MUNRO (1960) Four stars
I’ll make the review of this 1960 Czechoslovak-American animated short directed by Gene Deitch a short one, I promise.
It centers on a basic premise: The army drafts a 4-year-old boy.
Munro starts out your average little boy and then just a minute into the film, his life changes when he receives something in the mail. He can’t read, so a bigger person reads it to him. Cue that military music.
“At the age of 4, he’d been drafted.”
Then we join Munro for his physical. He’s the runt of the litter, for sure, and he’s the only one not talking about all his physical ailments, like a bad back.
Munro gets classified as “1A” or “eligible for military service.”
Munro goes to war.
It’s a foreign world for the little man with foreign words flying at him. This Sgt. couldn’t speak English very well, according Munro.
“Tenhoot,” “Foorit hoo,” “Hup haw hee haw hip hee haw hip,” et cetera.
Munro becomes a full-blown soldier and he plays all the games that soldiers play, like “Face.” Let’s see, there’s “Ri’,” “Lef’,” “Up,” “Down,” “In,” “Out,” and “Face” variances in “Face.”
Munro eventually becomes very tired.
Why?
“I’m only 4.”
They do not believe him.
Go back out and march in the rain.
They believe Munro’s faking that he’s only 4.
The experts think he’s a malinger.
The Colonel wants to shove him in the stockade.
They still won’t believe that he’s only 4.
Munro decides that he will be the best soldier.
Recruits pass by Munro and they’re told, “See that man, that’s a soldier. That’s what we’re gonna train you to be. We’re gonna separate the men from the boys.”
Munro then begins to cry.
They’re all embarrassed.
The General finally gets to the bottom of it, “You’re nothing but a baby boy.”
Munro signs his release form, and he gets a big parade in his honor with a message from the President himself.
American syndicated cartoonist and author Jules Feiffer, who’s considered the most widely read satirist in the country, wrote MUNRO. Feiffer won a Pulitzer Prize in 1986 and he was inducted into the Comic Book Hall of Fame in 2004. MUNRO won the 1961 Academy Award for Best Animated Short.
Feiffer wrote MUNRO when he was in the U.S. Army from January 1951 to January 1953.
“Every day I was enraged,” Feiffer said in an interview with Bookslut. “Every day I hated it. So much so that when they tried to promote me just as an automatic gesture to getting out, to raise your pay scale so you could get more, I refused to accept the raise in rank from private to PFC.”
Feiffer wrote MUNRO at his desk.
“With the full support of the man who supervised me,” Feiffer said, “who was this lllustrator who had a career that never took off in magazine illustration and this was his way of supporting the family. And his name was Perc Couse, who looked a very daunting, formidable man. He had a deep voice and scary, but he turned out to be a very warm, lovely, generous-hearted fellow who thought I and another G.I. there named Harvey Dinnerstein were much too talented to waste our time on Army stuff. So he let Harvey paint and he let me do my subversive satire. And I’m not sure he understood what I was doing, but after the war (Korea) he certainly did. After we were out, he took great pride, because we remained great friends until his death.”
MUNRO beat out some prestigious films and filmmakers for that Academy Award: Walt Disney Studios’ GOLIATH II, Warner Bros. cartoons HIGH NOTE and MOUSE AND GARDEN (the former directed by Chuck Jones and the latter by Friz Freleng, two of the legendary animators), and A PLACE IN THE SUN (not much info on this one).
George S. Kaufman said the famous words “Satire is what closes on Saturday night” after his play closed in Philadelphia and failed to make it to Broadway.
Though, in the 1960s, we had MUNRO and more prominently Stanley Kubrick’s dark Cold War satire DR. STRANGELOVE OR: HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE BOMB, one that still holds up rather well today.
MUNRO holds up rather well today, as well.
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