Walter Lantz | Dinky Doodle in Lost and Found / 1926

cartoon character crossdresses

by Douglas Messerli

 

Walter Lantz (screenwriter and director) Dinky Doodle in Lost and Found / 1926

 

Bray Production Company, founded by John Randolph Bray, was the first successful animation studio in the US, developing the methods of animation that would later become the standards of the industry. By 1926, however, Bray himself had turned to two-reel comedies and had turned over the animation part of his studio to Walter Lantz before he would become famous for his own work on Woody Woodpecker and other animated features.

     One of the most notable differences, however, between the Bray animated films and later studio productions was that in a great many of his cartoons live human characters and cartoon figures were intertwined. In the cast of Dinky Doodle in Lost and Found, as the human animator is busy with his art, using his brush in flamboyant gestures more as a sword in the manner of Douglas Fairbanks than as tool of animation, cartoon figures Dinky and Weakheart observe from a newspaper article that “Jerry the cradle snatcher” is on the loose again. The cartoonist assures them that Jerry will not be interested in such “two little pests” that they represent, and, since he’s been working late, falls asleep.

     As often happens in Bray cartoons, while the animator sleeps, his characters play. Dinky and Weakheart also go to bed and after a goodnight prayer, fall into dreamland. While they sleep, Jerry escapes from the pages of the newspaper. Looking up, he observes the gel that the animator has just painted of a couple dancing the French café Apache dance. Jerry obviously has not seen the 1925 movie Parisian Love, where in it is revealed that in some cases the dancers staged their seemingly brutal treatment of the female partner employing a third figure who suddenly appearing to interrupt the dance— apparently unaware that the woman was not truly suffering abuse—causes a row during which it was easy to steal the wallets of the tourists who had flocked into the café to see the famous dance.

      Jerry kicks out the male dancer, telling her in no uncertain chauvinistic terms, “The way that guy was beating you up, you’d think he was your husband,” and goes after the female who is sent, in cartoon fashion, on an endless run through sheet after sheet of sketch paper. Dinky and Weakheart, seeing the chase, gets up and joins in, while the animator also awakens, and draws himself a costume which he dons to become cartoon-like detective, leaping into the cartoon itself to join the chase to help the female on the run from the clutches of the evil “cradle-snatcher.”

      The female stops only twice, once to powder her face and a second time when she comes across a glob of ink in the center of frame. When she points it out to the skirt-chaser, he pauses, takes off his coat, and lays it, in the style of Walter Raleigh, across the ink so that she may continue on her way.

       Of course, he finally is able to snatch her and carry her off to his lumber camp with Dinky and Weakheart close on his track. Once inside the cabin, Jerry turns on the prerequisite sawmill, grabs up the boy and his pet friend, and demands that the female marry him. When she angrily pronounces, “never!” he places the two innocents on the mill, setting the saw blades spinning.

       Observing the situation, she replies “Yes,” but when he turns of the saw, she again tells him “No.” This continues, with Dinky and Weakheart playing leapfrog with one another in an attempt to escape being sliced in two, until finally the detective slips into the room through a window, dressing himself up like the heroine, quite convincingly except for his whiskers, as he continues to play hot and cold, putting his hand upon the villain’s hand and chest while kicking him in the butt when he isn’t looking.         Finally, spinning the girl around, Jerry discovers the detective who quickly removes his wig and faces off with the villain until Jerry shifts position, putting the detective/animator’s nose literally to the blade. The animator is wakened up with his friends, Dinky and Weakheart, tickling his nose with a feather.

    Cartoon figures throughout film history have regularly played in drag, Bugs Bunny on several occasions; but this may, in fact, be the very first instance of a cartoon figure dressing in drag, the rather sissified animator (played by the 27-year-old Lantz), after all, having concocted the whole scenario. Was cross-dressing his secret dream?

   For those readers seeking out further references to this film, I should warn you that IMDb has mistakenly put the synopsis of another film under this title.

 

Los Angeles, May 10, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (May 2023).