Despite Oswald the Lucky Rabbit and his cartoons being popular and well received at the time, they have been vastly overshadowed over time by succeeding animation characters. It is a shame as, while not cartoon masterpieces, they are fascinating for anybody wanting to see what very old animation looked like.
'Homeless Homer' on the other hand is not a good representation of Oswald, with very little actually to make it watchable. Unfortunately, 'Homeless Homer' is an even worse representation of a great talent like Fritz Freleng in one of his first cartoons (his second Oswald cartoon in fact) and to this day perhaps one of his worst.
Some of the animation is quite good, if not exactly refined, parts are crisp and fluid enough with some nice detail especially with animation techniques still in early days. The music has some nice energy, and Oswald is still likable enough.
On the other hand, Homer may look cute but is anything but in personality, instead he is rather too much of a brat. The story, even for an Oswald cartoon, is slight and sometimes struggles for momentum in the earlier parts of the cartoon. It also jumps around a lot, and there is the sense that there were parts missing, whether that was the case is uncertain but that's how one feels.
For an Oswald cartoon, 'Homeless Homer' is incredibly bland, and regarding Freleng it was like he was slowly trying to find his style in his debut 'Fiery Fireman' (not great but much better than this) before losing it here. 'Homeless Homer' is bland for two reasons.
One is timing, it's all very routine and pedestrian whereas timing was usually not bad at all in previous Oswald cartoons. The other is the content itself, there's never anything remotely amusing here and it's just as thin in the imagination and quantity departments too, quantity-wise it's rather meagre and none of it delivers with everything so tired and predictable.
In summary, weak and agreed for historical interest and for those wanting to see every Oswald cartoon there is (not feasible with many either being only re-discovered, incomplete or completely lost) only. 3/10 Bethany Cox
