Gulliver's Travels was the second American feature length animated film. While this makes it a curiosity for animation fans, and an important milestone in the history of film (even if most film historians would disagree), this doesn't necessarily make it an entertaining film for the casual viewer.
Part of this isn't the film's fault. Since Gulliver's Travels was a Fleischer production for Paramount, it wasn't accorded a "classic" status the way Disney's features were. The film did decent box office business at the time, but the Fleischer brothers were hardly beloved by Paramount and were fired from their own animation studio a few years later. Paramount had little incentive to preserve the film's integrity. As a result, many (if not all) of the copies in circulation on videotape are of horrible quality, and are on low-budget tapes. They are jittery, blurry, and have wobbly soundtracks as did many creaky Hollywood films discarded for broadcast in the early TV era. The film occassionally turns up on TV from time to time as well, virtually without fanfare. The poor quality of these copies make the film seem even creakier than it is; perhaps viewing a pristine print with a restored soundtrack would be a more favorable experience.
This makes reviewing the film difficult. It is unclear to what extent any of the copies are edited and one risks being too harsh on the film.
Gulliver's Travels is an unquestionably flawed film, and its flaws are interesting to animation fans for one chief reason - the Fleischers were trying to ape the Disney style. The opening scenes in particular, with the pages of a fairy tale book opening for us and Gabby the town crier singing a Seven Dwarfs-style song, let us know that the inspiration lies with Disney. This is significant, since Disney had released only one feature length film prior to the Fleischers, and the Fleischers were aggressively competitive with Disney in the short subjects market. From the beginning of the animated film era, it seems, Disney defined the medium and the only way his competitors could consider beating him was by mimicking him. This is the same Bizarro logic of Quest for Camelot, The Swan Princess, many Don Bluth productions, and seems to be the mantra of Spielberg's Dreamworks. These films make money, to be sure, but are quickly forgotten by the bulk of the audience when the latest Disney release is available. The true shame of Gulliver is that the Fleischer brothers had already proven they were capable of creating truly unique extended animated films in their two-reel Technicolor Popeye series, none of which would ever be confused with the Disney style.
The Disney influence is most clear in the painted backdrops, which evoke the fairytale illustration of Snow White and ambitious shorts like The Old Mill. There is also a reliance on musical numbers and extreme sentimentality. These are in sharp contrast to the animation of the lead characters which, while not bad, are clearly in the style of non-Disney 1930s shorts. The various Liliputians are goggle-eyed and rubbery, almost like characters in Sunshine Makers or the Van Beuren shorts. Gulliver himself is obviously rotoscoped almost literally in a manner that foreshadows Ralph Bakshi's work; the Fleischers invented rotoscoping in the 1920s but had never before used it as primarily a tracing tool. Whether or not these disparate tools work for you is a matter of taste; I found it to be a bit too patchwork.
Maltin's Of Mice and Magic paints an unflattering portrait of Gulliver in which it is implied that the film's artistic failure was a crucial downturn for the Fleischer studios; this may not be true. The failure of Gulliver to start a line of non-Disney animated features lies not in the film itself but in the lack of support Paramount had for the Fleischers; the film was one of the Top 20 box office successes of 1939. The Fleischer studio, had Paramount allowed it to continue, would surely have produced more feature films in the 1940s and its possible that the financial success of these films would attract a pool of talent to the Fleischer studio. The film, while very flawed, cannot be seen as proof that only Disney can achieve success at the box office.
Younger children will enjoy Gulliver's Travels as a timefiller or a rainy afternoon. Gulliver can't be compared to any true classics of animation from Pinocchio to Mononoke Hime, but it really isn't much different in quality from the Land Before Time OAVs or other current Disneyoid fare.
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