Johnny the Giant Killer

This movie has nothing to do with Jack and the Beanstalk. This visually stunning film is from the French school of animation, and is filled with a variety of storylines depending on what your age will allow you to understand. In other words, a kid and an adult can enjoy this film with each getting a different interpretation. If you liked this film, check out such animated classics like The Scarecrow, Amazing Adventures of Mr. Wonderbird, and the Adventures of Sinbad.

i discovered this cartoon in a bin of "bargain vhs tapes".having kids, we buy a lot of cartoons.

i would call this a lost classic.even though the copy i have has poor sound and choppy editing(it runs exactly 1 hour,and in several places you get the impression there's a scene missing).but no matter. as a whole its like a feature-length "SILLY SYMPHONY".hardly similar to "jack and the beanstalk" as the title would imply.lots of musical interludes with dancing worms,musical grasshoppers, and an educational limerick about beehives.

not as exciting as todays fast-paced animated features, but not without its own charms.

A truly bizarre animated feature from France, "Johnny the Giant Killer" incorporates Disney, Dali, Tex Avery and Hanna-Barbera into a crazy, frenetic adventure. A group of boys stumble upon a giant's castle, get captured and shrunken into miniature, and are then imprisoned. One boy escapes, is given refuge by a kingdom of bees, and then leads an insect invasion of the giant's castle. A weak English-dubbed version robs the film of whatever humor and irony the original Gallic screenplay may have possessed, and the violence in the flick (including decapitation and death via swordplay) is strangely rough considering this was an early 1950s production. The animation varies from eye-popping to banal, however, and none of the characters have any personality. This film is more of a curio than a classic...worth a look, but nothing to champion or savor.

I saw this film as "Johnny Little and the Giant" on the local "Colonel Caboose" weekday-afternoon cartoon show in the early 1960's. Some enterprising TV-film rental company had edited it into a serial of sorts, so it was aired in brief segments five days a week. It struck me as being a little on the strange side back then--which was all to the good in my book, as I was also a big Rod Serling fan at an early age!

Incidentally, a brief clip from this film appears in "Doorways to Horror", one of the earliest VCR games. I recognized it at once, even though it had been at least 20 years since the last time I'd seen any part of the movie!