Mary and Gretel (1916)
Article 5672 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 5-3-2019
Director unknown
No cast
Country: USA
What it is: Early stop-motion doll animation

Two dolls are brought to life and told not to pick flowers. They meet a white rabbit and characters from the story of Rip Van Winkle.

I will grant that the stop-motion animation here is certainly excellent for such an early film; it’s a pity that IMDB doesn’t have any credits for who is responsible for this. Certain individual scenes have a cute charm to them as well. The downside is that the short is also rather aimless; though the dolls are the putative main characters, most of the footage involves the bowling dwarfs and the white rabbit pilfering some of their grog, scenes that do not involve the wandering dolls at all. Granted, with only a seven minute running time, there really isn’t going to be much of a story to begin with, but you do expect the action to be more focused than what we have here. It’s an interesting oddity.