are great as such and the quality varied somewhat. Up to this point of the 1945 batch, 'Mighty Mouse and the Kilkenny Cats' is by far the best of the Mighty Mouse outings, to me at least, one of his best in a while and one of the best so far of the 1945 Terrytoons cartoons (the best by quite some way being one of the studio's best 'Post War Inventions').

'Mighty Mouse and the Kilkenny Cats' is especially good in the music and animation. Am aware about raving about these components a lot talking about the Terrytoons cartoons, but this is what happens when something is a consistent strength in a series. The music is lusciously orchestrated and hugely characterful, the most energetic moments in the score like in the final third being wonderfully wild. The animation is especially good in the backgrounds and landscapes, very meticulously detailed and beautiful to look at thanks to also the atmospheric use of colour.

It is a funnier cartoon than the late 1944 and previous 1945 Mighty Mouse cartoons, the last third does have some nice well-timed gags and a wild energy, and there is a sense of threat without getting too dark from the cats. The cats are the most interesting characters in the cartoon for the same reasons for most Mighty Mouse adversaries though a pleasant surprise here is seeing the mice have more personality and drive than most "characters in need of help" characters in the Mighty Mouse series, with the most creative use of mice characters up to this point of the Mighty Mouse series.

However, not unexpectedly, there are no real surprises really but this is including before Mighty Mouse appears. When saying not unexpectedly, that means that the series is a very formulaic one and can feel like the same thing over and over, while one knows the ending well before the cartoon end and actually it even starts.

Still feel that Mighty Mouse has mostly needed to be used much better, feeling too much like a supporting character that not everybody will see much point in him being there when the cartoon was not faring too badly without him. He should have featured more and appeared much earlier to stop that from happening, and the material is too more of the same.

Concluding, pretty decent. 7/10