Holiday Highlights Review

Holiday Highlights is a 1940 animated short film from the Merry Melodies series. It is a flawed, but amusing entry.

Pretty much like ‘Circus Today’, this short is also very uneven but mostly quite funny. The idea behind it is terrific as it gives us a funny, insightful look at the entire holiday calendar. I love this idea and although the execution wasn’t great, it is good enough leading to a fun cartoon. The animation is also very good as is the score.

The highlights are the Thanksgiving part with the politics as well as Halloween. But others such as Arbor Day are more forgettable. The film is very clever and entertaining, but a capsule of its time as it encompasses the holidays as 1940s audiences saw them. It is more timely than timeless.

Holiday Highlights definitely needed more timeless appeal, but the idea behind it and most of the execution are very good.