Blue Danube animation

NOT DISNEY! The Blue Danube, 1939

NO, not Disney, but a gorgeous seven minutes of old-time animation, drawn one frame at a time, yet fluid as the Danube itself. It took me years and years to track this cartoon down, and it has been up and down on YouTube more times than I can count. It`s so wonderful to see it again in its entirety! 

If Hugh Harman doesn`t ring any bells, don`t worry about it. Like Ford and Edison and Bell, Disney pushed his way into the public consciousness as the only ``brand`` in town. Meantime the artists in this studio turned out something as magical as anything Uncle Wally ever produced.

I was surprised to be able to find it. This was one of those mystery stories in which I had only a tiny fragment of memory of the thing, the scene where the little cherubs let loose the dam and the water cascades madly down the rocks and hills. I made a few grainy little gifs of it years and years ago, but then COULD NOT find the original cartoon anywhere. I even tramped through dozens of Silly Symphonies and everything I could find with little cherubs frisking around in it. Then I thought of Jerry Beck, the guru of traditional animation, emailed him with the gif attached, and he IMMEDIATELY gave me the title of the cartoon, which I quickly looked up and watched. The next day, it had been taken down, likely by Jerry Beck.

But it`s back now. . . until it isn`t. 

A cartoon miracle: The Blue Danube

This is something of a cartoon miracle. At least ten years ago, I made a few gifs from an old cartoon. It depicted little cherubs or elves or whatever-they-were, opening some sort of structure like a dam so that water spilled over rocks and tumbled down mountains in a splendid burst of traditional animation. (NOT Disney. Disney was the Edison, the Ford, the Bell of animation, better at stealing/cashing in than innovating.) 

 

 

Then, of course, I lost the whole thing. It got buried. I only came across those few small gifs again by accident, but I had NO IDEA where they had come from. I squeezed YouTube as hard as I could, looked at every nature cartoon, every cartoon set in a gnome village, ever cherub-frolicking scene I could find. I had no idea even of a title. Finally I emailed Jerry Beck, a sort of cartoon savant, and he came up with the title -  and a link to the YouTube video - instantly. I got to watch it exactly once, then "someone" took it down forever, claiming  violation of copyright. (On YOUTUBE? Where everyone violates every copyright, right, left and centre?) 

But never mind, I found (weirdly) another bootleg version of it with a Grateful Dead song on the sound track. It was pretty grainy and missing half its charm, but I at least got to see that compelling dam-bursting scene with all its Freudian eroticism.

But then this!

I don't even know if it will work, and I don't know why it's still up here if it's taken down on YouTube. And tomorrow it may be down everywhere, so you'd better watch it now.