Whoosh! Archy (voiced by Eddie Bracken) flies out of the river and onto the dock, shakes himself and starts wondering why he has just said hello to a rat who knew his name. Suddenly he catches sight of his reflection, and realises that he is a cockroach, thinking this shocking as he was not a cockroach before until he twigs what has happened. He used to be a poet, but the pressure of life grew too much for him and after leaving a note he committed suicide - now the power of "transmigration" has transformed him into an insect. However he still has a poet's soul, and on finding an empty office he alights on the typewriter to continue his work...
The Archy and Mehitabel stories of Don Marquis were very popular during the first half of the twentieth century, originating as newspaper columns that are still in print today. It was natural that creative minds would want to translate these tales to other media, and so in the fifties Mel Brooks and Joe Darion wrote a musical around them, which doubled as a record; the stage version was not a success, but the project endured long enough for John David Wilson, an ambitious British animator seeking ideas for a feature, to adapt it into this cartoon. Similarly it was not a success in cinemas either and Wilson never directed another feature although his short ventures, often based around music, remained well-received.
Yet as with a lot of productions which fail to find much of an audience in their initial releases, Shinbone Alley does have a few fans, either among those who were offered it at a tender age by parents who thought cartoons are solely for kids, or by those who liked the original stories and were curious to see how they would translate into film. The answer to that was, somewhat shakily, as there's not really a strong enough plot for the characters to inhabit, which would be fine for a column but not so satisfying for almost ninety minutes of entertainment. Couple that to a jazzy score which does not contain one catchy tune, and you have a willfully idiosyncratic piece.
This being a labour of love, there are compensations, but the viewer must have patience to uncover them. The visual style is sketchy and hard to settle with, but distinctive for all that and at least did not look too much like a Disney movie, even if it was not on a level of artistic success that something like Yellow Submarine was. It was more a series of small adventures strung together with the theme of the cockroach wishing to better the life of his best friend, the cat Mehitabel who he may well be in love with in his futile manner, holding it all together. She was voiced by Carol Channing in her typical fashion, proving a good match for the curvaceous and teasing cat as drawn by Wilson and his team.
As Mehitabel pairs off with yet another unsuitable tomcat (voiced by Fred Flintstone himself, Alan Reed), much to Archy's dismay, he plunges into the same kind of depression he suffered as a human, but although the insect goes through some terrible times even as a tiny creature, that angst doesn't really translate to the audience, who tend to see the cute little bug and not wish to look any deeper. These aims for grand emotions are nothing if not curious in Shinbone Alley, with such sequences as Archy attempting suicide once again only to be foiled when, for example, he leaps from a high building to discover he is so light he sails down to the ground like a leaf. Meanwhile his feline friend meets up with a pretentious dog (John Carradine) who fails to teach her Shakespeare, as all the while Archy looks for a plush home for her, not understanding that he's better off letting her be herself. It's difficult to completely warm to this, as while you admire it there's something spiky about it that remains offputting.
