Unlike myself, animation is ageless · 12:57am Mar 15th, 2013
I've got quite a bit to talk about here today (mainly in connection to animation), such as two reviews, a bit piece on one of the most famous cartoons ever, and a bit of news (nothing too bad) But first, six cartoons (I've increased it for today... just for the sake of it).
Teacher’s are People – 1952 – Disney - Kinney
After numerous sports cartoons, Walt Disney got this idea to create a “foibles series” as Milt Schaffer called them, as his way to put personality back into the Goofy character that pretty much vanished in the sports cartoons (much to the disappointment of the Goofy cartoon crew; director Jack Kinney said to Disney that they should just remove the dog head from Goofy if this is what he wanted). They encompassed a variety of subjects from dieting to sleeping, but in many ways, sadly, these works of edutainment were watered down versions of the sports cartoons in terms of humor and timing in animation and gags (even most of the people who worked on them didn’t think they were good).
This is one of better ones given how amusing it is at times. Basically, a character that looks like Goofy (but in no way acts like him, so he’s not really Goofy) is a teacher at a school and he has to deal with unruly students, mainly one called “George”. The education part of this is the narrator (voiced by Alan Reed, who would later voice Fred Flintstone) tries to explain how important the teacher is and how school benefits children (with bits of dry irony from the visual parts).
I should add, given our present culture and numerous events, there is absolutely no way a cartoon like this would get made today. That ending, in particular, would cause an uproar (Bill Waterson got in letters for doing something similar in Calvin and Hobbes, and even if many social conservative groups objected to him when he was , Matt Groening’s Bart Simpson wouldn’t do anything close to that, well besides the chalkboard).
No Barking – 1954 – Warner Bros. - Jones
Chuck Jones (with Mike Maltese) created a lot of second-tier (the three bears, Hubie and Bertie the mice, etc.) series that featured characters that never became classics in the way that the Road Runner and Coyote or Pepe Le’ Pew did. He retired most of them by 1951, but there were a few he did past that like this one called ‘Frisky Puppy’ that only had three cartoons, this one being the last one. This character’s gimmick is simple; a cat is searching for him intending to do harm, he appears behind the cat, his bark sends the cat rocketing into the air. Basic stuff, but this cartoon finds many ways to play the gag each time, and it makes enjoyable for the most part. I say for the most, because there's quite a bit of filler with just the dog on screen, being a dog, that's not that fun to watch.
By the way, I’ve read this cartoon had only one animator (Ken Harris) working on it. Somewhat remarkable.
One Meat Brawl – 1947 – Warner Bros. – McKimson
A meat shortage causes Grover Groundhog to run for cover on Groundhog’s day. Amongst his pursuers are Porky Pig, seeking to add the little rodent to his stuffed animal collection, and his dog Mandrake, a sucker for sob stories.
Slap Happy Lion – 1947 – MGM – Avery
By now you should know the drill with Avery. Take a crazy idea, and push it to the extreme. In this case, a bit of a play on the lion and the mouse, as leo discovers that there may indeed be one animal he can’t scare. It's certainly a laugh riot.
Ferdinand the Bull – 1938 – Disney - Rickard
Based off the children’s book of the same name (which Franco (who is still dead) banned because it was a pacifist book), this cartoon was unusual in that it wasn’t released under any common title. Whether because this was an adaptation or some other reason, I really can’t say.
The story is pretty simple; as a calf Ferdinand preferred to smell the flowers than fight, and the same remained true when he grew. However, the damage he causes after sitting on a bee gets to the attention of five men, who take him to Madrid to compete in the arena.
I think I would enjoy this cartoon more without a narrator, because even though he provides some funny lines (“even though she was a cow”), there is a huge tendency to state the obvious. However, the animation is great, fast-paced when needed to be, a caricature of real life movement and action, but maintaining both form and fluidity, like the best animation from Disney.
