The Northwest Film Forum’s Children’s Film Festival is now winding down its fourth year of screening films that no kid I know would really enjoy. I’m not trying to bring down the festival, I’m just noting that I’ve got, at quick count, seven kids of various ages in my life and not a single one of ’em—and these are bright little buggers, mind you—will ever be heard to say, "Uncle Steve, can we please go see three decades of Polish animation?"

That aside, the festival is a gold mine for adult fans of animation. The whole thing wraps up with the 1941 Fleischer brother effort Hoppity Goes to Town, which plays through Thursday.

Back in their day, the Fleischers—director Dave and producer brother Max—were, along with the geniuses (Tex Avery, Friz Freleng et al) at Bugs Bunny’s Warner Bros. studio, a zippy antidote to the often enervating Disney animation empire. Dave and Max’s work in the 1930s and early ’40s included the innocently tarty Betty Boop shorts, some dazzlingly designed (if a bit stiff) Superman cartoons, and the rambunctious best of the Popeye films (the ones in which you could tell that sailor was only a beat away from saying something fantastically foul).

Hoppity was a feature-length failure about some insects threatened by urbanization (again: "Mommy, please…?") but for film buffs it’s worth checking out to catch big-screen glimpses of the brothers’ verve. The following clip is long, but when it downloads skip to about the five-minute mark for a fantastic "jitterbug" sequence and a sampling of the film’s most engaging characters, the hardboiled henchmen Swat, a fly (my favorite), and Smack, a mosquito. Then head to NWFF to see it the way it was meant to be seen: