Detouring America Review

Detouring America is a 1939 Oscar-nominated animated short film from the Merry Melodies series. It is a solid, but not great flick.

It is basically a travelogue of the United States where we see various groups of people and places visited while also following a human fly who tries to climb the Empire State Building. His “Help!” yelp at the end was of course very funny and a great finale, but other than that, there aren’t a lot of quality gags here unfortunately.

The film definitely must have been incredibly interesting for the 1939 audiences, but travelogues are rather dated in today’s day and age and that is just the fact. Some scenes here are fine, but most are forgettable and not all that funny. The narrator is definitely solid and the animation is certainly very strong, but the film is still overrated and certainly not deserving of an Oscar nomination. Thankfully ‘The Ugly Duckling’ earned another Oscar for the Silly Symphonies series and not this weak film.

Detouring America definitely is very well animated and with a great ending, but it’s a slight, dated travelogue nonetheless.