Speaking of caricatures, various members of the Disney staff were caricatured in this cartoon, including Walt Disney himself as the matador (Ward Kimball, who drew them, is his sword carrier). I have to admit either Walt Disney had a great sense of humor and could take a joke, or this went over his head (I suspect the former) because the presentation of his character is far from flattering.
The Clock Cleaners – 1937 – Disney – Sharpsteen – Notice below
Version 1
Version 2
It wasn’t uncommon in the second half of the 30’s for Disney to make cartoons involving Mickey, Donald, and Goofy as a trio of workers on the job. By putting them in various tasks that allowed the Disney writers and animators to create individual situations for the characters and gags without having to develop a true plot and story. These cartoons don’t work for everyone; Mickey isn’t much of a character, they’re rather slow-moving with gags that emit at best chuckles (you wouldn’t mistake these for Looney Tunes), and there really isn’t a lot of conflict (I preview the cartoons ahead of time (mainly to make sure the video and audio quality pass my standards and the cartoon is uncut) and I removed one of these trio cartoons from posting because I felt aforementioned problems were too large to post the cartoon here).
However, there are a few cartoons of these cartoons that while have these problems, either reduce how big an impact they have or offer something more than usual to distract from them. Moving Day is one of them, but for me The Clock Cleaners is probably the best of the trio cartoons. For one, Mickey actually does more than usual (he tries to, unsuccessfully, remove a stork). Another, there’s a visual richness here that I find very neat to look at.
The cartoon (as its title suggests) involves the trio cleaning a huge city clock (this being the depression, I guess such a job would be welcome), inside and out. Mickey deals with a stork that built a nest in the inner workings of the clock, Donald struggles with the main spring, and Goofy cleans the bell. The highlight occurs at the end when Goofy becomes dizzy (well-done character animation by both Woolie Reitherman and Bill Roberts here) and he and Mickey become the world’s greatest circus act ever as the mouse tries to keep his friend from falling to his doom.
I debated about including this one because I couldn’t find the exact copy I wanted, so I’m going to offer two versions. The first one is the restored copy on DVD, with great video quality and it’s at full length. There’s just one problem; this one has the reedited soundtrack. Years back, the Rev. Donald Wildmon (you have five seconds to hiss) led a successful boycott of this cartoon’s sale on VHS at Wal-Mart because he believed (incorrectly) that Donald (the duck, not the rev) said, “Fuck you” to the main spring (Donald says, “Sez you”). Well, when time came for DVD, the Disney Company (to avoid another such boycott that would hurt their profits) dubbed over that line with dialogue from another cartoon, but they did a piss poor job because the new line (“Aw nuts”) causes the conversation to make no sense and you can hear Pluto barking in the background.
The other version does not have the edit in the soundtrack, but the visual quality isn’t as good, parts of the cartoon are cropped out (example, you don’t get to see all of the toothpaste tube Goofy uses to clean the teeth of the gears), and the title and the first couple of seconds are gone (I suspect this came from a recorded VHS copy of a Disney TV special because you can see part of the ending of another Disney cartoon (Magician Mickey) at the beginning). You’re not missing much from the beginning, but the lower visual quality might worsen your experience with a cartoon where the strongest parts are visual.
Tired by Ebon Mane
I don’t know how many “main characters in old age or beyond” pony fanficts I’ve read, but I have to admit any sadness I could possibly get from them has long been exhausted. Maybe it’s because I have a black heart made of iron and stone and maybe it’s because I don’t get quite the emotional draw from ponies that they used to (that’s not to say I can’t still enjoy them or I don’t), but sometimes I wonder how exactly people get worked up from these kind of fanficts. I say this because Tired is one, and it really didn’t get any emotional response from me.
For one, I have to admit I had a hard time at quite a few parts to accept that the narrator was Pinkie. This part is an example:
“The mare in the mirror is not me. She’s too thin, too wrinkled, too old, and the silver highlights in her pink coat repulse me. I refuse to believe that I could ever look like that, or at least I refuse to acknowledge that belief.”
