Random cartoon insanity. And Ko-Ko the Clown!

Bed Time (1923)
Starring: Max Fleischer
Director: Dave Fleischer
Rating: Seven of Ten Stars

The Animator (Fleischer), wanting to get a good night's sleep, tries to stop Ko-Ko from escaping into the real world by stranding him on an animated cartoon top. How will Ko-Ko even the score this time?

The "Out of the Inkwell" series were cartoons that mixed live-action footage and animation, telling crazy stories of an Animator either bullying and abusing characters in a cartoon reality, which he partially created through his pen and ink; or telling stories of characters escaping their cartoon world and entering the ours where they either help or hinder human activities, or set out to get revenge for abuse heaped on them by their creator, the Animator.

"Bed Time" starts out like a typical Out of the Inkwell installment--with the Animator taking a someone inexplicable hostile attitude toward the character he brings to life--but it quickly veers into surreal and crazy territory that's beyond even what one can expect from the series. The sequence where an angry Ko-Ko is out to get his revenge on the Animator is fabulous and waaaay over the top!

I'm not going to go into detail about what happens in the roughly nine minutes of unbridled weirdness that is "Bed Time", because this is one of those things that needs to be experienced without too much foreknowledge of what's to come. I will mention, though, that it gets a little too repetitious at times, and it was bad enough that I kept it at a rating of Seven instead of the Eight Stars I was on the verge of giving it. Plus, if you're like me, you may have the feeling that the entire situation in this cartoon could have been avoided if the Animator had taken a different, far easier and straight-forward way to keeping Ko-Ko in check--and be midly irritated by it. However, if you stick with this fun little film until the end, it wraps up in a way that makes those actions seem acceptable.

Take a few minutes and brighten your day with some Ko-Ko driven craziness. The version embedded below is taken from Craig Davison's YouTube Channel, and, if I understand his notes correctly, the sound-effects were added by him. You should swing by and check out his many excellent offerings.