Yes, I think Starlac has covered most of the salient points on Molly Moo Cow, and I recommend the review below to you. The short is pointless, characterless and boring. The only area I might disagree is that I thought that the old Tom and Jerry shorts were (often) rather a LOT better than this, not just somewhat.

Still, I can't bring myself to give it one star, because I have shorts that are SO much worse than this in just about every respect, and a lot of them are much later. You want to talk racial offensiveness? Though I can understand how it could offend some people, how can you compare this cartoon to that godawful 1946 thing I have somewhere which has a kangaroo, a giraffe and an elephant in black face? I think the producers treat Native American culture with ignorance rather than derision. And after all the female Indian is portrayed as a good character, and most of the laughs such as they are, are at the expense of her husband, for reasons that are a parody of white culture.

This isn't quite rubbish. It's a silly old cartoon, and not quite awful enough to make me heave, but it is certainly pretty bad. But if we didn't put things like this in here, everything would get 3's and 4's and you wouldn't appreciate how good the good ones actually are.

Hardly the Van Beuren studio's finest hour...

It’s not hard to see why the Van Beuren studios was forced to close down, or why fewer people without an interest in animation history remember them with non-entities like Molly Moo Cow in their film library. Although in reality they had to close when their distributor RKO, signed a contract with Disney, with Walt’s quality shorts to distribute why would RKO need stuff like this. The studio would ultimately be closed in 1936, Van Beuren himself would die a year later from a heart attack, the studio he created a mere footnote in animation history.

The Molly Moo Cow cartoons were one of the studios attempts to create some new characters, mostly due to the poor revenues that the studio had managed to obtain at this point after some bad choices. This shorts went under the banner “Rainbow Parade,” a name obviously inspired by Disney’s Silly Symphonies. These new colour cartoons, first using Cinecolor and then the Technicolor processes (after Disney exclusive-use contract was up) are certainly colourful, garish even. Bright, primary colors fill the screen, threatening to give a headache to the viewers.

However, they haven’t travelled very far from the Tom and Jerry shorts that Van Beuren made a few years before, in fact they lost even the edge of surealness that those shorts had; this lack of originality didn’t help the studio's survival. This is even more remarkable when you consider the talent that the studio had at the time: Soon to be Disney legends Milt Khan and Shamus Culhane for two, and Joseph Barbera (Flintstones, Tom and Jerry, etc) all worked for Beuren, either as animators, story writers, or both.

This Molly Moo Cow short isn’t a well crafted one, the rubbery limps harked back to the early thirties and animation had moved on in leaps and bounds by then. To give you some idea, the Disney masterpiece of characterisation “The Three Little Pigs” had been out for some two years prior to this short.

Neither does this short have the kind of surrealism that the Tom and Jerry shorts enjoyed. It is quite, to be frank, pedestrian. When the two ducks go through their “You First, No You First” routine the first time it is okay, the second time is just labouring for laughs. Not that they is much to laugh at here, well I didn’t find anything anyway, the whole thing seemed flat.

The character of Molly herself has a certain Clarabelle-ness to her design, Clarabelle is the cow from various Disney shorts, that Disney retired due to her being completely uninteresting because of having no real personality to talk about.

Molly is also uninteresting, and she looks decidedly undernourished and due to the Hayes code she is missing her udders, this is because the code forbade udders under the terms that they may offend someone (who I’ve no idea).

In essence it is because this short has so little in it, either the spark that the previous studio’s black and white Tom and Jerry cartoons had, coupled with the fact that the company couldn’t compete with the increasingly sophisticated animation coming from the west* that makes it, like the studio that made it, so completely unknown today.

*Van Beuren’s was based in New York, but it also was across the street from the Fleischer studio, so it’s location wasn’t an excuse for it output.