Konterr
Brilliant and touching
Catangro
After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.
Scarlet
The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.
Horst in Translation (filmreviews@web.de)
"Yankee Doodle Cricket" is an American animated short film from 1975 and the third and from a Chuck Jones trilogy about a very special little cricket, even if this title character moved a bit into the background already as this one seems at least as much about the little mouse voiced by the legendary Mal Blanc and also about American history as Thomas Jefferson and Paul Revere play crucial roles in here, especially towards the end. Oh well, what else can you say about this one here. It's pretty much on the same level like the previous two, which would normally be a good thing, but I must say I am not impressed by the trilogy as a whole and I would agree that the cricket is just not perfect to carry it and I found the character really not memorable in the slightest, even more forgettable than several supporting players, which is certainly also one major reason why this one here never became famous at all or as known as some other Chuck Jones films. This is a very American cartoon and interesting from the perspective of how America was depicted in animation over the decades. But unless you are a historian, it won't do too much for you. Music was kinda okay though at the end, but that's obviously far from enough. I give it a thumbs-down.
Steve Carras
I'll have to agree with F Gwynplaine MacIntyre from Wales..BTW, C.C.Krieg, Wales and England are in (Great) Britain, NOT England..anyway,on Chuck Jones reusing too much of the house style and a very tiny voice talent pool reusing over and over again the same voices, I'm afraid that, having watched all of his specials, with all great due respect to Chuck for his much earlier better work, I'm very inclined to agree.Which is all the more reason for me to be irritated by later Chuck Jones and equal him with Tim Burton, right down to the narrow talent pool (Mel Blanc=Johnny Depp; June Foray=Helena Bonham-Carter), and the use of composers with the "D.E." initials. Dean Elliott=Danny Elfman, and the distinct house style.
cckrieg
My Dear F Gwynplaine MacIntyre, because you're a citizen of England, Im not going to criticize you for not being familiar with American culture, but as someone who has watched more than enough reruns from the 60s and 70s, I can assure that shows from the 1970s and I can cite several, All In th Family, The Mary Tyler Moore SHow, Maude, The Jeffersons, Good Times, etc all made similar jokes about Nixon's "perfectly clear remarks. Yes, Nixon did indeed use that phrase, and yes, it was funny. Did you ever stop to consider that maybe the producers were trying trying to suggest that Nixon wasn't up to the same high standards of high office as our forefathers, yes, Our forefathers, not yours. So to criticize "Yankee Doodle Cricket" over that one single joke that you found annoying and didn't get because you're a foreigner and not familiar with US History is pointless. Maybe you would have gotten the joke if you had been an adult in the 1970s who felt betrayed by Nixon's failure to be the guardian of the people's trust. At its worst, the "perfectly clear" joke, which Nixon did indeed say quite often during his scandalous presidency, not unlike the Clinton administration, was not very original as I said that other TV shows and movies at the time used the same joke.
F Gwynplaine MacIntyre
'Yankee Doodle Cricket' is a low-budget animated film with a fairly atypical setting: the American Revolution. The animals in this cartoon talk to each other but are drawn realistically. There are the usual economic short cuts, typical of cartoons: for example, a brief sequence of the cat walking down a road with the cricket on his back is repeated at several points during this toon. The cheapness of the animation is forgivable; somewhat less forgivable is its general shoddiness. The cat is drawn like a realistic cat, but he walks with a peculiar goose-stepping gait that doesn't remotely resemble actual feline movements.In several other IMDb reviews, I've made clear my very strong dislike for Chuck Jones, who directed 'Yankee Doodle Cricket'. My dislike is partially personal: Jones consistently took credit for other animators' innovations, and belittled the importance of his collaborators. But my dislike of Chuck Jones's cartoons is also for artistic reasons: Jones had a very small bag of tricks and narrative techniques, and he repeated himself far more often than did his contemporaries such as Clampett, Freleng, Tashlin and the sadly underrated Robert McKimson. I'm angry that Jones took one of the most unique and distinctive books ever written -- 'The Phantom Tollbooth', by Norton Juster -- and turned it into a Chuck Jones cartoon that looked like a hundred other Chuck Jones cartoons.'Yankee Doodle Cricket' is not very funny, but (to its credit) it tries to tell a story rather than offer slapstick gags. There is one very strained 'joke' in this cartoon which I found especially annoying, and a strong example of the self-indulgence which taints all of Chuck Jones's work. Harry the cat is present in Thomas Jefferson's study while Jefferson attempts to write the Declaration of Independence. Jefferson keeps coming up with various opening phrases (which he speaks aloud as his quill pen writes them down), but in each case he crumples the paper (parchment?) and tosses it onto the floor near Harry. The 'joke' here -- a weak one -- is that each of these anachronistic phrases is associated with some U.S. President (a different one each time) who came *after* Jefferson.The 'payoff' to this gag is very weak indeed. After rejecting half a dozen other phrases, Jefferson comes up with 'Let me make one thing perfectly clear.' (This phrase is associated with Richard Nixon ... but did he ever actually say it?) This one, too, Jefferson crumples up and tosses onto the mounting pile of crumpled pages alongside Harry the cat. But Nixon's phrase, and *only* Nixon's phrase, is now hastily batted away by Harry the cat. Chuck Jones never made a secret of his hatred for Richard Nixon, but I'm annoyed that he came up with this immensely contrived sequence in order to slip a Nixon-bashing joke into a cartoon about the American Revolution.Apart from Jones's strenuous efforts to bash Nixon, there's a general laziness here. Voice work is supplied by June Foray and Mel Blanc, providing exactly the same voices they've supplied in countless other Jones cartoons: Foray does her bog-standard twee-granny voice, and Blanc does his Barney Rubble with no frills. There are a couple of good points in 'Yankee Doodle Cricket', but they're few and far between. I'll rate this toon 2 out of 10. Cartoon fans, skip 'Yankee Doodle Cricket' and watch Disney's 'Ben and Me' -- about a mouse's adventures with Benjamin Franklin -- instead.UPDATE: Memo to IMDb reviewer C.C. Krieg: I pay taxes in the USA for income I earn on my Stateside investments, and I'm well familiar with U.S. sitcoms from the Nixon era; plenty of them show up on British television. I agree with you about the Clinton administration, which is by far the most corrupt to date.
