The Sunshine Makers is a 1935 Van Beuren Studios cartoon, directed by Ted Esbaugh and distributed by RKO Pictures.
The cartoon starts with a happy gnome waking up his fellow villagers to worship the sun and get to work making good and wholesome sunshine milk to spread happiness across the land. Unfortunately, they're also neighbours to an evil colony of gnomes who hate anything happy or sunny. When one of them tries attacking a gnome making his delivery rounds, he throws a bottle of sunshine milk at him, which makes part of his coat turn bright with happiness. He flees back to his village and buries it, and he rings the gong for the village to begin an attack on the happy gnomes with bug sprayers armed with toxic fumes. The happy gnomes immediately fight back and bombard them and their land with their sunshine milk, turning their desolate land beautiful and making them all happy and good.
The cartoon is in the Public Domain and can be seen here.
Tropes:
- Black-and-White Morality: The good, happy gnomes are forced to fight against the evil, sad gnomes to turn them good.
- Cartoon Bug-Sprayer: The evil gnomes try to attack the happy gnomes with these.
- Card-Carrying Villain: The evil gnomes, who openly call themselves nasty, mean and sad, and hate anything sunny or happy.
- Good Colors, Evil Colors: The happy gnomes are dressed up in bright, happy colors while the evil gnomes look drab and grey.
- Heel–Face Brainwashing: All of the evil gnomes are turned good in the end by the sunshine milk.
- Mordor: The evil gnomes village is a desolate wasteland, at least until the sunshine milk makes it beautiful again.
- Power-Up Food: The sunshine milk, which is capable of turning anything it touches into something bright and happy. It even reinvigorates the desolate wasteland of the evil gnomes into a lavish, beautiful landscape.
- Product Placement: The film was presented as a tie-in to the long forgotten Borden's brand of milk products.
- Public Domain Animation: The cartoon's copyright expired decades ago, making it a public domain cartoon staple.
- Scenery Porn: The cartoon takes full advantage of the Cinecolor process and shows off some lavish looking backgrounds that fit the films idealistic tone.
- Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism: Lands straight on the idealistic end of the scale.
- Vile Vulture: A nasty looking vulture is briefly seen before some sunshine milk turns it into a beautiful bluejay.note
