Showing posts with label The Blue Danube. Show all posts
Showing posts with label The Blue Danube. Show all posts

Tuesday, October 27, 2020

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. 



Wednesday, July 11, 2018

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.