Showing posts with label Disney animation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Disney animation. Show all posts
Monday, December 8, 2014
Saturday, September 6, 2014
Sometimes the ridiculous is sublime
I think a blog has to have, if not a subject, then certain core subjects that are visited again and again. Since I can't draw worth a tinker's dam (and that's dam, folks - look it up), I live vicariously through the efforts of others.
Here we have an example of early Disney, well before Mickey came on the scene and stole the show. I never liked Mickey Mouse: too bland, too ordinary, even though it could be argued that he was the Harold Lloyd of animation, just a regular mouse. Disney experimented with all sorts of strange things, including a series of Laugh-O-Grams, combinations of live-action and animation which were so bizarre that they almost worked. The star of these was a little girl named Alice, with Pickfordesque corkscrew curls.
It's interesting to see the evolution of Disney from a run-of-the-mill animator with an uninteresting character (Oswald the Rabbit) to the so-called king of animation. It's kind of fashionable to diss Disney now, maybe because of what happened with his empire, the way it evolved into a mega-corp which often seems to lack heart. But the animation goes on, including the mega-blockbuster Frozen which FINALLY provided some strong, interesting female lead characters.
I'm fascinated with the early jumpy, smudgy, quivering, flickering images, post-Gertie the Dinosaur who was supposedly the first real cartoon. I'm fascinated with Fleischer and his surreal clown Koko jumping out of the inkwell. I like the early, gritty Popeye cartoons with their gorgeous rotographic/ stereo-optical backgrounds, which my grandchildren are now fascinated with. They want me to sing that weird skeetin-scattin' Popeye song, which I can't.
(Just look at this, from 1934! A very early Popeye cartoon called King of the Mardi Gras. The background was actually built by hand and mounted on a turntable, then slowly revolved and filmed. Somehow or other the animation was layered on top of it. Who needs 3D?)
I don't know if all this goes back to my childhood, when I sat on the floor (I was probably just a toddler then) and watched the Mickey Mouse Club, which came on every day and padded the live-action clubhouse segments with Spin and Marty episodes and VERY old Disney cartoons. I sat there drooling down the front of my bib and absorbed it all. It was a little bit scary, and it still is, primitive, with a spooky magical energy. Pen-and-ink drawings come to life.
Now we have YouTube, with just about every cartoon ever made, and I drown in it sometimes. My husband growls at me to get out of my office and enjoy the day. And I should.
(Note my radically new ad campaign. I doubt if it will work any better than the old one, which I am not discarding. But at least *I* had fun with it, or some of it. Took me most of the day, in fact. Damn. When I get to the end of it all, I guess I'll say, . . "Too late.")
Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book
It took me years to write, will you take a look. . .
Tuesday, December 3, 2013
Christmas Cartoons from the Third Reich
From that disturbingly hearty beer-hall anthem at the beginning to the precision-march of the toys at the end, the whole thing is an exercise in conformity and obedience. I was completely squicked out by Santa's final song, which reminds me of nothing more than that festive Yuletide carol,Deutschland, Deutschland Uber Alles. As with most cartoons and film portrayals of Santa, he is terrifying, with an evil whiskey-voice that sounds like the guy who did Peg Leg Pete or whoever he was, that big ugly guy with the villainous laugh.
Who IS this monster who envelops them in the scent of sweaty polyester? As with almost all childhood mysteries, no one explains it to them. They have no idea who or what Santa is. It's a kind of initiation, almost a Christmas circumcision in which the cost of entry into the Spirit of the Season is bleeding and pain.
Kids want to believe, they really do, though it must really fly in the face of logic in these days of high technology. It was hard enough when I was a kid and technology had reached its apogee with our giant Webcor reel-to-reel tape recorder in which the tapes constantly broke and had to be spliced with scotch tape. We could at least record the sound tracks of our favorite cartoons and movies and play them over, and over, and over again until our parents screamed, the tape snapped and the reel went flap-flap-flap-flap-flapping around.
So now how do they do it? How do they maintain such a transparent fiction? Aren't they frightened by some strange man dressed in a red fur costume breaking into their house? At some point, don't they realize that their parents have been lying to them?
