Fairaher The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

StyleSk8r At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

Motompa Go in cold, and you're likely to emerge with your blood boiling. This has to be seen to be believed.

Brendon Jones It’s fine. It's literally the definition of a fine movie. You’ve seen it before, you know every beat and outcome before the characters even do. Only question is how much escapism you’re looking for.

OllieSuave-007 This is a really nice cartoon featuring an assortment of Mother Goose and/or storybook characters, from Humpty Dumpty to the Three Blind Mice and from Bo-Peep to Goldilocks, performing a song and dance for Old King Cole. It's nice how the storybook characters come together like this in one big bash and its clever to see them literally coming out of their respective storybooks. Very imaginative.Grade B

Robert Reynolds This is an early color short in the Silly Symphonies series produced by the Disney studio. There will be mild spoilers ahead:It's hard to spoil this short because it's the blandest Disney short I can recall seeing. The basic premise is simple. That may be a large part of the problem with this one.Old King Cole is throwing a party and has invited all the characters in Storybookland to come. That's about it. You see various books open and have buildings pop up relevant to whatever fairy tale it relates to and the visuals are nice, but they can't really compensate for the lackluster music and boring characters.The short is like cotton candy. It's very nice looking and might briefly seem sweet, but in reality, it's just so much air Pretty much every fairy tail character has a brief moment in the spotlight, but nothing is developed to any degree. The Three Blind Mice and Hickory, Dickory, Dock are the only ones which are even halfway memorable.This short is available on the Disney Treasures More Silly Symphonies DVD set. The set is worth having but this short is for die-hard Disney fans who want to see everything.

TheLittleSongbird As I have said many times, I have a lot of fondness for the Disney Silly Symphonies. Old King Cole I'm afraid doesn't really do all that much for me. It is more tolerable than El Terrible Toreador, The Merry Dwarfs and Cannibal Capers, but if I want a masterpiece status Silly Symphonies I prefer The Old Mill, The Ugly Duckling(1939), The Skeleton Dance, Flowers and Trees, The Goddess of Spring and The Band Concert. I do like the vivid colours and colourful backgrounds, the music although simpler than most cartoons is still full of energy, the nursery rhymes are nice to hear and the dancing is niftily choreographed. And there are some nice parts to the cartoon such as Peter the Pumpkin Eater and his wife and Hickory, Dick and Dock jumping out of Pandora's Box to sound the midnight bells. However, while spotting the characters are a delight most of them are not very appealing to me. They are of the cute but bland kind. And I didn't care for some of the character designs, Old King Cole's features are very over-exaggerated and some of the side characters like the mice and the Pied Piper look like stick figures. There isn't much story to speak of either, it is over-simplistic and is more an excuse for short snippets of nursery rhymes to come to life and in a less charming way than it had potential to. All in all, not much memorable apart from the spotting of the nursery characters and rhymes. 6/10 Bethany Cox

Neil Doyle 1933 really marked the beginning of Walt Disney's cartoon kingdom and a ten-year period during which all of the elements that went into the making of his great feature-length cartoons could be seen in transition as the artists developed their talent for bringing instantly recognizable characters to life, with music and art.OLD KING COLE is a merry old start for Disney. A storybook opens as trumpeters announce the arrival of The Pied Piper, Little Boy Blue, Mother Hubbard, The Old Lady Who Lived in a Shoe, all on their way to King Cole's Happy New Year celebration at the castle. The figures all appear as pop-ups in a storybook, a device used so many other times by Disney and other cartoon makers.Jack Pratt, Peter Peter, Pumpkin Eater, Humpty Dumpty, Three Blind Mice, Ten Little Indians, all are part of the party celebrations, dancing in style to some nimble tunes and all sorts of party celebrants. The frenzied finale has the merry Cole joining The Ten Little Indians in a wild dance and then joining the other revelers for more of the same.Enjoyable look at how the early animators began their training ground and what the Silly Symphonies were all about.