Yes, before there were THE Tom and Jerry, there were the OTHER Tom and Jerry, from Van Beuren Studios (interestingly, Joe Barbera worked at Van Beuren at the time, but I'm not sure in what capacity).

This isn't the best Tom and Jerry cartoon, but it's not the worst either. Although this was in the very early days of sound, there is little dialogue in Tom and Jerry cartoons. Instead they rely heavily on music, so everything bounces, stretches, jiggles and dances in time to the soundtrack.

One thing which I like about the original VB Tom and Jerry, over most Warner and MGM cartoons, is their unpredictability. Rather than the rather wearisome format of 'set up good guy and bad guy, and have them try to 'get' each other for seven minutes') which is what a lot of the less stellar WB cartoons amount to, these Van Beuren shorts were often completely nuts. In one Tom and Jerry cartoon, they meet a guy walking a piece of cheese. In another, they get shot out of a cannon, and spend the rest of the cartoon underwater in a sort of hooch parlor filled with mermaids.

This is the sort of cartoon which they're parodying in the intro to 'Triplets of Belleville'. Some of the jokes (mostly sight gags) fall flat, some just don't make sense, and some are funny. The plot really doesn't matter much. T and J seem to be tuning a piano for a concert performance by a female pianist (who has outrageously huge breasts - another thing you wouldn't see twenty years later). There are lots of silly sight gags involving a bad note being removed from the piano, another one being pulled like a bad tooth. And the notorious Disney-like mice. I find the argument here rather silly, since at this time, virtually all cartoon animals were sort of amorphous black blobs whose species was sometimes even doubtful.

All in all I find these cartoons edearing. This isn't the best of them, but it's decent enough.