Monthly Archives: July 2011

by | July 21, 2011 · 3:52 pm

Wet


If RHI wasn’t putting out a box set of the Hal Roach Laurel & Hardy sound films, I would say that the collection of Famous Studios Noveltoons Steve Stanchfield is releasing this October would be the DVD I’m looking forward to most this year. Remastered from the best accessible 35mm material, this collection will finally make some of the most unique examples of 1940s animated cartooning available in the best quality possible.

The DVD will feature twenty cartoons from 1943-50, stopping around the time things started to go south for awhile at Famous. What happened there, with its once well-polished and funny product quickly becoming a repetitive mess, is a sobering reminder of how easily the Warner studio could have suffered the same fate had the management structure been different, and how thankful we should be that those shorts were as great for as long as they were.

Steve told me he’s gotten requests to do a Famous release more than any other, so I urge you: if you’ve only read about or seen the work of artists like John Gentilella, Marty Taras, Dave Tendlar, Steve Muffati, and even Jim Tyer through this blog or others, buy this DVD to see their cartoons in the best way possible. It’s just another in the long line of immaculate collections Steve has put out and will continue to put out in the future.

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by | July 15, 2011 · 1:37 pm

TCM, Blow Me Down

The stupidest thing done on TCM last night should have been accidentally playing a Dogville Comedy (a series “as funny as AIDs and nuclear war”) rather than a Popeye cartoon. But in actuality, it was the piece they played, above, that was supposed to introduce it. Jack Shaheen has obviously never seen Popeye the Sailor Meets Ali Baba’s Forty Thieves or is legally blind.

For some reason, Fleischer opted to use “Ali Baba” for the title, even though Bluto is called “Abu Hassan” repeatedly throughout the film, possibly because the former had more name recognition. (Sort of the opposite reason for why Bob Clampett had to call his short Coal Black rather than the more appropriate So White.) So in spite of the title, it’s clearly only using the story as a basis for an adventure story, not bastardizing it as Shaheen suggests.

There are many cartoons that exemplify poor Arab images in film, but this isn’t the one. One beautiful thing about the Fleischer cartoons is how they succeeded where the other Hollywood and New York studios always failed: not adhering to formulaic portrayals of specific races or genders. Everyone and everything should look as exaggerated and different as possible. And how could it do “more to denigrate Arabs than any cartoon ever” if Popeye is going out of his way to save a community of Arabs?

Popeye Meets Ali Baba’s Forty Thieves is one of the most atmospheric, thrilling, and funniest animated films ever made. Shaheen seems to be another dime a dozen ‘film scholar’ who obviously hasn’t done the least of his obligations by seeking out as many films as possible to draw such a conclusion. At least he’s in good company.

(Via Cartoon Brew)

Addendum: I read that Sahara Hare (which starts out brilliantly and sort of fizzles out by the four minute mark) was another cartoon that was supposed to be presented with an introduction but was dropped. Good thing too, because it would’ve been an embarrassment trying to explain the negative social values therein and convincing anyone that this isn’t just Freleng doing a normal Bugs/Sam picture with a costume and scenery change. I’m all for encouraging better enlightenment and tolerance in fan communities when it comes to racial imagery, but there’s a right way and an asinine way to do it, and it’s just weird to see TCM doing so much in the latter. But hey, right, they’re just cartoons.

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Filed under classic animation, crap, people

by | July 14, 2011 · 6:48 pm

Kimballing

I hope this doesn’t become a monthly-post blog of links to other sites, but it just may well become that.

While he hasn’t announced it on his own site, Amid Amidi will have an illustrated biography on Ward Kimball published next year. He says, “I hope the book will offer a portrait of Ward that goes beyond his stereotypical image as animation’s goofy madman,” and I certainly hope so too. Contrary to the marginalization of Kimball in most texts that are part of what Mike Barrier calls “The Approved Narrative” (really “Accepted”, but he told me he could care less about a differentiation), Kimball is probably the only Disney artist where a full-scale biography is truly needed. Whenever you read something like John Canemaker’s Nine Old Men (an “Approved Narrative” if there ever was one) and see these animators lined up as if they were all equals, all it reveals is that (for the most part) these artists were more or less facsimiles of each other in their work, with Kimball as the only individual.

The access to Kimball’s private library is enticing, but it worries me that it might compromise some of Amidi’s critical writing style, the problem his beautiful Cartoon Modern suffered. (In exchange for lavish illustrations, he doesn’t tell you that most of the films the book is about, as films, really are hollow, wallpaper.) “Thorough celebration” tends to be a red flag for “everything this man touched is worth something”, but fortunately Kimball’s life and career was so eclectic that it’d be quite easy to avoid the pratfall of giving the lesser film works the same importance as the best ones and just give them the brushoff they deserve.

To supplement the post, here’s an example: Kimball’s 1968 anti-Vietnam short Escalation, the sort of underwhelming satirical filmmaking that dominated his later period, highlighting political bromides presented in a faux-arty manner. The “Johnson” joke is lame too.

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