This Tweety adventure is set in a hotel called The Spinster Arms (“Baby It’s Cold Inside”). Isn’t that an amazing thing to put in an ostensible children’s cartoon? I’m for it, by the way—say this kind of thing in front of the kids. They’re evolving into understanding, and this tone and balance seems to point toward health and balance.
Room and Bird is built on really nice, concise idea. No pets, a tough hotel dick to make sure the no-pet policy is observed, and a bunch of very determined grannies. We have an absurd elevator gag involving a mouse discussing Thomas Jefferson. The pets cooperate when this detective comes around. There’s a lesson here for the kids, if you want to pursue it. Sympathy and antagonism are circumstantial, relative, even completely arbitrary! As part of their campaign against unjust authority, the pets fashion themselves into a very unwieldy composite granny. Very funny!
The film’s conclusion is really good, right out of L&H’s Blockheads—there’s a pet in every room! Same situation, though a different sense, obviously. Goes so far to anticipate the remarkable situation of the gifts on the table in Milos Forman’s The Fireman’s Ball. Room and Bird may not have been intended as ideological cinema, but it sure can be apprehended that way.
There’s an incidental, out-of-nowhere elephant, who is just fantastic.