Century Film Project

This animated short exploits Charlie Chaplin’s image, but due to the different standards of copyright at the time, he probably made no money off it. It also includes a character named “Fatty” who appears to represent Roscoe Arbuckle.

The movie shows a relatively barren landscape, with Charlie walking up to a house with a large window, a stand of trees in the background and what looks like a fern in the foreground. He addresses a woman inside the house, asking her to marry him. She replies that she will – if he can bring her a white elephant. He shrugs and wanders off and Fatty now emerges from behind the house, asking the girl if she has forgotten him. She replies again that she will belong to whoever brings her a white elephant. Charlie now wanders the bleak countryside, looking high and low for a white elephant, but they don’t seem to be indigenous to this region. Fatty follows him to keep an eye on his progress.

Eventually Charlie happens upon a circus, represented by tents in the foreground and background, and he spies an elephant snoozing on the ground, This one is not white, however, it seems to be a mottled grey shade. Undeterred, Charlie wakes the beast and yanks on its tail, resulting in his being thrown. He chases the elephant up and down the landscape, and eventually drags it by the trunk back to his home, Fatty still following at a discreet distance. Charlie brings out a pail of paint and a brush, and he paints the elephant white. While he goes off to get the girl, Fatty comes up with another pail and kicks the elephant several times and pulls its tail. Charlie and the girl climb to the roof of his house to see the elephant, and Fatty continues agitating it, until he splashes it with orange paint, which causes the girl to lift Charlie by the seat of his pants, twirl him around her head, and throw him at the elephant. The elephant sits on Fatty. The end.

This very simplistic movie seems to have been intended mostly to entertain very small children, who would recognize Chaplin from his well-known live action movies, and would be able to follow the simple, almost fairy tale plot. I actually think the detail on Charlie is a bit better than in some of the other Charlie cartoons we’ve seen, for example “Charlie on the Windmill,” or maybe we just have a better-preserved print with more close-ups here. It’s sort of interesting that they chose to use “Fatty” as his adversary; Arbuckle and Chaplin had been in a couple of shorts together in 1914, but he was never an established “villain” the way Mack Swain was. Presumably, the producers of this little movie thought that Arbuckle was more recognizable than Swain, although he’s not as easy to represent in an avatar as Chaplin (or Swain, for that matter). The girl just seems to be a generic love interest, not one of Chaplin’s co-stars at Keystone or elsewhere.

Director: Unknown

Camera: Unknown

Run Time: 5 Min, 40 secs

You can watch it for free: here.