Last April, I decided to experiment with some week-long
series that looked for essay possibilities within either a single year or set
of years. I selected the time periods
via a random year generator (kinda fun to do!). From April through November, I did
some cursory explorations of 1811-1815, 1856-60, 1930, 1955, 1963, 1965, and
2006.
Since I thoroughly enjoyed this time-focused approach, I’ve
decided to expand upon the strategy in 2013.
Knowing that I work best when confined by arbitrary and numbered ground
rules, here are my new guidelines for the coming year:
21 Essays will cover six
time-periods in 2013. The January
focus will be 1913, allowing me to explore some highlights of the world,
100 years ago. The other five time
periods will be chosen through the random year generator.
Essay
series will naturally emerge. When
I have five or more essays on a single subject, I’ll group them into an
informal essay series. Originally,
I hoped to be able to keep up a pace of publishing 21-essays-in-21-days on
this blog, but I’ve learned this is an unrealistic goal for me. With this new approach, I’ll post
in-depth on topics that I find most inspiring but without any firm promises
to crank out a full 12, 15, or 21 essays.
After
a month of heavy concentration on a single time period, I’ll relax things
in the second month. If I feel like
it, I can continue working on the time period, or I can revisit earlier
essay series (like King Kong, Duck Dodgers, In the Bleak Midwinter, Der Golem, or Blackmail), or I can take some well-deserved time off.
Most
importantly, I reserve the right to relax, change, or abandon the rules
whenever I like.
Here’s the big benefit of the changes…
I run two blogs, 21
Essays and Tour America’s Treasures. Previously, they had no real connection,
aside from sharing the same writer/publisher.
But now I can think of my blogs as a complementary pair. Tour
America’s Treasures is a cultural history blog with a focus on place.
21 Essays is a cultural history
blog with a focus on time.
Place and time: I
think it sounds like a good way to do history.
Midway through this past year, I wrote a new lead sentence
for my official blog description: 21
Essays is my cultural history blog.
It took some trial and error on my part to realize that my initial
blog concept was too open-ended. I
thought I wanted complete freedom to write about anything that struck my
fancy. But looking back now, I clearly see
that there was a very real connecting link between my favorite pieces. They all shared a love of cultural history.
When I was young, I read half of Will and Ariel Durant’s
11-volume The Story of Civilization.
By that, I don’t mean that I read midway through volume 6 (which would have
left me stranded in the Reformation). I mean that I read the parts that
interested me: the sections that covered the history of literature, art,
science, philosophy, and religion, as well as the descriptions of the history
of domestic life. I skipped over the royal intrigues and the endless
wars.
Forty years later, I’m still relatively uninterested in the
history of power. As far as I can see, it’s still the same story ever
repeating—only the weapons change. But I love culture more than
ever. The ideas that shape our world are constantly in flux. Whether in novels, poetry, film, music, or
painting, every artist expresses a new interpretation of the world. There’s a thrilling wildness in the variety
and beauty of creation.
So starting in January 2013, 21 Essays will officially be my cultural history blog. Of
course, I won’t be attempting to repeat the Durants’ mad 11-volume achievement and try to
cover everything. I’ll continue to write about the artifacts and artworks
that I personally find most exciting, examining them closely and from multiple
perspectives in order to (in the words of William Blake) “… see a world in a
grain of sand/And a heaven in a wild flower.”
With 16 essays out of the promised 21 completed, I’m
quitting the animation series. My heart
isn’t in it. It’s not what I want to be
doing at this blog.
So I’ve been taking a little time off as I consider where I want to take 21 Essays in 2013.
I think I have some good ideas.
From the start, I’ve pictured 21 Essays as a place where I could write in-depth on very focused
topics—specific movies, books, poems, paintings, and music that mean a lot to
me. Unfortunately, the format that I
adopted for the animation series never allowed for that approach. I found myself writing a paragraph apiece on
three animated shorts, when what I really wanted was to write a full essay
series for each of them. That’s what
this blog was supposed to be about.
Nevertheless, I think this has been a very good first year
for 21 Essays. I loved creating the 15 essays on King Kong, the 12 essays on “In the Bleak Midwinter,” the 15 essays on Duck Dodgers, and the 6 essays on Blackmail.
That’s the kind of work that I want to
be doing.
So I’m going to be making some changes on this site, doing a
little tinkering. I think I’ve got a
blog that has promise… and I’m hoping
that it will more consistently deliver on that promise in the coming year.
Dream Work (2003), directed by Peter Tscherkassky.
The 16th essay, “Animating With Live Action Footage,” is
published in full at Press Play at IndieWire. It deals with
several extremely challenging films that fall along the borderline
between live action and animation. As
the highlighted films by Peter Tscherkassky, Virgil Widrich, and Norman McLaren
are experimental, I struggled to find an accessible way to describe what I see
in them. My experience with a Beatles
song suggested a way in…
First, a memory which has been
seared into my brain: It’s 1973 and my cousin and I are alone in the
house, obsessively playing and replaying the last minute of the Beatles’ “I Am
the Walrus” backwards on a cheap plastic portable turntable. And I’m getting
seriously creeped out.
This series of 21 essays is inspired by a list of 250 great animated short films, composed in August 2012 by Scott Bussey, Jorge Didaco, Waldemar Hepstein, Bill Kamberger, Robert Reynolds, Sulo Vatanen, and Lee Price, with additional assistance from participants on the IMDb Classic Film message board.
