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.
