Mr. Bug Goes to Town

I watched a little gem of an animated feature-length movie on TCM the other night titled Mr. Bug Goes to Town. Never heard of it? I hadn't either, and as it turns out, very few people have any inkling the film ever existed. Why is that, you say? The film was plagued with production problems from the outset, but the real problem was that it was released on December 5, 1941 - two days before Pearl Harbor.

After untold hours of painstaking animation (this was way back before computers, remember), and all the loving touches that are so evident in the film, it's a little heartbreaking to think that it became another casualty, of sorts, of World War II. It was re-released in 1946 as Hoppity Goes to Town by Paramount, but was deemed a box-office failure and relegated to deep in the film archives.

The heart of the story has a little bit of crime in it, with a happy and innocent band of insects living in the "lowlands" of a garden near Broadway in NYC until a broken fence leads to The Humans tromping on their territory and disrupting their community. Our plucky protagonist, Hoppity (a grasshopper, natch), is in love with the beautiful Honey (Bee), but he's not the only resident of Buggsville who has his eyes on Honey - so does the rich and evil C. Bagley Beetle.

The plot piles layer after layer of trouble and mayhem onto the Buggsville residents that Mr. Beetle happily fosters (with the help of his hapless henchmen Swat and Smack) because it all ties into his plot to make Honey's father Mr. Bumble so destitute that he's forced to have Honey marry the rich shyster to save both their home and their little "town."

Fleischer Studios is the creative force behind Mr. Bug Goes to Town, headed by the often-quarreling brothers Dave and Max. (The Fleischers were forced to sell their studio to Paramount mid-way through production on Mr. Bug due to financial problems). Max Fleischer was one of the pioneers of animation, creating Betty Boop and Koko the Clown, with the Fleischer studio also behind the popular Popeye cartoons in the 1930s and the better-known animated feature film Gulliver's Travels.

Under the reissue title, Hoppity had multiple re-releases on home video with inferior quality throughout the 1970s and had a more recent DVD release by Legend Films, re-titled as Bugville. The film has now become a cult favorite with a younger generation of animation buffs and was transferred from an original 35mm Technicolor release print owned by the Museum of Modern Art Department of Film. That version was shown in 2012 for the first time on television in a special hosted by Robert Osborne and Jerry Beck dedicated to rare animated films, including Gulliver's Travels.

Todd Mason has a regular Tuesday "Forgotten Films" feature on his blog, and you can check out more neglected masterpieces via this link.