Cartoon-blogging, essay 15 of 21 blog entries on 250 great animated short films
The Sandman (1993), directed by Paul Berry.
The fifteenth essay, “Animating Horror,” is published in
full at Press Play at IndieWire. A
special Halloween essay, it focuses on three films from our list: The Tell-Tale Heart (Ted Parmelee, 1953),
Harpya (1979, Raoul Servais), and The Sandman (1993, Paul Berry).
It’s the witching hour…
The Sandman (1993), directed by Paul Berry.
The Tell-Tale Heart (1953), directed by Ted Parmelee.
Harpya (1979), directed by Raoul Servais.
The moon is out...
The Tell-Tale Heart (1953), directed by Ted Parmelee.
This series of 21 essays is inspired by a list of 250 great animated short films, composed in August 2012 by Scott Bussey, Jorge Didaco, Waldemar Hepstein, Bill Kamberger, Robert Reynolds, Sulo Vatanen, and Lee Price, with additional assistance from participants on the IMDb Classic Film message board.
Cartoon-blogging, essay 14 of 21 blog entries on 250 great animated short films
Pixillation (1970), directed by Lillian Schwartz.
The fourteenth essay, “Animating Without a Narrative,” is
published in full at Press Play at IndieWire.
Written by guest blogger Scott Bussey, this is an unusually personal
essay on the abstract animated short films of Adam Beckett and Lillian Schwartz.
Adam Beckett was an animator and
visual effects artist who attended the California Institute of the Arts during
the 1970s, where he learned from and studied alongside important members of the
LA experimental animation scene. Lillian Schwartz is a pioneer in the field of
computer art who worked out of Bell Labs during the 1970s, then going on to
develop tools for computer-aided analysis of art, particularly finding
inspiration in the work of Leonardo Da Vinci. Each of these relatively unknown
animators is represented by one work on the “250 Great Animated Short Films”
list: Heavy-Light (1973) for
Beckett and Pixillation (1970)
for Schwartz.
This series of 21 essays is inspired by a list of 250 great animated short films, composed in August 2012 by Scott Bussey, Jorge Didaco, Waldemar Hepstein, Bill Kamberger, Robert Reynolds, Sulo Vatanen, and Lee Price, with additional assistance from participants on the IMDb Classic Film message board.
Cartoon-blogging, essay 13 of 21 blog entries on 250 great animated short films
Ryan (2004), directed by Chris Landreth.
The 13th essay, “Animating Real Life,” is published in full
at Press Play at IndieWire. The essay
begins with perhaps the first animated documentary, Winsor McCay’s The Sinking of the Lusitania (1918), and then moves on to
some very challenging examples of modern psychological realism: Frank
Film (1973), Ryan (2004), and Orgesticulanismus (2008).
“… but I’m getting off the subject
here, I’m afraid. This story is about Ryan.”
The subject of Ryan (2004)
is real: animator Ryan Larkin (1943-2007). The story is drawn from real life,
as pieced together from recorded interviews. The visual approach is . . .
director Chris Landreth’s interpretation of real life.
This series of 21 essays is inspired by a list of 250 great animated short films, composed in August 2012 by Scott Bussey, Jorge Didaco, Waldemar Hepstein, Bill Kamberger, Robert Reynolds, Sulo Vatanen, and Lee Price, with additional assistance from participants on the IMDb Classic Film message board.
Cartoon-blogging, essay 12 of 21 blog entries on Animating the Directors: 100 Masters of Short Animation
The twelfth essay, “Animating the Directors: 100 Masters of
Animated Short Film,” is published in full at Fandor Keyframe. The short written essay leads into a witty
and joyous video celebration of the great animation directors by Kevin B. Lee. Enjoy!
One of Keyframe’s most popular
articles from last year was its illustrated guide to 100 masters of the animated short film. Film animation has thrived for over a century, but has
never seen quite the level of recognition afforded to live-action feature
filmmakers. And while there are plenty of outstanding animated features to
celebrate, a list of those films wouldn’t boast nearly as much eye-popping
diversity as those represented by this list.
And here’s the video as a stand-alone essay on YouTube:
I’ve seen 100 out of 100!
How’d you do?
This series of 21 essays is inspired by a list of 250 great animated short films, composed in August 2012 by Scott Bussey, Jorge Didaco, Waldemar Hepstein, Bill Kamberger, Robert Reynolds, Sulo Vatanen, and Lee Price, with additional assistance from participants on the IMDb Classic Film message board.
Cartoon-blogging, essay 11 of 21 blog entries on 250 great animated short films
The Ash-Lad and the Good Helpers (1961), directed by Ivo Caprino.
The eleventh essay, “Animating the Folktale: The Puppet
Animation of Ivo Caprino,” is published in full at Press Play at
IndieWire. Written by guest blogger
Waldemar Hepstein, this essay focuses on the storytelling of Ivo Caprino,
particularly the two Caprino shorts that made our list: The Ash-Lad
and the Good Helpers (1961) and The
Seventh Father of the House (1966).
The classical fairy tales and
fables have served as fodder for many film animators, from the pioneer days of
Lotte Reiniger and Walt Disney onward. One filmmaker almost exclusively
associated with this type of material is Ivo Caprino (1920-2001), Norway’s most
famous practitioner of the art of animation.
