My daughters and I watched this movie yesterday evening on Netflix “Watch It Now”.
If you are in the right frame of mind when you sit down to such cartoons it can be wicked fun.
If you haven’t watched it before I’ll give you a little background (hopefully without giving anything away because I know you all want to watch it).
It’s basically about a little mouse family escaping from Russia where the cats are evil to come to America where there are no cats. That’s already kind of funny.
Of course, on the way across the ocean Fievel Mousekewitz falls overboard trying to catch his little blue hat (yes, the one in the picture on his head). He manages to crawl inside a floating bottle and make it to Liberty Island where a French Pigeon is constructing the Statue of Liberty.
The bird names the little mouse, “My Little Immigrant” which just cracked me up. Don’t ask because I don’t know why. Maybe it was the French accent in America calling the little Russian mouse “My Little Immigrant”, but I couldn’t get it out of my head. When my wife got home I called her, “My Little Immigrant” and she hit me.
Fievel sets off in search of his family somewhere in New York City. His sister, Tanya Mousekewitz has a scene with Mama Mousekewitz where she is saying that she thinks her brother is still alive (remember he fell overboard). “Mama, I have a feeling that Fievel is still out there somewhere”. “It’ll go away,” Mama Mousekewitz consoles. It’ll go away? Who wrote this thing? Yet more tears of merriment.
Anyway, turns out the mice in America are trying to win their freedom from the cats in America. Yes, there are cats in America. There is this rich old mouse (Gussie Mouseheimer) who is trying to organize the revolution. At one point she is making a speech and she says in this strange voice with some kind of hoity English/German accent, but with an Elmer Fudd speech impediment, “I have dedicated my life to helping those less fortunate than myself (that’s everyone).” I suspect you may have had to see it to get the full unabated belly laugh, but it was great. We had to rewind a couple of times.
Oh wait. I found a clip. You have to get to about the 1:25 mark…
Oh Fievel. I could watch that little mouse over and over. I never realized until I got older that there were a LOT of allusions to real life events. If I watched it again (which I may have to do now, thanks), I'm sure I'd find even more references and such. Tanya annoys me though. In all the movies. Had your chilrens ever watched it before?
ReplyDeleteMy youngest admitted to watching it before. Not sure about the other :).
ReplyDeleteMy wife had watched the German version. Some of the songs were much funnier in German. You can find them on youtube is you browse around enough.