Even though I accepted the fact partway that the subdue nature of the character was due to age, the above struck me as far too self-conscious for the character, even at stage of her life. Thankfully, the tone was consistent; never does the prose become extra bubbly. The sentence also illustrates my other problem with the story, it lacks subtlety; reading Pinkie pretty much spell out the meaning of everything did this story no favors whatsoever. Pinkie goes out and describes a last time moment with her friends (or something like that), but they never really emerge as characters. And that’s basically the story (if it could be called that), Pinkie makes a visit to each over her friends (and herself) and describes the encounter. It makes for boring read.
Thankfully, the writing is pretty good from a technical perspective, and there was some great pieces of prose throughout.
Overall, Tired is basically old hat, just better with better writing. We’ve seen these kind of stories before, and almost nothing here makes it stick out from the large masses seen elsewhere.
The Truth about Pinkie Pie by Batty Gloom
It’s not in my nature to read six-stars after I’ve read the review of them. It’s a bad habit of mine, but I’ve discovered that if read a review from someone I respect, the odds of me checking out the work itself pretty much drops to zero (this is why I have not seen a single Pixar movie since Cars). However, I decided to check it out anyway, and… I came away rather troubled by the story.
Let me start with what I thought was good. Everyone is recognizable characterized. As a plus, Batty rightful calls out Space Jam, Baby Looney Tunes, and Loonatics (good lord) for being the crap they are (even if the whole scene is basically just a rant from the author, as opposed to the character). The idea that Pinkie is a classic cartoon character (even mentioning the whole being controlled by someone else, and the that literally broke through the fourth wall, is an interesting idea. How she eventually got to Ponyville certainly showed quite a bit of effort and thought to have it make sense. Plus, I can tell Batty Gloom is fan and that he has at least some knowledge of classic animation (the use of alliteration in character names and the switch from black-and-white to color, although its more complicated than he makes it out to be (characters came started appearing in color in different years, and they might switch between the two depending on the unit making the cartoon), but I found it acceptable).
Unfortunately for Batty Gloom, just because most people don’t really now how the good stuff was made and its history, doesn’t mean it’s true of everyone, and there are some people such as myself who can see the inaccuracies, and call out the author for getting them wrong. And for me there are far too many. To start with a basic one, Pinkie refers to the studio of her origins as Warner Brothers sometime in the 30’s. This is sadly incorrect for a couple of reasons. While there was briefly a cartoon studio founded by the company in New York, by Jan. 1930, Warner Bros. closed that studio (and I seriously doubt that was the one Batty Gloom was thinking of, given he’s wrong about too many other things). After that, they signed a contract with Leon Schlesinger, who had a deal with Harman-Ising to make cartoons, until 1933 when H and I refused to do any more business with Schlesinger. Schlesinger would then start his own cartoon studio, which he sold to J. L. Warner in 1944. That was the studio that gave rise to Bugs, Daffy, and Porky, and Pinkie should have referred to her studio of birth as the Schlesinger studio if that’s what Batty was going for. Batty also incorrectly describes certain terminology such as referring to the product of the machines that record the pictures (we call them cameras) video instead of film (video refers specifically to that which is recorded on videotape, which wasn’t used for motion pictures or cartoons) and his use of the words draw and animate (for the sake of film production, they are pretty much interchangeable, unless you were drawing layouts or backgrounds, but Batty treats them as separate steps). What really bothered me was the mention of Pinkie being animated with rubber hose. Rubber hose was an old school style of animation, but there’s no way that the drawing Batty supplied would have been animated in such a way. Rubber hose is basically there are no bones and joints, and that leads to very thin appendages in character designs (see these two cartoons for a more accurate representation on what a rubber hose equine would look like; I'm saying either cartoon is good, I'm just using them as examples) as well as sameness, both of which the Pinkie design lacks. And there’s no way a design like that would have been used when rubber hose was king, it would too hard for the animators that were often to stubborn to break out of formulas (in design and movement; storyman and layout artist Mel Shaw said that he tired to use a more illustration style for the design of a deer in a 1934 cartoon (not giving its name, I saw it yesterday for the first time, and it was one of the worst cartoons I’ve seen), and "the guys wanted to murder me. They didn't want to draw a deer like that; a pop-eyed deer with rubber legs is what they could handle.") and learn to draw better (that was why Disney succeeded, he got his animators to become better draftsmen by making a break from formulas, and even he struggled to get them to go to classes). The design might have made more sense once Porky came to be and given that Avery (who turned the studio into the direction we've come to love) joined after the pig was created, more so, but it doesn't strike me as something to come out from the time period (neither does the personality, cartoon character's in the Looney Tunes were incredibly shallow in the 30's, more so than Pinkie, who supposedly doesn't change). In short, the story struck me as implausible in some respects.