This series of 21 essays is inspired by a list of 250 great animated short films, composed in August 2012 by Scott Bussey, Jorge Didaco, Waldemar Hepstein, Bill Kamberger, Robert Reynolds, Sulo Vatanen, and Lee Price, with additional assistance from participants on the IMDb Classic Film message board.
Cartoon-blogging, essay 10 of 21 blog entries on 250 great animated short films
The Mitten (1967), directed by Roman Kachanov.
This is the tenth of 21 essays inspired by a list of 250 great animated short films, composed in August 2012 by Scott Bussey, Jorge Didaco, Waldemar Hepstein, Bill Kamberger, Robert Reynolds, Sulo Vatanen, and Lee Price, with additional assistance from participants on the IMDb Classic Film message board.
Artists often mine their childhood for inspiration. Charles Dickens and Mark Twain recreated
their childhood world in classic books;
Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes
and Charles Schulz’s Peanuts explored
life through the eyes of children in classic comic strips. I’m friends with a minister who often wears Snoopy
and Charlie Brown ties to church, acknowledging their spiritual depth.
Schulz used the world of childhood to grapple with his own adult questions and
struggles. He tapped into deep wells by immersing himself in
childhood.
When drawing together our list of 250 great animated short
films, our panelists found a small yet rich selection of movies where artists
recreate and creatively explore the world of childhood. Animation is
particularly effective at tapping into the recesses of the brain where our deepest
memories reside. An animated image can instantly summon up strong emotions tied to our past.
Of course, many people erroneously believe that animation is
nothing more than a medium for entertaining children, probably because
children are naturally drawn to the world of the cartoon. In the early days of
television, advertising and marketing salesmen quickly capitalized on the new captive audience. Short bursts of 30-second animation can be very effective at
lodging sales messages into the brains of children, creating an urgent need for the hot new toy or the sweetest breakfast cereal. All film is manipulative, but there seems to
be something especially crass about manipulating children through animation, whispering
in their ears as they relax on a Saturday morning.
Fortunately, my topic isn’t “Animating for Maximum
Manipulation” but the much more agreeable “Animating Childhood,” where the intent
is to express an idea or vision. Each of
today’s selections opens into universality. The Dr. Seuss-penned Gerald McBoing Boing widens to express
ideas about creativity, Tulips Shall Grow
begins and ends with children yet is dominated by war and loss in its middle
passage, Boy and Girl explores gender and relationships, and Mikhail Aldashin’s Rozhedstvo
(Christmas) brings a childlike
innocence to the Jesus nativity story. Very big themes can be explored through
the eyes of childhood.
Little Tadpoles
Search for Mama / Xiao ke dou zhao ma ma (1960): Director Te Wei (1915-2010)
made Little Tadpoles Search for Mama
(also known as Where is Mama?) for very
young children but its technique transcends its content. Published in the same year (1960), P.D.
Eastman’s classic American picture book Are
You My Mother? has the same plot yet it remains rooted in its child
audience. Te Wei’s short film offers a
deeper experience with nearly identical material, thanks to the miraculous
beauty of its imagery. The simple
narrative of tadpoles in search of their mother becomes an exercise in brush
painting in motion.
Te Wei made this groundbreaking film with important
assistance from Tang Cheng and animators Duan Ziaoxuan and A Da (who directed Three Monks on our list). Produced
at the Shanghai Animation Film Studio, Little
Tadpoles Search for Mama was the first film to employ brush painting
animation and it received much acclaim for its effects. The school of
tadpoles moves through the water with a delightful random feel as certain adventurous
tadpoles venture out while others shyly hold back. The exquisite brush
work conveys the pond environment through carefully chosen details. The
other denizens of the pond each receive charming personalities, from birds on
the shore to a catfish, shrimp, and a crab in the depths. The fifteen
minutes pass like an enchanted dream — childhood evoked in a delicate flow of museum-quality
images.
The Mitten / Varezhka
(1967): A puppet animation by Soviet director Roman Kachanov (1921-1993),
The Mitten carefully and wordlessly
establishes its plot in the opening minutes (a girl desperately wishes she
could have a dog of her own) before discreetly shifting into the girl’s
imagination. From her point of view, we see a mitten transform into an
adorable knitted dog and share in her joy at his doggy behavior. There’s charm in abundance in Kachanov’s
comic treatment of the wide variety of dogs in the neighborhood. And I especially appreciate the sweet end of
the film, as it wisely refrains from indulging in the extreme sentimentality of
the scene that would naturally follow.
Tchou-Tchou
(1972): Director Co Hoedeman can animate
anything. He’s animated sand (The Sand Castle — it’s on our list),
wire, sealskin figures, and teddy bears.
In Tchou-Tchou, Hoedeman
animates blocks — for 13 vivid minutes, a simple children’s block set is in
constant inventive motion. The boy and
girl at the center of the action are basic figures, each composed of three painted
wooden cubes. But watch as Hoedeman ingeniously
finds countless ways to endow his building blocks with personality. He’s a playful wizard behind the scenes, animating
with childlike glee — making a difficult art look like child’s play.
Support
the artists and the art of the animated short film! Tchou-Tchou is available for purchase at the NFB website.
Here’s a sampling of a few other films about childhood from
our list of 250 great animated short films. While these films offer a child’s
eye view of the world, they are not childish.
As William Wordsworth wrote when he recollected scenes from his early
childhood, “the meanest flower that blows can give/Thoughts that do often lie
too deep for tears.”
