In today’s hed gif you are watching a segment from a 1931 cartoon I found from poking around on the Internet Archive called “Marty the Monk.” It’s from the cartoon studio of Boyd La Vero, one of the early animation houses, which apparently did not survive very long but did act as a training ground for some budding cartoonists that would go on to work at other studios.
The two Marty shorts at the archive borrow a lot of the same footage, one from the other. Still, I found them both charming and unique. There’s that horse-ish squishy-tire’d car that comes when called and comes with a duck-horn… how cute is that?! The short “Mere Maids” (from which the gif footage was taken) also employs a creative breaking-the-fourth-wall gimmick that tickles me; the cartoonist, brush-in-hand, interacts with the animated characters on-screen. This serves as a reminder of how very time-consuming the early work of cartooning was, with every cell needing to be drawn individually by hand. No computer-assist tweeting there!
There is not much about Marty or La Vero available on-line, but I did find a great website with loads of cartooning history that provides a bit of information on the subject. You can read it all here: Cartoon Research: "The Forgotten Cult of “Marty the Monk”" by Steve Stanchfield. And then you can go on to explore more cartoon history on this delightful site. Long live our cartoon historians!