I know a lot of the above doesn’t mean much to most people, and most would think I’m getting on my high horse, but I found the presentation of one of my hobbyhorses to be half-assed and poorly researched far too often. Some of this might be somewhat acceptable to not bog the story down with a lot of technical things (Batty makes no mention of cels, which in pretty much every West Coast studio (including the one of her supposed origin) by the early 30’s is what the camera actually filmed instead of the drawings on the paper, or the process of preparing them for the camera), but such misconceptions, when presented by a that source is meant to be somewhat credible (unlike with Duck Amuck, where the meta-aspects are handled a lot better), trouble me. As I suggested above, some this could have been worked around. Even if that was out of the way (and I’m guessing because that’s hard to do), I found the other parts of the story to be problematic, such as the explanation of cartoon physics (ugh never do this), plus the rants at modern day presentation of the characters (no matter how much I agree) were pointless filler. In addition, reading Pinkie explaining things was at times hit or miss.
But honestly, Sisyphus would have had a better chance of getting the boulder over the hill than Batty Gloom would to get me to like this fanfict in its current form for one key reason; the idea is that Pinkie is of the some kind as Bugs, Daffy, and co.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, Pinkie is not a Looney Tune. She is a pseudo-Looney Tune, drawing from the say vein as Roger Rabbit and the Animanics (and all the other animated crap Steven Spielberg produced); the kind that thinks being wild, crazy, zany, and hyperactively cartoony is the true meaning of being a Looney Tune is simply ignorance at its finest. There is a subtly to the best Looney Tunes whether they or not the whooping off of walls. Pinkie lacks that. To even, suggest that she’s one of them annoys me to no end. Honestly, Batty Gloom would have been better off just making up a studio, and saying Pinkie came from there (it went bankrupt, a lot of them in the thirties did).
There are some nice things, but I think this fanfict hit too many of my pet peeves for me to even enjoy. I didn’t hate it, though, but I would recommend any of the Looney Tunes I’ve put on my blog way before this.
I mentioned last week that one of the more shocking things about the first My Little Pony Special was that people who worked on the Looney Tunes directed it. It wouldn’t be the only time I’ve seen such names in less than expected places (thankfully, the product created is worth far more praise than the episode ever did).
The screenshot comes from the Day of the Tentacle, easily one of the greatest Lucasarts adventure games, and probably one of the greatest games in general. It’s a quirky little creation where after drinking toxic pollution, Purple Tentacle grows a pair of arms and then declares… I can’t do the line justice, just listen to the intro.
Back now. Okay, after freeing the tentacles and allowing Purple to escape in Bernard and his friends, Laverne and Hoagie, are sent back in time by Doctor Fred Edison to turn off the sludge machine “yesterday”, but the imitation diamond powering them breaks sending Hoagie 200 years in the past (at the writing of the constitution), Laverene 200 years in the future (where Purple Tentacle is the ruler of the world), and Bernard in the present. So the game is basically that, a point-and-click adventure to get former two back in the present and then try and stop Purple Tentacle. I’m not big into video games (I’m more of a board game person), but I really like this one. It’s funny at times, with rather memorable characters, and some rather decent animation. I overall enjoy the Lucasarts Adventure line from the 90’s quite a bit, and this is no exception.