Little Nemo / Winsor McCay, the Famous Cartoonist of the N.Y. Herald
and His Moving Comics (Winsor McCay, USA, 1911)
Tulips Shall Grow (George Pal, USA, 1942)
Gerald McBoing Boing (Robert Cannon, USA, 1951)
Boy and Girl / Malchik i devochka (Rozaliya Zelma, USSR,
1978)
Who Will Comfort Toffle? / Vem skall trösta knyttet? (Johan
Hagelbäck, Sweden, 1980)
Cartoon-blogging, essay 9 of 21 blog entries on 250 great animated short films
Donald's Tire Trouble (1943), directed by Dick Lundy.
This is the ninth of 21 essays inspired by a list of 250 great animated short films, composed in August 2012 by Scott Bussey, Jorge Didaco, Waldemar Hepstein, Bill Kamberger, Robert Reynolds, Sulo Vatanen, and Lee Price, with additional assistance from participants on the IMDb Classic Film message board.
My fellow panelist Waldemar Hepstein sent me two short
pieces: one on a classic Donald Duck short, Donald’s
Tire Trouble (1943), and one on a Porky Pig favorite, Kitty Kornered (1946). They seem to go together nicely and so I decided
to round them out with a short piece on one of my favorites, Gertie the Dinosaur (1914) to comprise an entry
on the art of animating character and personality.
Donald’s Tire Trouble
(1943): Disney was known for respecting
and emulating the old live-action comedy greats in his cartoons, and he
encouraged his animators to do likewise. This film is a kind of animated cousin
to Chaplin’s One A.M. (1916) in that
both are essentially one man shows — rather unusual in either animation or live
action. (The Goofy ”How to” series is another kettle of fish.) Of course, both
the Tramp and the Duck must have their adversaries for comical conflict, but
here their antagonists are inanimate objects.
Donald’s Tire Trouble
was one of a mere handful of shorts that Dick Lundy directed for Disney following a ten-year
period as animator. In fact, Lundy is sometimes credited as being the creator
of Donald Duck, which might seem something of an overstatement as there were
several pivotal talents at hand in developing the Duck’s personality (Jack
Hannah and Carl Barks are other names that come to mind, and we shouldn’t
forget the original voice, Clarence Nash).
There’s no doubt, however, that Lundy was one of the most
important Duck developers, being in on the screen legend’s image from the very
beginning. For this reason, as well as the quality of Lundy’s work both as
animator and director, his relative obscurity even among cartoon buffs is both
sad and mysterious. In a letter to an animation historian, Lundy described his
modus operandi:
When
I was animating at Disney’s I was considered a personality animator. I always
tried to give the personality a comedy twist, with a gesture, a body action or
a twist of the mouth or head. When I animated dances I tried to put in the same
thing. Now with a funny personality leading up to a physical gag which was
funny (usually the way a character reacted) you usually ended up with something
twice as funny.
Which is a perfect description of Donald’s Tire Trouble.
Kitty Kornered
(1946): Made in the year that director Bob
Clampett ended his long tenure at Warner Bros., Kitty Kornered, while being as wild and Looney as any Tune, has an
easy-going feel to it. It’s almost as if Clampett felt he didn’t have anything
to prove anymore and could just have a ball with his inspired brand of Loonacy.
In the process, he introduced a new character, Sylvester the Cat, later to
become the special property of Friz Freleng and the team mate of Tweety.
The plot, such as it is, consists of a very familiar standby
of the classic Hollywood cartoons: The hero has his home invaded by pesky
animals and must do battle with them — in this case, it’s Porky Pig against some
nasty cats who just won’t take no for an answer. Throughout the film, speed and
silliness are the main watchwords.
At the finish, when the film has about a minute and a half
left of its running time, Clampett pulls a couple of nice tricks out of his
sleeve. The cats fake a Wellesian “Martian invasion” broadcast in a failed
attempt to scare Porky out of his house. As he turns in for the night, at first he takes no notice
that there are three Martians in bed with him, even after they fondly kiss him
good night. (Somebody somewhere must surely have written a doctoral
dissertation on all the kissing that goes on in the Looney Tunes!) It’s Porky’s
delayed reaction that provides the standout moment, a frenzied split-second
head-turning and eye-bulging — on a par with, though quite different from, the
famous reaction shots from Clampett’s colleague Tex Avery.
Apparently, in modern TV screenings of this cartoon, not
only have scenes of the cats smoking and drinking been censored out, but so
have the establishing shots of the cats being kicked out of various homes.
Waldemar Hepstein
Gertie the Dinosaur
(1914): While the medium of film was
still primitive in 1914, the artistry of Winsor McCay was anything but
primitive. A newspaper cartoonist of
peerless skill, McCay threw himself into the new medium of film animation with tireless
energy. A handful of animators had tackled the new craft before him, but McCay was
the first to create animated characters who appeared to take up real space, breathe
on screen, and display coherent and individualized personalities.
In addition to being a nationally famous cartoonist, McCay
established himself as a vaudeville star in the early 1900s. He drew rapid
sketches for adoring vaudeville audiences, amazing the crowds with his lightning-fast
skills. Gertie the Dinosaur is a vaudeville performer, too. She bashfully enters the frame as if onto a stage, coquettishly
playing to the audience. Her self-confident
walk as she strides to the foreground (the equivalent of the stage edge)
practically flirts with the audience. From
outside the frame, McCay issues commands and Gertie either chooses to obey or
follows her own whims. When McCay
reprimands her, she cries. She’s
part-toddler, part-puppy, and fully dinosaur.
