Disney's Portrayal Of America's National Pasttime

 

Happy Opening Day to baseball players and fans alike. ⚾️ 

This hilarious Disney short focuses on the cartoony antics and shenanigans of playing the all natural sport, that is baseball. Jack Kinney has made other cartoons involving sports. Football, Fishing, Skiing, you name it. They were all classics.

I think what makes this short funny is how the gags work and the lively animation. Disney always was the best with animating characters but here it's done with mastery. I believe John Sibley was a part of this project, because he's one of my favorite animators as of now. 

The poses are also stellar and the right amount of attractive. It's like your ready to take your picture, it's awesome. 

Now I'm not choosing this short because it isn't as funny as Baseball Bugs or Batty Baseball, but it's probably the best of the 3 with the animation and slapstick. 

You can see the dry brush smears with the frames of the baseball bat, it's been a classic cartoon staple and I LOVE it!

Classic studios including Disney always had an era where they made the best cartoons. Looney Tunes's best was 1948-50, Fleischer's probably 1931-1933, MGM 1949-1951, and I think Disney's absolute greatest spot for the best cartoons were around 1940-1943. They had alot of expressive and conceptual ideas for almost every cartoon and you can tell that the humor and voices started to feel more free and varied.

Back to How To Play Baseball, after rewatching this one, I realized how much funny moments is amounted in this cartoon. I don't think people realize that what's funny in animation is sometimes the stuff that doesn't actually work in real life. That's what's here with Goofy trying to swing the ball but it keeps on moving and missing. It's so off the wall that I have to give it additional credit. 

I also think the moments where the character is just standing there minding their own business relates to how I am in real life. I respect well drawn and relatable sense in films.

And we get more drybrush smears. Nice. 

It's so silly that baseball teams especially in the major leagues have these truly weird and funny names. This short makes fun of either the Boston Red Sox or Chicago White Sox and I think them naming different colors is clever.

I think the crew at Disney at that time has made the best walk and running cycles in animation history. 

Especially the animators who worked for Jack Kinney and Jack Hannah. I like both of them and they continue to entertain viewers to this day. The Preston Blair book is really useful if you want to know how to animate movements like this!

Even when at times the animators are drawing the most intense and stretched frames in the entirety of the short.

I don't think this is as subtle and funny to watch than some of the other Goofy shorts but it's still really amusing and has an amazing narrator voiced by Fred Shields.

I always wondered if Tex Avery the genius behind cartoony gags and fast pacing reacted to these cartoons. Did he experience them? I would love to know. This was 1941, just about that year when Tex Avery arrived to MGM.

Never knew a ball would rip and become a piece of yarn.

I can definitely believe people hysterically laughing too much with this scene. It was pure insanity and really rare for it's time. Goofy running while the base is stuck on his shoes is comedic perfection and in the vain of small details that make this highly watchable.

Like I was saying earlier, Happy Opening Day!