As for the involvement, I don’t know if there was any. The best I’ve been able to find was an interview that Chuck Jones cartoons certainly provided inspiration, not just in the artwork and design, but even humor (they borrowed the famous wet paint and skunk gag from the Pepe le Pew cartoons). Still, Linda Jones’ (Chuck Jones’ daughter) inclusion in the credits makes me wonder if there was more than what was said.
He’s not the only person from the Warner Bros. cartoon studio that was also thanked though.
Maurice Noble is better known as the layout man for Chuck Jones. He was the one who designed the backgrounds and chose the colors for the cartoons at various points of time in the Chuck Jones unit, and later worked with the man when he left Warner Brothers. Perhaps the film his work can be best seen in is “What’s Opera Doc”, the famous Wagnerian parody starring Elmer Fudd as Siegfried (“Kill the Wabbit, Kill the Wabbit. Kill the Wabbit, Kill the Wabbit”) and co-starring Bugs Bunny. That film is one of the most famous of all Looney Tunes, considered culturally significant by the National Film Archive, (Jones was said to have judged people based on their reaction to this film), and even made first place on a list of so-called 50 greatest cartoons (Duck Amuck, for my money Jones’ best cartoon, got second and was also deemed culturally significant). If you haven’t seen this film or heard of it, I have to assume you’ve been living under a rock (or without a television set).
I have to be honest, having watched the film recently for the first time in years, I’ve concluded that “What’s Opera Doc” would never have made my normal selection of cartoons that post every other week (this right here is pretty much a special) because I don’t think it’s good enough (it’s good but not great, which is the minimum rating to get posted, based on very subjective methods; I haven’t rated every cartoon I’ve seen, there are plenty Looney Tunes I saw as a kid that I haven’t revisited). Yes, I know that I’ve posted plenty of cartoons that don’t work for a sizable amount of people and even a few that people probably walked away from thinking what the heck I saw in them (Motion Painting No. 1, Hell’s Bells, Coal Black and de Sebben Dwarfs, Jitterbug Follies, and Mother Goose goes Hollywood all come to mind as potential ones for this group). Meanwhile, “What’s Opera Doc” is one of those unforgettable pieces (like I said before, pretty much everyone knows about it) and look at the awards it won. But for me “What’s Opera Doc” has a few too many misses and too few hits to work.
I think one of the bigger problems I had concerns the portrayal of Bugs Bunny. Bugs has always been overly confident of his own abilities and skill (he can casually chew a carrot while someone has a gun pointing at his head) and he’s always been willing to mess with his opponents in a number of ways including disguising himself as the opposite sex, but in What’s Opera Doc, there’s something annoyingly smug (effete is perhaps the better word) about the character and the way he’s animated (the poses are the clearest sign of this, I actually find them far too effeminate). Bugs is probably one of the hardest characters to use because he’s so good at pretty much everything he does and he knows that just as well (the term Mary Sue is always lurking somewhere in the background for one), that if one little thing falls out of place (the animation, the voice, the writing, the gags, etc.) he’s stops becoming funny and instead becomes a pain to watch. And for a Looney Tune, there’s not much in the way of actually humor (or least things I find funny). Sure there’s Elmer’s famous line, the last line by Bugs Bunny, and a few bits with the helmet, but most of the time it’s Bugs as Brunhild doing this dance and duet with Elmer, which I don’t think is really enjoyable to watch (I’ll admit that opera isn’t something I have a great deal of knowledge about, so there might be some jokes that go over my head). I never find myself really laughing with the cartoon such much as at it. Jones clearly respected Wagner, and he certainly knew enough about opera to take on this task, but I think he had too much respect for it because he can’t get himself to truly make funny of it. Instead, he presents the things that should be mocked as something worthy and godly, the part where Elmer discovers Bugs is presented as something tragic (and I know plenty of people find it that), but even without knowing the ending ahead of time, I find everything from the water that drips from the flower to Elmer’s cries to be neither sad or funny but instead unintentionally droll. I have to wonder if most non-comic opera is like that.