McCay conceived of Gertie
the Dinosaur as a film to accompany his vaudeville act, with McCay
interacting with the dinosaur on the screen.
For these first vaudeville showings, there would have been no intertitles — McCay
would have issued his commands from the stage.
When the film went into wider release, a live-action prologue and
epilogue were added, along with the intertitles to the cartoon portion.
Maybe Gertie could have moved on to cartoon fame on
the order of crowd-pleasing personalities like Felix, Mickey, and Bugs. McCay planned a sequel called Gertie on Tour in 1921 and filmed some
of it, but there’s no record of any formal release. A tantalizing fragment remains. McCay gave up filmmaking that same year. He was a solo artist working in a medium that
was quickly moving in the direction of factory production. Over time, artists would learn how to work effectively
within this new production system, but it wasn’t for McCay. He was strictly a “one-man, one film”
auteur. Consequently, his films are
one-of-a-kind achievements — masterpieces in a primitive medium.
Support
the artists and the art of the animated short film! Gertie the Dinosaur is available for purchase on Winsor McCay – The Master Edition.
Cartoon-blogging, essay 8 of 21 blog entries on 250 great animated short films
The Unicorn in the Garden (1953), directed by William T. Hurtz.
The eighth essay, “Animating the Classics,” is published in full
at Press Play at IndieWire. The primary
focus of the essay is on The Unicorn in the Garden (William T. Hurtz, 1953)
which was adapted from the classic James Thurber short story and Achilles
(Barry Purves, 1995) which was adapted from Greek legends and Homer’s The Iliad.
The inimitable American humorist
James Thurber once proposed that Walt Disney should animate Homer’s Odyssey. “(Disney’s) Odyssey can be, I am sure, a far, far greater thing than
even his epic of the three little pigs,” Thurber wrote in 1934.
This series of 21 essays is inspired by a list of 250 great animated short films, composed in August 2012 by Scott Bussey, Jorge Didaco, Waldemar Hepstein, Bill Kamberger, Robert Reynolds, Sulo Vatanen, and Lee Price, with additional assistance from participants on the IMDb Classic Film message board.
Cartoon-blogging, essay 7 of 21 blog entries on 250 great animated short films
Hedgehog in the Fog (1975), directed by Yuriy Norshteyn.
A deliberate movement
from Point A to Point B. That’s the
quest in a nutshell. Point B is the goal — the purpose of the movement is
ostensibly to achieve the goal. And did
I mention there may be monsters between Points A and B? In fact, there’s a very good chance of it.
In the immortal quest-promising words of Carl Denham
in King Kong (1933), “It’s
money and adventure and fame. It’s the thrill of a lifetime and a long
sea voyage that starts at six o’clock tomorrow morning.”
One more thing about Point B… The object achieved at Point B may not be the real point of the
quest. Even though the hero or heroine may remain unaware of this, the real goal is personal transformation. If the hero completes the journey by returning to Point A, the hero
returns a changed person.
The quest goes way back in time. Composed nearly 3,000
years ago, Homer’s Odyssey is a classic
quest. Way before that, there’s even a
chance that long-forgotten quest stories lurk behind the beautiful cave
paintings left by our prehistoric ancestors. The quest is in our blood
— it’s part of our DNA. So naturally, as the age of movies dawned, the
first generation of filmmakers turned to the quest for inspiration.
The epic nature of quests may fit better with the feature
film than the short. Many animated features are quest stories.
Lotte Reiniger’s amazing animated feature film The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1927) is centered on the
quest for a magic lamp. Disney’s Pinocchio (1940) follows the title
character as he searches for transformation.
Pinocchio is on a rite-of-passage quest — the wooden puppet equivalent of the Native American vision
quest that transforms a boy into a man. The
oeuvres of Disney, Pixar, and Studio Ghibli are filled with similar quests.
But short animated films aren’t entirely out of the
picture. There’s a lot that a skilled
animator can achieve with a quest theme in a very short period of time.
Captain Grogg’s
Wonderful Journey / Kapten Groggs underbara resa (1916): Technically,
Captain Grogg’s Wonderful Journey is more
of a parody of a quest than a quest proper.
The hard-drinking and cantankerous Captain Grogg sets off on a
picaresque adventure where anything can happen. He flirts with a mermaid
at sea, has his ship marooned by a whale, gets chased by a lion, joins up with
the island natives, and romances a native princess on the island shore by the
light of the full moon.
Victor Bergdahl’s animation is extraordinarily fluid and
detailed for 1916. This was the first of 13 popular Captain Grogg shorts
that he made between 1916 and 1922. This first one sets the tone for the
rest. The adventures are all in fun and nothing is really at stake, even
when Grogg finds himself devoured by a lion. The visual treatment of
the natives is exaggerated in a racist manner, but the film has no qualms with
a fairy-tale happy ending uniting the Swedish Grogg and the black island
native. It’s a quest in the footsteps of the real-life quest of impressionist artist Paul
Gauguin, whose Point B turned out to be Tahiti.
Fade out on Gauguin under a full moon
with a Polynesian beauty.
Hedgehog in the Fog /
Yozhik v tumane (1975): Yuriy Norshteyn’s Hedgehog in the Fog is a miniature (hedgehog-sized) masterpiece. The imagery is haunting and the animation is dazzling. The
story is a quest, reduced to its most basic ingredients. Following a
vision of a white horse, our hedgehog hero descends into the fog. A
series of adventurous encounters ultimately leads him home, but with a
transformed view of himself and the world. The hedgehog has returned from
a vision quest.
