'Barnyard Melody' is a song of madness

Barnyard Melody (1929)
Starring: Anonymous Voice Actors
Directors: John Foster and Harry Bailey
Rating: Four of Ten Stars

Animals form a singing group, and a farmer lends his voice to their cacophonous effort.

Among the cartoons you should never watch while high or really drunk is "Barnyard Melody". Even stone-cold sober, in a well-ventilated room, and after a good night's sleep, when it's over, you may find yourself questioning if you really just saw what you think you saw.

The best Van Beuren cartoons are wild rides of surreal weirdness. This one starts promising--with a mouse and a cat roller-skating down the road--but the opening also suffers from what ends up sinking this entire cartoon: There is just one single gag that isn't dragged out beyond the point where it stops being amusing and becomes tedious... and that gag is among the weakest the film has to offer.

There's a lot of very funny moments and/or cute moments in this film, but they are all ruined by the way they are dragged out and just go on and on and on. Some are even just the same animation sequence being looped three or more times. It's like instead of coming up with material, they padded a four-minute cartoon until it ran six minutes. Given that this cartoon feels like it's a two-minute bit (an old man joins some animals in a musical group) that was padded out to short-film length with random jokes and surreal bits that make little sense in or out of the context of the film, the fact that so much of it feels padded is even more frustrating. Since this was already a mess of random stuff that was just thrown together between the opening and closing credits, would it REALLY have been that hard to come up with a few more situations?

This is often the point in a review of a Van Beuren cartoon where I often talk about how great the music is. Generally, even the most wretched, badly animated, plotless messes from the shop at least has spectacular music that is artfully coordinated with whatever is unfolding on screen. The music here is... well, interesting. As always, it's well integrated with the action on screen, but in this case that means it must, out of necessity, be intentionally bad. It should come as no surprise that animals who aren't birds aren't that great at singing. The music in this short is up to the usual Van Beuren standards and fits the cartoon perfectly, but this means it's more whacky than what a sane person would describe as "good".

There's a lot to like about "Barnyard Melody", but it's almost overwhelmed by the sense of tedium that replaces the initial amusement or curiosity that you'll feel when a new scene begins. The fact there are some good and fun ideas here made me give this Four Stars. I still think it's worth seeing if you've liked other Van Beuren releases, or if you just want to experience something a little strange. (And, hey, maybe you should watch it high or drunk? I could have it backwards--maybe being in an altered state is the BEST way to experience this one!)

Click below to check out "Barnyard Melody".

Note: The bearded farmer in this film appears in a bunch of the Aesop Fables cartoons. I've seen the character referred to as Farmer Grey or as Al Falfa in writers about the Van Beuren releases, but I've not yet seen one where his name was spelled out. Time will tell if this is a Milton & Rita-type situation where the name is identified in sources other than the actual cartoons, or if I will come across actual mentions as I view more of Van Beuren's output.