Showing posts with label animation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label animation. Show all posts
Wednesday, August 19, 2015
Friday, May 15, 2015
Thursday, December 25, 2014
When is a blackbird white?
As I prepared to adopt another bird (more later!), an old song about a bird kept playing in my head. A French Canadian song. A song I had heard only once. A song I thought was attached to a piece of animation. The animation being done by the legendary Canadian film innovator Norman McLaren. But do you think I could find it?
I had no idea of the title. All I had was "French Canadian folk song about a bird" - specifically, a bird whose body parts drop off, then multiply. Strange?
But not if it's Norman McLaren, the mystic pioneer of animation who was known to draw images and even a sound track directly onto film stock.
Where did I see this? On TV? In school? It might have been at Bondi, the mystical vacation spot of my youth, where on Friday nights we saw films, not on a TV but projected on a screen. This was up in the "rec room", a woody-smelling place meant for rainy days (which was seldom used). All I remember is a ping-pong table, some old 78 rpm records (including the complete score for South Pacific), and a wheezy old organ you pumped with your feet.
But ah, those Friday nights! Often the movies were from the National Film Board, a Canadian institution which spewed out educational films, movies that were Good For Us (and taught us something, too!). But there was also this wacky aspect of the NFB, the animation. (Canadian animated shorts still win a disproportionately high number of Oscars.). McLaren's work was known for being surreal to the point of dadaism.
With this one, I remembered the sorrowful Gallic minor-key tune and even the French lyrics vividly, and the poor bird made of white chalk lines with its body parts flying all over the place. But what was the song called, what was the name of the film, and (more to the point) could I dig it up on YouTube and see it again?
The internet never ceases to fill me with wonder. It didn't take long, after all: I tracked it down on (naturally) an NFB web site/film archive. I knew it as soon as I saw the title. It's called La Merle (The Blackbird), even though, ironically (though not for McLaren), it's white.
Post-bird reflections. I thought of one more Bondi special, called Glooscap Country. Found it easily, as this was something every Canadian schoolchild was required to see. I remembered the narrator, and beautiful scenes, and just one line: "Amethyst. The eye of Glooscap." And by God, not only did I find the movie - I found the line. So one more bit of seemingly-irrelevant information rattling around in my head has clunked into place.
Sunday, October 26, 2014
Weird-ass old TV show gifs
Yes, I remember Tom Ewell, who could forget, he was in that movie with Marilyn Monroe, Some Like it Hot, wasn't it, or no, it was The Seven-Year Itch I think. But this is a way weird-ass show because, uh, The Tom EWELL show? Who'd a known.
I don't have dates for these, but I suspect they're 1958 - 1962-ish, because in that era most sitcoms began with stylish but very primitive animation. This one reminds me just a little bit of a later gem, My World and Welcome To It, loosely based on the works of James Thurber. William Windom, I think. I'll never forget his turn, or turns, on Star Trek, sweating and freaking out. Or was it someone else?
You can't tell me there was actually a show by this name on TV. Looks like a failed pilot, or something that maybe lasted a season. Then again. O. K. Crackerby! with Burl Ives was a real show, and it knocked me over to realize it. Notice how they cleverly combined "cracker barrel" (folksy wisdom) with "cracker" (po' white trash, which he was supposed to be in the show, and probably was in real life).
This reminds me so much of another '60s sitcom intro I giffed, that also showed a couple driving home and doing zany things, but now I can't remember either of their names. Peter and Mary ring no bells either.
Love that station wagon.
I've heard of My Sister Eileen, but not as a TV show, and the intro is so bizarre and '60s that I just had to include it.
I don't know why this doesn't say The Weird Brothers. It looks like three Swiss guys, bellringers or something, with bells for hats. A kindergartner using left-handed scissors could have made better cutouts than these, that's all I can say. I said weird-ass, and I gave you weird-ass.
William Windom's finest hour in The Doomsday Machine.
Friday, October 3, 2014
A horrible transformation
One of the rare intriguing things I've seen on Facebook lately. As usual, there was no credit given anywhere for who did the animation. I've looked all over the place. It's creepy and fascinating and all too true what happens to this pink little figure, ruthlessly mauled by calipers and scalpels and pliers and suction hoses. I just did a post on how "neurotic" women (women who are "reserved", worry about things, get angry, anxious, etc.) are more likely to get Alzheimer's. For some creepy reason, this feels like part of the same thing. Now, girls. Don't have a body like THAT. Have a body like THIS, and maybe your rate of acceptability will fall into line. It's all a way of containing us, because if we're not contained we turn into madwomen. We run amok.
Let's go, then.
Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book
It took me years to write, will you take a look
Order The Glass Character from:
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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. . .
Sunday, October 27, 2013
MELTDOWN!!
When I don't have much to say, when I am embroiled in editing my next novel (The Glass Character!) and feeling like I'm in the trenches, there are always gifs.
GIFS (or gifs, or giffys or whatever-they-are) are easy to make, but tricky. Tricky in that you must literally isolate hundreds of a second to get the effect you want without extraneous material. There are other restrictions: on the program I like, you have to use YouTube videos that are shorter than 10 minutes, and not all of them work.