While Hedgehog in the
Fog closely follows the structure of a classic quest narrative, the
adventures themselves remain wonderfully elusive. We never learn what the
creature is that carries the hedgehog on its back through the water.
Animals like elephants, dogs, and bats mysteriously appear and then sink back
into the fog. The white horse functions as a symbol — and it is an inspired quest goal — but the meaning of the horse remains unexplained. The
hedgehog’s search for understanding takes place in a fog.
The ending is surpassingly beautiful. The
hedgehog returns home for a joyful reunion with his bear cub friend,
yet the film closes with the hedgehog alone with his thoughts, forever changed
by his quest. Although small in scope and muted in tone, Hedgehog in the Fog is one of the most authentic portrayals of the quest ever captured on film.
Support
the artists and the art of the animated short film! Hedgehog in the Fog is available for purchase on The Complete Works of Yuri Norstein.
Death and the Mother
(1988): Ruth Lingford’s Death and
the Mother is a classic quest tale adapted from Hans Christian Andersen’s
“The Story of a Mother.” After a personified Death takes a sick child
from its home, the mother sets off on a quest to retrieve her child.
Along the way, the mother undergoes a series of terrible and wound-inflicting
adventures. A thorn bush tears her skin and her eyes fall into the water
as she cries by the side of a river, leaving her sightless. Reduced to a ragged blind beggar by the time
she catches up with Death, she courageously makes her demand. The end of her quest
turns out to be a sad wisdom.
Lingford’s treatment of the story is based on traditional
woodcuts. Everything is conveyed visually, with no dialogue to break the
mood — we do not hear the mother’s cries and sobs. Partly because of this
approach, the film avoids falling into the extreme sentimentality that would be
natural to the story. Instead, we get to marvel at the artistry of this
primal world and appreciate the classic elements of the quest, as they fall
into place one by one.
Here’s a sampling of a few other films with quest elements
from our list of 250 great animated short films. These are some of the
greatest tales of adventure on our list, but the quest narrative always suggests there
is deeper meaning behind the chases, battles, and rescues. Ultimately,
wisdom must emerge from the experience. From the safety of the campfire, the
hedgehog will peer into the darkness beyond, haunted by his vision of the white
horse. “How is she, there… in the fog?”
What’s Opera, Doc? (Chuck Jones, USA, 1957)
Little Tadpoles Search for Mama / Xiao ke dou zhao ma ma (Wei Te, China,
1960)
The Ash-Lad and the Good Helpers / Askeladden og de gode hjelperne
(Ivo Caprino, Norway, 1961)
DojojiTemple
(Kihachiro Kawamoto, Japan, 1976)
There Once Was a Dog / Zhil-byl pyos (Eduard Nazarov, USSR,
1982)
The Monk and the Fish / Le moine et le poisson (Michael Dudok de
Wit, France, 1994)
The Old Man and the Sea (Aleksandr Petrov, Russia, 1999)
Brothers Bearhearts / Vennad Karusüdamed (Riho Unt, Estonia,
2005)
The Mysterious Geographic Explorations of Jasper Morello (Anthony
Lucas, Australia,
2005)
The Danish Poet (Torill Kove, Norway/Canada, 2006)
The Legend of Shangri-La (Chen Ming, China, 2006)
Peter & the Wolf (Suzie Templeton, UK, 2006)
The Tale of How (The Blackheart Gang: Ree Treweek, Jannes Hendrikz
& Markus Wormstorm, South Africa, 2006)
My Childhood Mystery
Tree (Natalia Mirzoyan,
Russia,
2008)
Cartoon-blogging, essay 6 of 21 blog entries on 250 great animated short films
Clock Cleaners (1938), directed by Ben Sharpsteen.
This is the sixth of 21 essays inspired by a list of 250 great animated short films, composed in August 2012 by Scott Bussey, Jorge Didaco, Waldemar Hepstein, Bill Kamberger, Robert Reynolds, Sulo Vatanen, and Lee Price, with additional assistance from participants on the IMDb Classic Film message board.
In both short films and long, the lead characters are usually attractive,
healthy, and relatively free of the demands of work. If they do work,
they’re likely to be soldiers, policemen, criminals, or prostitutes. Rounding out this cinematic snapshot of society, there are the
lawyers, doctors, and performers. The bit roles go to the nurses, waiters,
cab drivers, librarians, accountants, etc. who come from the ranks of the remaining 90% of
the population, performing jobs that apparently aren’t sufficiently glamorous for the big
screen.
The list of “work and labor” animated shorts at the
conclusion of this entry is a desperate attempt to identify a few outliers that
genuinely depict characters working for a living. For the most part, I
discounted the films with the stock characters mentioned above, but that left
slim pickings. The Boogie
Woogie Bugle Boy of Company “B” (1941) snuck in because it shows
soldiers engaged in everyday work, The
Tender Game (1958) slipped in despite the hero immediately abandoning
his job when romance beckons, and Ballerina
on the Boat (1969) made the list not for the ballerina (there’s no
indication that she dances for a paycheck) but for the working men on the
ship. With its portrait of the clerk Bob Cratchit, A Christmas Carol (1971) actually
stands out as one of the best depictions of the working class on our
list! Pretty sad…
And that’s why I want to share a word of praise for Mickey
Mouse, the hardest-working cartoon character in the movies. Mickey started out
piloting a steamboat and went on to pump gas, wash windows, sell hot dogs at a
carnival, drive a train, fight fires, deliver groceries, operate a steam
shovel, and many more respectable yet common occupations. As the Disney animators found themselves emphasizing Mickey’s superb work ethic, their star mouse unfortunately
dropped into the category of “responsible adult” when other cartoon
characters were present. As a result, sidekicks Goofy and Donald became
the fun characters, stealing much of Mickey’s initial popularity. When
Disney got around to filming Mickey’s
Christmas Carol (1983), our ever-dependable mouse naturally took the role of Bob
Cratchit, the quintessential guy who does all the work and never gets the
credit.
