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Moving Forward, Looking Back

Like everyone else in the animatophile community, I spent my Sunday night by not watching the Seth MacFarlane block on FOX, but the block of classic animation on Turner Classic Movies, co-hosted by the patron saint of animation, Jerry Beck. Actually, those shows were cancelled in favor of baseball, so perhaps ratings for TCM got a boost.

Starting the block were the only two animated features of the Golden Age that weren’t made by Disney, the Fleischers’ Gulliver’s Travels and Mr. Bug Goes to Town. The transfer of Gulliver was incredibly weak and muddled with the DVNR process. Along with having its original title reinstated, Mr. Bug looked beautiful. I’m very familiar with the 35mm nitrate from the Museum of Modern Art they used, and it’s delightful that everyone was able to see that genuine, raw 1941 Technicolor for themselves.

If only either of them were truly great films though! What I get from both of the Fleischer movies is an overwhelming sense that the animators just didn’t want to make the damn things. You don’t need to read J.B. Kaufman’s excellent new book on Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (which I will be reviewing shortly) to know that that film is the product of a man with an obsession, backed by a fleet of artists determined to do their part in realizing it.

The polar opposite is true of Gulliver’s Travels, an almost willfully convoluted film on every level. The Fleischer studio simply tried in vain to be something they weren’t. There are some very elaborate sequences, but they are smothered by overlong stretches of needless exposition and shameless forgeries from Disney’s first picture. It’s said that one possible route early in development was to feature Popeye as Gulliver, and it’s so easy to envision a richer film evolving out of that concept. Sadly they didn’t, and we have the very poor film that launched TCM’s animation celebration.

Perversely, the second Fleischer feature, Mr. Bug Goes to Town, tanked, even though it’s a vast improvement over the studio’s first. The animators had returned to their element. They came up with an original story, making Mr. Bug far grittier and earthier than any of the Disney films. The animation is generally slick and well-acted, calling to mind the better wartime Famous shorts. Unfortunately, the film is terminally flawed when its most engaging characters are the comedic, one-dimensional villains.

Many have made the comparison between Mr. Bug and Frank Capra (beyond the title) and it’s apt. The film certainly plays like one of Capra’s in its depiction of societal/class conflict and forced (but effective) emotion, but only after you’ve ironed out the charisma and maturity of Mr. Deeds Goes to Town and It Happened One Night. A unique kind of character animation flourished at the Fleischers in the 1930s, but it was absent in their films after the move to Miami. The Popeye series got into a clumsy rut and the Superman cartoons are outright embarrassments. It’s only natural any movie made in that environment would suffer accordingly. Shame that another feature wasn’t made with this crew, even under the Famous moniker. They might have gotten it on the third try.

I skipped the UPA block entirely. I think 2012 will be known as “The Year of UPA,” what with Adam Abraham’s book and the Jolly Frolics collection. As a result, there is collective exhaustion of the topic. Unlike the Disney and Warner canons that have dozens of films still commanding attention, UPA’s golden era is miniscule and doesn’t invite the same level and volume of critical analysis (certainly nothing beyond design after John Hubley left). It will be a long time before I ever willingly watch one of them again, save Rooty Toot Toot or the Fox and Crows. But TCM’s selection did include all of the UPA cartoons that are worth going out of your way to see at any rate, and they must be applauded.

Actually, the applause has to go to TCM for featuring films from the archive of my near-lifelong friend Tom Stathes. Like any medium, the works in its gestation period can be endlessly fascinating. The silent animation highlighted from Tom’s collection go beyond mere historical curios: they are genuinely entertaining historical curios. In this age where it’s actually feasible for one person to do a film singlehandedly, I rarely see one iota of the creativity regularly exhibited in this period (in which one guy had to do everything).

A lot of silent animation was certainly mechanical, and often showy to compensate for the lack of good ideas. It’s not an issue when something like the sheer inventive imagery of J. Stuart Blackton’s The Haunted Hotel or Winsor McCay (note the spelling) is commanding the attention; only when characters take the center stage does the lack of cinematic prowess become obvious. But film itself was still developing. It took silent live-action film years to regularly deliver compelling personalities and narratives. Like those early comedies, when the humor worked in these cartoons, it worked.