But the rest is done for you, so I don't really have to do anything very technical. My favorite site is Y2GIF, though GIFninja ain't bad for using your own videos or making montages of stills.
I am totally freaked out by this cartoon, as animation in the '30s was completely bizarre. Most of it was ripped off of Disney, and this one is no exception. There is this Oswald the Rabbit, and I can't find him because he looks like a mouse with long ears (IF that's him), a dead ringer for Mickey.
This cartoon even uses similar effects to the skeleton dance I made gifs out of a couple of posts ago, but very crudely: the skeleton leaping forward into the frame so that the camera passes right through his hollow body and out the other side. Stylin'.
Walter Lantz was the animator for this one, and it ain't much for imagination. He went on to Woody Woodpecker and Andy Panda and a few others I don't remember now.
But it sure made a few great gifs.
Friday, October 11, 2013
Friday, June 7, 2013
Wednesday, May 15, 2013
Do animal hybrids exist? Ask Betty Boop
You can always tell I've run out of inspiration when I begin to post totally bizarre gifs.(Never mind that it's every day.) I seem to be obsessed with these tiny captured cartoons that repeat, and repeat, and repeat, without even having to click "play".
Betty Boop is still emblematic of the 1920s flapper/sexpot character, her pre-Code outfit leaving nothing to the imagination. Her dress is about the size of a postage stamp, and no one knew how the front stayed up (Max Fleischer's iron will, I guess - but I can imagine what the stag reel was like). She often flipped up her microscopic skirt to reveal garters, thigh, and (let's face it) ass.
But her first appearance in a bizarre thing called Dizzy Dishes begs the question: did anyone know who or what Betty Boop was supposed to be? She wasn't even named here, and maybe originally she was just a one-off. Certainly, she was so grotesque that no one would ever want to see her (or hear her - that screechy chalkboard voice) again.
Nevertheless, she was significantly remodelled in time for a return engagement, the mental-institution eyes toned down, the spiky head gradually getting bigger and bigger until it barely balanced on her slutty little body. Huge heads on tiny bodies remind us of dolls, or babies - an instinctive response. I think men secretly lusted after her.
Then came the Hollywood Code as enforced by the Hays Office, a repressive legion of decency that took all the fun out of the movies. Betty's hemline plunged, her neckline shot up, and she began to look increasingly matronly. Here she even pulls her apron down over her knees. Betty! What happened to the little sex fiend who flipped her skirt up in the animal cafe?
Later I think she sold war bonds or something, wearing plaid woolen skirts and brown Oxfords.
The fact is, Betty was originally a dog. Either that, or a human-dog hybrid (a phenomenon I explored in a previous post: FOUND: Cujo's Rogue DNA!). A hideous one, too, flirting shamelessly with that whatever-it-is who pushes his erection-like heart back into his chest. Those aren't earrings you see dangling from her head: they're EARS. Her snout pops in and out as she offers grotesque kisses and flaunts her canine cleavage. Just what were the animators trying to tell us here: that Betty was a bitch?
The odd thing is, her humanizing (or humanization) happened in stages. The flappy ears remained even as her face began to look more normal. Eventually she graduated to long pendulous earrings that still look a lot like those fleshy flaps.
Perhaps some minute trace of dog genes lingered. I would hate to see her children.
(Post-post: I just noticed, in that third gif, that she isn't wearing any panties.)
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Thursday, December 13, 2012
Christmas Cartoons from the Third Reich
I searched far and wide, long and hard for this special Xmas video. Took maybe 2 minutes. There are numerous weird, antiquated cartoons out there that express, supposedly, the spirit of the season, but this is the strangest: it's a Santa's Workshop kind-of-thing with a decidedly military flavour. This was from the early '30s and I don't think the Nazis had really happened yet, so this must have been a kind of foreshadowing.
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.
No wonder little kids' first encounter with Santa Claus seems to uniformly inspire terror and screams, until their parents force them to sit on this bizarre character's bum-hot lap and listen through a synthetic beard to his wet flabby lips pronouncing lies about what they'll get this year. All that "well, we'll see" bullshit.
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?"
Ye gods! Was there anything left of childhood? Were there no harmless illusions we could maintain? Not in the face of an 8-year-old future TV news reporter. It wasn't long until I overheard her talking to one of her little friends, sharing her newfound knowledge about how they'd all been blatantly deceived for years.
"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.
Saturday, October 6, 2012
Monday, July 16, 2012
Les Meows: Victor Hugo in the trash can
Oh my GOD, I am too tired to write about Top Cat right now, but I have to get this down before I collapse! Since I started watching this show again on the Classic Toons channel, my whole life has changed. And as elegant as these opening and closing credits are - some of the neatest, most sophisticated animation I've ever seen, giving the lie to the belief that Hanna-Barbera only turned out schlock - the real discovery, or rediscovery,is a certain character: the one I used to call "The Pink Cat", my favorite Top Cat gang member when I first saw the show. When I was seven.
