Trees and Jamaica Daddy is a 1957 cartoon by UPA.
Actually it's two different and unrelated cartoons released as a set:
- "Trees": A little girl named Hattie sings about how cool trees are. Directed by Lew Keller.
- "Jamaica Daddy": A Jamaican fellow with his own calypso band sings about how he needs to have children to grow his family tree. Directed by Fred Crippen.
Part of a short-lived UPA series, Ham and Hattie, in which two separate short-short cartoon songs were welded together to make a standard one-reel short.
Tropes:
- Animated Actors: Hamilton Ham, the star of the second segment, starts the show putting on his costume from a steamer trunk, as if he were an actor getting ready to take the stage.
- Babies Ever After: The singer in "Jamaica Daddy" sets about populating the family tree, and has twenty-four children. The song ends with the singer a grandfather in retirement, content about having grown the family tree.
- Cats Are Mean: A cat tries hard to eat the cute bird in "Trees". It eventually gets forcibly flung out of the tree, landing in the pile of leaves that Hattie's father is raking, much to the displeasure of Hattie's father.
- Funetik Aksent: For the singer with the Jamaican accent, who sings of having to populate "De Fam-Lee Tree" (per the on-screen words).
- Have a Gay Old Time: One of the lyrics in "Trees" asks "What do little pussies climb and rest in?"
- Limited Animation: UPA house style. In the scene in "Trees" where the cat is flying through the air, nothing about the figure of the cat moves as the drawing moves across the screen. The singers in "Jamaica Daddy" pop from pose to pose with no movement in between.
- The Musical: Two unrelated songs set to animation.
- Thick-Line Animation: Simple drawings with thick lines per UPA style.
