We use cookies to personalize your experience and analyze traffic. You can opt out at any time.
Betty drudges in the kitchen alone until her friends (including Bimbo and Koko) hold a surprise birthday party for her… which gets rowdy.
Betty Boop's Birthday Party isn't screening in cinemas right now.
Follow the film in the app to get notified when showtimes are added.
Betty Boop's Birthday Party showtimes, refreshed every morning
Pick your cinema, get a nudge before it leaves screens.
Another banger from Betty Boop: her singing about not wanting to wash dishes.This one was super cute overall, but it would be upsetting to me if all the guests at my birthday party were men. Betty deserved some girlfriends! Her character design was truly peak in 1933–1934: the Hays Code really did my girl dirty after that.For the next 3 weeks, I’m only watching shorts because school refuses to let me live my full cinephile life…
Bittersweet Boop fare. We open on Betty scrubbing a floor, surrounded by mountains of dishes to be cleaned, singing the saddest of songs to herself. She’s “got nobody to hear her song, so she’s humming to herself,” and she’s “so alone she could cry.” This is our Lady of the Boop at her most vulnerable, a shell of her former, carefree self. She also complains about having so much work to do and nobody to play with, though one of the shirts she starts washing ends up washing itself, and a tiny cat appears from inside her sink’s faucet to lick the dishes clean. Still, Betty is in dire straits. Just a year ago she was running a successful presidential campaign, and now she’s been reduced to this lonely, Cinderella-style drudgery. The mood lightens when her doorbell rings. Betty says, “I hope it’s a man” and opens her front door, only to find a huge package on her doorstep. It’s a big birthday cake (creepily sporting only 14 candles), courtesy of all the Boopster’s friends. Surprise! Various animals are there to greet her, along with Koko and Bimbo! Her birthday presents consist of talking flowers, various new pets, and a piano, the ivories of which Betty gladly tinkles. Then it’s off to the birthday feast, where everyone wildly gyrates and demonstrates the idiosyncrasies of their eating patterns. Too good to be true, unfortunately. A fight breaks out between two of her friends. Then a full-blown brawl ensues among all the party goers. Betty tries to stop this melee but ends up getting bounced across the yard to land on a “Crossing the Delaware” garden fountain statue. She basically lands in the arms of George Washington, who issues her greetings, to which she replies, “Thank you, Daddy.” The entire statue, with Betty in tow, sails away, leaving the remaining fountain’s fish to gossip. Are Betty’s daddy issues coming to the fore? Does she end up knocking boots with the father of her country? In statue form?!? The film offers no easy answers.
boop-day-a-doop
The film follows Betty Boop, who starts her day feeling lonely and doing chores, until her friends surprise her with a rowdy, eccentric birthday party.
It was directed by Dave Fleischer, a central figure in early sound animation and co-founder of Fleischer Studios.