Which I was. Seven. And the cat was. Pink. I doubt if I knew his name then, as I was trying to keep the names of the whole gang straight and there were SIX of them which was just about one cat too many.
Another very odd thing about the show was the way they mixed cats with humans: a cat could be in a human hospital with a cat nurse, and the nurse could be engaged to a doctor who was actually a human. A cat could be a torch-singer in a night club that human males had the hots for. It was all extremely weird and anthropo - anthropo - excuse me while I spit this word out.
I do remember Arnold Stang, T.C.'s voice, from other things, including commercials for a chocolate bar called Chunky. Stang died only a couple of years ago at age 90, so doing T. C. must've been lucky for him. They only made 30 episodes of this gem, maybe because these were alley cats and part of an actual gang of no-goods who went around cheating and stealing and breaking the law. Not a very nice example for the kiddies.
But I digress. I digress because I'm so tired my head will soon roll off my shoulders and bounce down the stairs like a bowling ball. I have to just get this in before I fade out for the day: now I've found out more about The Pink Cat! His name is Choo-Choo and he is THE coolest of the gang, wearing a white turtleneck (which was very beat back in 1961) and speaking in a Brooklyn-accented voice which Wikipedia tells me was supposed to resemble Woody Allen's.
Did someone mention Woody Allen? Did anyone know who the hell he was back then? Had he even made a movie? So unless you lived in some esoteric part of New York and went to coffee houses, how would you ever be exposed to him? Jesus. Hanna-Barbera was incredibly progressive.
The thing is, this was 1961 and I was seven. And then there was this pink cat. Then my brother got home from band practice. Then I went to bed.
TAKE TWO. . .
As it turns out, yes, yes, I DO have more to say about Top Cat. It came on late enough at night that I watched it through a drowsy haze. I liked it, but it was Different. It wasn't simple like The Flintstones or dumb like Ruff and Reddy or ridiculous like Underdog or Superchicken.
Top Cat was originally meant to be a sort of cartoon version of The Phil Silvers Show, which ran some time in the late '50s and which scared the bejeezus out of me because at the start of the show, there was this cartoon guy yelling out this incoherent gibberish. Took me years to figure out it was an army guy barking orders. I was about four, so my confusion was understandable. But who gave a shit about Phil Silvers anyway? He has been completely forgotten, and for some reason his name reminds me of an empty can of cheap salmon rattling around in a garbage can. He has all the historic importance of Arthur Godfrey's discarded fingernail parings.
But back to Top Cat.
In my last rather pathetic entry, posted in a twilight state, I neglected to mention that besides his Gang of Five (and no, I'm not going to give you their idiot names because it doesn't matter: they're something like Brain, Stupid, Fleas, Burlap Sack, and Twinkie), this show had an undercurrent of Victor Hugo that was completely missed by audiences and critics alike (not to mention Nielson ratings, which were always poor).
Top Cat was a rapscallion and a scalawag and a scofflaw and all those other things good alley cats aspire to be: but he was also hunted, chased from one end of the City of New York to the other by a menacing figure.
Behold: the Inspector Javert of the alley!
OFFICER DIBBLE!
Witless as he was, this guy had such an effect on world culture in the thirty short weeks of his cartoon life that in some parts of Australia and New Zealand, "dibble" still means "the fuzz".
As a kid I used to call him Dribble, or even Drivel sometimes, as he could be incredibly stupid. But that's not the point. Our wily Jean Valjean of the alley needed an adversary, something to push against. Otherwise there'd just be no story.
As I watch these cartoons again fifty years later (oh God, it's even more than that), they look different. I now realize "the Pink Cat" couldn't have been my name for Choo-Choo because he was grey, just like all the other cartoon characters, just like Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, Deputy Dawg, Tennessee Tuxedo, Wally Gator, Magilla Gorilla, Twinkles the Elephant, Lippy the Lion and Hardy-Har-Har, and all the rest of them.
Now the colors look deeply saturated and incredibly vibrant, as if I've stepped over the threshhold and into the land of Oz. Those colors were there all the time, of course, but hidden beneath the veil of early '60s drabness. The veil peeled back, these cartoons are incredibly enjoyable to watch again, though I am not sure why.
Maybe it's their sweet pointlessness. Hanna-Barbera, clever as they could be, were not Victor Hugo, after all. But there are still moments that cause a little frisson of shock.
Top Cat is very New York, more New York than Woody Allen (and I've already explained how Choo-Choo, my fave character, was meant to be a Woody Allen impersonation, though frankly I like Marvin Kaplan's voice characterization better - a little more adenoidal but friendlier, not so whiny). Its New Yorkness, if ever so simplified, is crucial to every plot line.
But at the beginning of more than one episode, there's an opening shot sweeping the ramshackle skyline of T. C.'s glorious domain, accompanied by a raffish bluesy upslide on the clarinet which is strongly evocative of the first few bars of Rhapsody in Blue.
Holy God! Is THAT where that famous opening shot in Manhattan came from? Did Woody Allen really think he was being original?
Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book
It took me years to write, will you take a look
Order The Glass Character from:
http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B001K7NGDA
Barnes & Noble
Thistledown Press
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