While not Herman's biggest fan, a good deal of his cartoons have grown on me and are enjoyable though nothing outstanding, personal favourites being Naughty But Mice, Of Mice and Magic and Herman Catoonist. Drinks on the Mouse is a long way from a bad cartoon but at the same time it didn't do an awful lot for me.
Starting with what was good, the best thing was the music. The music is the one consistently good element in the Herman(both with and without Katnip) cartoons, and that in Drinks on the Mouse doesn't disappoint at all. It gives the cartoon so much energy and soul, is lushly orchestrated and rhythmically lively. The animation has its moments, with some good detail in the backgrounds and some nice mellow colours. The animation in the sleeping pills gag is clever. Katnip is a good adversary and is more menacing than some of his other outings while taking the violence and laughs well. His chemistry with Herman also convinces, but while Herman has some amusing moments he has been more likable and a lot of his actions feel a little stale, especially when you compare to his previous cartoons.
Not all the animation in Drinks on the Mouse works, the drawing has been much smoother especially with the mice. A good deal of the middle-period-late Famous Studios cartoons did show increasingly smaller budget and with a slightly rushed, less careful look, and while Drinks on the Mouse is a long way from the worst case those did show. Famous Studios were also getting increasingly repetitive, and that comes through in Drinks on the Mouse too. The stories in the Herman cartoons were always unoriginal and unsurprising but it felt very repetitive and tired here, with little clever, new or imaginative done with it. The cartoon is also lacking in laughs, suffering from being incredibly predictable and stale, I could barely remember most of them. The most memorable were the ones with the vanishing cream, which has been done before and much more inventively, and the sleeping pills, though that was mostly because the animation was clever. The mice are little more than a plot device, sometimes they do give a poignancy to the cartoons but they have little to do and what happens to them seems to happen in every single Herman and Katnip cartoon.
Overall, certainly not bad or unwatchable but didn't care for it. 5/10 Bethany Cox