The Fleischer studios followed Disney into the uncharted waters of feature length cartoons with this adaptation of Gulliver's adventures in Lilliput.

It is colourful, charming, respectful, and gentle. The moral of the original shines through.

The animation is perhaps of the same standard as Disney's shorts and, maybe, falls short of the heights achieved during Snow White (there is some obvious reliance on certain movement cycles, something you often saw in Disney's shorts of the time but less so in features).

The comic relief elements may seem out of place, or they may appeal - this is a matter of taste. They are fine for kids.

I personally felt that the rotoscoped Gulliver contrasted a bit too much with the hand animated Lilliputians, but that shouldn't be taken as a criticism - this is a pioneering film, and a good one.

The Fleischer studios were best known for their "Popeye" and "Superman" shorts, but the caliber of animation and story-telling in this 1939 feature-length film were on a par with Disney at that time. Had they not gone bankrupt in 1942, I suspect they would have surpassed Disney in many ways.

The idea here was to do Disney's "Snow White" one better, and they came very, very close. The restored edition on DVD shows the depth and beauty of the artwork to perfection. Fleischer was even perfecting a "stereo-optic" process to add 3-dimensional depth to their images which was used in this film to good effect. The music is typical of the period, rather sugary for today's tastes, and the "Gabby" character introduced in this movie isn't nearly as funny as they seemed to think at the time. (Two "Gabby" shorts are also included on the DVD; draw your own conclusions.)

I can only guess at the reactions of movie-goers who first saw this film in 1939, but I suspect that they were blown away by the sheer scope of the artwork. Gulliver is a "man-mountain" to the Lilliputians, and the scale and perspective between him and the "tiny people" is perfect throughout the film. The sequence where the tiny townspeople use a variety of skills to truss up the sleeping "giant" and cart him (literally!) to their king's palace is, by itself, worth the price of the entire movie.

The pacing is a bit slow during the first part of the film, but the filmmakers do a nice job of setting up the conflict between the two tiny kingdoms, which (true to the spirit of Swift's story) is caused by the pride of the rival kings. I would've preferred less "Gabby" in this sequence, but I understand they were trying to establish a new character to compete with the Mouse.

If you like good animation, you will enjoy this DVD.

Paramount's animation department never got the same acclaim as Walt Disney's or Warner Brothers or MGM. But Max Fleischer who created the Popeye cartoons for Paramount made his bid for immortality with this animated version of Gulliver's Travels with radio announcer Sam Parker voicing Gulliver and radio singers Lanny Ross and Jessica Dragonette as the Blefuscuan prince and the Lilliputian princess who in fact are a love match and would like to rule peacefully if they're fathers can keep from reuniting old animosities.

In the Jonathan Swift book it was which end of the eggs do you crack, the big or the small end. Here it is the song with the same music and the same lyrics save for one word, Faithful for Lilliput and Forever for Blefuscu. Mankind does go to war stupidly over some trifles and sad to say still does.

The song sung by Ross and Dragonette received one of the two Oscar nominations for this film for Best Song. The songs were written by Paramount contract team, Leo Robin and Ralph Rainger. The scoring of the film netted the second Oscar nomination for Victor Young.

I have a feeling had this been done over at Disney or Warner Brothers some additional zip would have been in the film. It moves way too slowly. The closest treatment of Swift's satire to what he had in mind is probably in the film that Ted Danson did as Gulliver back in the Nineties.