My daughter, a TV news reporter who at 8 years old already had a gift for getting to the real story, one day asked me in a sort of "come on, tell me" voice, "There isn't really a Santa Claus, is there?"
So what was I to say? At eight, she wasn't even disillusioned. She just wanted to wring the truth out of me.
"Well. . . ummm. . . Christmas is a lot more magical and fun if you pretend there's a. . . "
"I thought so." She looked more satisfied than dismayed, her suspicions confirmed. Then she looked at me again with that let's-get-the-real-story expression.
"What about the Easter Bunny?"
"Uh, Shannon. .. "
"WHAT? I'm just setting her straight here. I'm doing her a favor."
We never got to the Tooth Fairy, but I am sure by then she had figured it out on her own.
Friday, July 26, 2013
Harold Lloyd: it's cartoon time!
This is a Mickey Mouse cartoon about a polo match, with a ragtag assortment of celebrity caricatures cavorting around. Unfortunately we only get to see Harold in the stands (bottom left), but he's right there beside W. C. Fields and (presumably) Greta Garbo. In the back row, Charles Laughton as Henry VIII, and Eddie Cantor, known on radio as Banjo Eyes.
Was the original in colour? I doubt it. They didn't make them back then. Someone must have colorized it somewhere along the line. BTW, I don't think Harold ever wore a red bow tie. Interesting that he wears gloves: a horrific hand injury forced him to wear a prosthetic glove on camera.
Here he's singing in a chorus in Mickey's Gala Premiere, which features dozens of "stars" doing all sorts of wacky things. Looks like Clark Gable on the right, with Edward G. Robinson and - ? - Adolphe Menjou? - in the front row. Help me here.
A funny little thing I found on YouTube, an animated trailer for Harold's last silent picture, Speedy. Wish I could see more of him, but isn't that always the case?
Congratulations, Mickey!
Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!
Wednesday, October 19, 2011
Willie can Wail: Disney's all-time worst character
Ah, childhood! Was it ever as grotesque as this? Probably not, because until recently I never saw the animated version of what we used to call "Willie the Whale". We had a set of 78 rpm records telling the story, with a lot of long, boring, unnecessary narration to fill in the gaps. There was a picture of Willie dressed as Pagliacci on the cover, with a gigantic fake nose and a tutu.
It was decades later that I learned that Willie's melancholy story was actually an animated short tacked on to the end of a little-seen Disney movie called Make Mine Music. I don't know much about it, and frankly I don't feel like looking it up.
I am sorry to say this, but Willie was one of the most grotesque Disney figures of all time. You can't animate a whale, not like this anyway, with his mouth in the middle of his stomach. He looks like a foam-rubber toaster, and his inside is worse than his outside, with three gross-looking tonsils (or whatever) hanging down, indicating that he could sing tenor, baritone and bass all at the same time.
Disney did a much better whale with Pinocchio, but this one was spozed-ta be a friendly one, the reason for his loveable squashy shape. What ruined the effect was the bizarre opening in his stomach where hot air (and arias) blasted out. (And if his mouth was on his underside, how could he get a decent breath?)The story is about "a voice that sang at sea" that turns out to be Nelson Eddie pretending to be a large rectangular sea creature. Soon a demented scholar named Tetti-Tatti goes after him with a harpoon, claiming "the whale has-a swallowed a hoppera-singer!". (Though most hoppera-singers look like they've swallowed a whale.)
It's confusing to me at the end, as it's not really clear if his career singing "grand opera" (a creaky term if ever there was one) at "the Met" (which I assumed was the Metropolitan, a local department store) was all just a dream. At the conclusion there are some ferocious Melville moments, and the ending is more depressing than Old Yeller. But we get to see Willie at the end, presumably in heaven, now colored lavender with green wings and a halo. The Pearly Gates have a sign hung on them: SOLD OUT. We always suspected "our Willie" was a sellout: success spoils everybody.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1896300693/qid%3D1064537730/sr%3D11-1/ref%3Dsr_11_1/103-6792065-9634225
http://www.amazon.com/Mallory-Margaret-Gunning/dp/0888013116/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1319992815&sr=1-1
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