So happy belated Labor Day! I’ll give this handful of
movies all the more credit for acknowledging that most of us have to get up and
go to work every day.
Clock Cleaners (1938):
This is working-class Mickey at his peak. A classic Disney cartoon, Clock Cleaners is set in the
everyday urban work world, with Mickey, Goofy, and Donald Duck reporting to duty
on a clock face perched dizzyingly high above the city. Naturally, this is a
setup designed to generate thrills in the tradition of those famous
building-climbing stunts of Harold Lloyd in silents like Safety Last (1923). And it has another forerunner in the
wonderful Popeye cartoon A Dream
Walking (1934) which shifted the Lloyd gags from the real world to the
cartoon world, with Popeye, Olive Oyl, and Bluto mixing thrills with comedy at
skyscraper heights.
If it weren’t for the cartoons, slapstick comedy of this kind
would have been largely abandoned in Hollywood’s
transition to sound. Producers looked to Broadway dialogue writers for
verbal wit, largely abandoning the art of slapstick comedy. But
Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, and other masters continued to inspire short cartoons
like Clock Cleaners, where
timing and pantomime counted for everything. Fortunately, Mickey, Donald,
and Goofy (and their fabulously talented animators—Disney still had some of its
finest working on shorts at that time) had skill and charisma to rival their
silent forebears.
Three Monks / San ge
heshang (1982): Three
Monks would be an ideal choice for a video to show at a staff meeting
focused on team building. These monks may not have particularly demanding
jobs, but their work environment is very familiar office terrain. Our three
prayerful protagonists hold grudges and resentments, jealously guard their turf, sneakily enjoy the
discomfort of their co-workers, and even sabotage each other’s work.
Thanks to the skill of director Xu Jingda (A Da), all of this is communicated
swiftly and charmingly. We find the three monks endearing even as they behave
poorly.
The lesson for that staff meeting comes at the end when creative teamwork wins the day. Even monks can be friends. And if harmony
can even be established at a monastery, there’s hope for work places everywhere.
Support
the artists and the art of the animated short film! Three Monksis available for purchase.
This Way Up (2008): Now
here’s a cinematically under-represented profession:
funeral director! And no one could represent the undertaking profession
more ably than the two determined casket bearers in Adam Foulke’s and Alan Smith’s This Way Up. Like a modern-day Tex Avery cartoon (see King-Size Canary and Bad Luck Blackie for reference),
the gags become increasingly wild and outlandish as the short progresses. The
stoicism and practicality of our two heroes offer a perfect counterpoint to the
black comedy.
While the gags are creepier than you’d ever get in a classic
Disney cartoon, This Way Up sets
up a similar type of situation to those that were handled with aplomb by
Mickey, Goofy, and Donald back in the 1930s. Can’t you picture Mickey and
Goofy carrying the coffin, circa 1936, in a short called something like Mickey’s Funeral Service? Yet even
though different times deserve different heroes, it’s nice to see that
unflagging professionalism and good old-fashioned depression-era work
ethic are still with us today.
Support
the artists and the art of the animated short film! This Way Up is available for purchase on the Best of Animation 4 DVD.
Here’s a list of some other films from our list that touch
upon themes of work and labor. I wish this list was longer, but these
were the best I could find!
Steamboat Willie (Walt Disney, USA, 1928)
The Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy of Company “B” (Walter Lantz, USA, 1941)
One Froggy Evening (Chuck Jones, USA, 1955)
The Tender Game (John Hubley, USA, 1958)
The Hand / Ruka (Jirà Trnka, Czechoslovakia, 1966)
Ballerina on the Boat / Balerina na korable (Lev Atamanov, USSR,
1969)
Cartoon-blogging, essay 5 of 21 blog entries on 250 great animated short films
Tulips Shall Grow (1942), directed by George Pal.
This is the fifth of 21 essays inspired by a list of 250 great animated short films, composed in August 2012 by Scott Bussey, Jorge Didaco, Waldemar Hepstein, Bill Kamberger, Robert Reynolds, Sulo Vatanen, and Lee Price, with additional assistance from participants on the IMDb Classic Film message board.
Ferdinand the Bull is in.
Tom and Jerry are out.
To be more specific… The very sweet Disney short Ferdinand the Bull (1938) made it on
this entry’s sample list of animated short films that deal with themes of
war and violence. But the two
Tom and Jerry cartoons that made our big list (The Night Before Christmas and The Cat Concerto) aren’t here. Much as I
enjoy the orgies of destruction in Tom and Jerry cartoons, I watch them knowing the shenanigans are
ultimately all in fun and no one gets hurt.
The violence isn’t real. In Ferdinand the Bull, the threatened violence
is very real and must be addressed.
Therefore, the bull gets in.