And that leads probably to what might be my biggest problem, not some much the cartoon, but its reputation. I always see the praise the cartoon get actually as a bad thing, because it seems to encourage that the only way animation (or at the very least cartoons, they’re not really the same) to be considered a work of art is to intermix with things that are already accepted as “high art.” I don’t get that; I don’t see how any sort of association with Wagner or Shakespeare or Michelangelo or Beethoven (just to name four people whose works are considered “high art”) makes something extra prestigious and that line of thought almost suggest that animation (unless it’s foreign) is also doomed to be middlebrow at best, which is insulting. It’s the same reaction I get from Walt Disney’s Fantasia (which was made because Disney wanted something more grandeur), I don’t see a work of art or the high point of an artist’s career, but instead the signs of a decline with the abandonment of what made the other works so good and worthy of praise.
There are things that are great in “What’s Opera Doc” like Noble’s designs and it certainly is memorable (even my family, who aren’t exactly Looney Tune friendly, know of it). But even as a kid, I never really looked forward to seeing it. I do like a number of cartoons that have a “high art” connection (again, Motion Painting No. 1 comes to mind), but I don’t think of them as too annoyingly pretentious.
“What’s Opera Doc” isn’t the only cartoon with a parodic take on opera. If you so desire, you can watch Disney’s 1934 take on the myth of Persephone and Hades, "The Goddess of Spring" and one the earlier Disney attempts at animating real humans. I’m going say something right now, I don’t care for “What’s Opera Doc”, but I would never call it a bad film. “The Goddess of Spring” I do think is a bad film (best to see it as a curiosity and experiment to preparing for Snow White, which was just started as a conceptional work on around this time), the animation is incredibly weak for one (Persephone has arms that are as rubbery as Olive Oyl’s or Betty Boop’s), the plot needs work (if you’re familiar with the myth, well this in one Demeter doesn’t make an appearance, so Hades letting Persephone go is anticlimactic (and to be honest, her deal to return suggests she developed Stockholm Syndrome, which is creepy)), and even director Wilfred Jackson admitted that the film wasn’t that good (“the main mistake we made was that we didn’t let the audience in on something - we kept it a secret that we were kidding grand opera”). There is one part I do like, a clearly element of burlesque when Hades slips into a Cab Calloway imitation singing “Hi de Hades”, and as a fan of Calloway, myself I can't help but smile. It wasn’t the only time that hell and jazz were intermixed in cartoons of the time, I know of one other Disney cartoon that uses a similar gag, and I know the Harman-Ising good little monkeys cartoonscontains a reference (“Oh, speak no evil, see no evil, hear no evil, no. We’re the goody goody monkeys everywhere we go. Never have we gone astray, don’t believe in being gay, being good’s the only thing we know. Oh, speak no hi de, see no hi de, hear no hi de ho, not a single wild oat do we sow. We’re so very very good, wouldn’t be bad if we could. Speak no evil, see no evil, hear no evil, no”). Jazz certainly wasn’t as acceptable back then in certain circles, but I don’t think there’s anything offense about the above, and it just goes to show that like jazz, hell is cool.
Speaking of hell, now for some news. I'm going on a family vactation to hell Disney World (been there already, I regret not taking any pictures of the "the not as magical" areas when backstage) and Florida sightseeing (ugh!), and I won't have pretty much any internet access starting Saturday. This also means I won't have a lot of time to do any reading during break. So don't expect me to post for quite a some time.
