TheLittleSongbird Despite Oswald the Lucky Rabbit and his cartoons being popular and well received at the time, they have been vastly overshadowed over time by succeeding animation characters. It is a shame as, while not cartoon masterpieces, they are fascinating for anybody wanting to see what very old animation looked like.'Fiery Fireman', one of the "Winkler Years" Oswald cartoons (one of the first in fact due to the previous "Winkler Years" cartoons either only just been re-discovered or still lost), is notable for being the debut of Fritz Freleng. It is not a bad debut either, if a little bland by Freleng standards.Bland in terms of two things. One being in terms of timing, which became considerably sharper since. The other being in terms of consistent humour, with the content being amusing enough but not hilarious or imaginative.The story, even for an Oswald cartoon, is slight and sometimes struggles for momentum in the earlier parts of the cartoon.However, the animation is very good, it's crisp and fluid enough with some nice detail especially with animation techniques still in early days. The music is lush and energetic, adding a lot rather than distracting and enhances the cartoon's quality even, the use of sound is never static and helps make the action understandable.Oswald is a likable enough lead with a nice personality and never doing anything that would infuriate the viewer. As said, some of the material is amusing and it's all charming enough, just with nothing exceptional and with the sense that Freleng was still properly finding his style.In summary, decent but not great, both for Freleng and for Oswald. 6/10 Bethany Cox

boblipton In this, the first of more than three hundred cartoons that Isadore 'Friz' Freleng ever directed, we see no sign of his future greatness -- although he does use one of his favorite gags, of some one entering one door and then exiting another, unrelated door later. This was one of the Oswald the Lucky Rabbit cartoons that were produced for Charles Mintz after he cheated the rights to the cartoon character out of Disney and then lost them, in turn to Universal Pictures. It is, so far as future efforts are concerned, no better and no worse than the others of this period, with Oswald, as co-directed by Rudolph Ising, simply another frenetic clown, doing the same sorts of cartoon shticks that cartoon firemen would do for another ten years.