Our list of 250 great animated films has a respectable
selection of World War II propaganda cartoons, anti-war message films,
and meditations on the roots of violence.
While cartoons have certainly been made that present war as an exciting
adventure, none of them made our list.
Even our propaganda selections, like Blitz
Wolf and Der Fuehrer’s Face,
express profound discomfort with violence.
Hitler is the violent one; in this context, Donald Duck is the voice of
reason and peace.
For me, the scenes that linger in the memory are the
haunting ones that show the aftermath of the violence. In the marvelous Story of a Certain Street Corner (1962), the viewer’s eye searches
the ruins of a bombed-out city hoping for signs that our principal characters
have survived. We see immense loss, as
well as glimmers of hope for the future.
Yuriy Norshteyn’s brilliant Tale
of Tales (1979) is even sadder. The women
dance with their men who fade off the screen.
Notifications of their deaths fly like birds to their waiting loved
ones. A powerful anti-war message is
delivered without ever showing soldiers in conflict.
Tulips Shall Grow
(1942): The Holland setting looks
enchanting in the opening, brought to storybook life with neat rows of flowers, picturesque windmills, and young lovers.
Then the Screwballs attack and things quickly get real ugly.
For all its childlike simplicity, Tulips Shall Grow had to be a personal statement for its director,
George Pal. He had just completed
working six years in the Netherlands,
mastering the art of puppet animation. America beckoned and Pal accepted an offer from
Paramount Studios, leaving the Netherlands
with his wife and son just months before the Nazis invaded in May 1940. The Screwballs in Tulips Shall Grow are Nazis.
Their monstrous presence befouls the formerly beautiful countryside.
Adding an additional layer of interest for me, one of my
heroes—Ray Harryhausen—worked as a model animator on this film. Harryhausen, who went on to become the
animator and special effects wizard behind movies like The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953) and Jason and the Argonauts (1963), was just 18 when he began his Hollywood
career in the new George Pal Puppetoon studio at Paramount. He made ten shorts with Pal before enlisting
in the U.S. Army, where he eventually wound up working in Frank Capra’s Special
Service Division film unit. While the
wood puppets of the George Pal films frustrated the artist in Harryhausen (who
really wanted to do King Kong-style
animation), he concedes that the experience was very valuable for him and the
films were “elegant in their own way.”
Support
the artists and the art of the animated short film! Tulips Shall Grow is available for purchase on The Puppetoon Movie DVD.
King-Size Canary
(1947): One of classic Hollywood’s wildest directors, Tex Avery is
represented by two films on our war and violence list. Avery’s Blitz
Wolf mercilessly satirizes Hitler and King-Size
Canary is a very funny—and frighteningly prescient—stand-in for the
impending US-Soviet arms race and its "mutually assured destruction" philosophy. Avery was
at his best with such extreme material, fashioning endless sight gags that
threaten to escalate into complete madness.
In fact, the end of King-Size
Canary escalates the situation just about as far as you can take it.
Avery was the least sentimental of the great Hollywood cartoon directors. Everything was forward motion with him;
everything was over-the-top and exaggerated to the max. You didn’t go to Avery for a romantic love
story. But if you were in the mood for a hot-blooded take-no-prisoners gag-packed cartoon, he was your man. We’ve got four Avery classics on our list—Blitz Wolf, Red Hot Riding Hood, King-Size
Canary, and Bad Luck Blackie. That’s more than anyone else except for Chuck
Jones (who somehow netted five).
Support
the artists and the art of the animated short film! King-Size Canary is available for purchase on the Command Decision (1949) DVD.
Balance
(1989): With Balance, twin brothers Christoph and Wolfgang Lauenstein hit on an
inspired metaphor to examine human nature and the roots of violence and
warfare. Five strange, faceless
individuals co-exist on a floating platform.
Even though they know they must keep the platform balanced, the
curiosity and greed of the figures inevitably unleash cold-blooded havoc.
Despite the bleakness of the setting and the pessimism of
the story, Balance is strangely
exhilarating. The choreography of the
characters’ movements within the limited space is brilliantly timed—at times, it’s almost
like watching a Gene Kelly dance routine.
And even though the nature of these characters remains mysterious, their gestures of threat and fear make it clear
that these creatures are all-too-human.
Here’s a list of some other films from our list that touch
upon themes of war and violence. It’s
not a fun group of films this time (Education
for Death has to be the most depressing of all Disney shorts) but these are
movies loaded with genuine insight into human nature.
Ferdinand the Bull (Dick Rickard, USA, 1938)
Peace on Earth (Hugh Harman, USA, 1939)
The Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy of Company “B” (Walter Lantz, USA, 1941)
Blitz Wolf (Tex Avery, USA, 1942)
Der Fuehrer’s Face (Jack Kinney, USA, 1942)
Education For Death (Clyde Geronimi, USA, 1943)
Neighbours (Norman McLaren, Canada, 1952)
Story of a Certain Street Corner / Aru machikado no monogatari (Eiichi
Yamamoto & Yusaku Sakamoto, Japan, 1962)
The Thieving Magpie / La gazza ladra (Emanuele Luzzati and Giulio
Gianini, Italy, 1964)
The Roll-Call / Apel (Ryszard Czekala, Poland, 1971)
Tale of Tales / Skazka skazok (Yuriy Norshteyn, USSR, 1979)
Tyll the Giant / Suur Tõll (Rein Raamat, USSR, 1980)