Koko the Clown is always a favorite, and the more I see of Mutt and Jeff, the more I like those cartoons (the featured Fireman Save My Child delivers an alarmingly high amount of well-executed gags). Sometimes they were a little too good this early in the game. Paul Terry’s Springtime with Farmer Alfalfa is actually better acted and written than most of the cartoons he did with sound. Curiously absent was Otto Messmer’s Felix the Cat, though hopefully that will be remedied ‘next time’. In its place was a delightful Bill Nolan Krazy Kat, Scents and Nonsense, which plays like a better Felix (with more elaborate animation).

I hope that the animation block was a success. A regular line-up is obviously capable of provoking the same kind of historical insight, intelligent commentary, and plain inspiration that TCM’s thoughtful programming has done regularly. A heartfelt thanks to Mssrs. Beck and Stathes (and Steve Stanchfield and David Gerstein) for making it transpire.

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OIAF 2012

I’ve just returned from my first visit to the Ottawa International Animation Festival. I left it feeling inspired, though it’s a very complicated sort of inspiration.

The worst things I have to say about the festival seem to echo the thoughts of everyone else I spoke with. First and foremost, it’s too expensive and I didn’t feel I got my money’s worth because the scheduling is so horrendous. (I tried to make up for it by drinking as much free alcohol as I could at the Cartoon Network Picnic and Mercury Filmworks party – a hassle in itself with so many animators present.) I missed out on several screenings I wanted to see because they were either playing against something else or were simply too far away to make it in time. It’s impossible to please everyone, certainly, but a little more effort could be made.

The introductory video that played at every screening is unworldly awful. It’s almost schizophrenic going to a generally artsy festival and getting blasted with an obnoxiously loud advertisement for homogenized commercial animation wherever you go.

I only went to one competition screening, Short Competition 5, bearing in mind the popular opinion of the films screened in Ottawa: dreary and depressing. A great number of them absolutely fit that bill. Several seemed to hardly have any animation at all, and OIAF actually subjected its audience to an abhorrent CGI Coca-Cola commercial as part of the competition (easily the worst 45 seconds of my weekend). Yet I must have lucked out because several of them were entertaining and even funny. Rob Shaw’s Portlandia ‘Zero Rats’ was a bit too “College Humor” for my tastes to be truly hilarious, while Grant Orchard’s A Morning Stroll made excellent use of mixed medium to illustrate changing societal views as they relate to a New Yorker cartoon. The clear winner was Don Hertzfeldt’s It’s Such a Beautiful Day, which seemed to make fun of every single bad film that preceded it, and quite possibly all of the ones I didn’t see. I was in tears laughing at it and sincerely hope it wins the Oscar.

The key to enjoying the festival thoroughly, as Greg Duffell once told me, is to skip the competition screenings and only go to the retrospectives. It is also more of a social gathering than anything else, as all conventions and festivals really are. I got to see friends like Bob Jaques, Steve Stanchfield, Mark Mayerson, Mike Kerr, and Mitch Kennedy again, and as someone who doesn’t live in an animation ‘hub’ like L.A. or N.Y.C., it’s always invigorating to talk cartoons aloud with people who actually know what I’m talking about.

On Mark’s recommendation, I went to the retrospective of Barry Purves, a British stop-motion master. If you’re unfamiliar with Purves’s work, you’re in for a treat. I’m more partial to his work for children’s television, like The Wind in the Willows, than his operas like Rigoletto and Gilbert and Sullivan, where the music almost overwhelms the brilliance of his craft. His other strictly narrative shorts, like Screenplay embedded below (warning: it’s quite explicitly graphic), are far more successful in Purves’s aim to take animation into uncharted territory. There is something curious about stop-motion. It’s been steadily more daring than traditional or CGI animation have been over the years, yet it receives almost zero critical attention. Perhaps it’s because it’s seen strictly as an unserious novelty, thanks to its most visible feature films regularly steering into farcical gothic territory. As Purves’s body of work shows, stop-motion is no different than the various stigmas against other forms of animation: it’s capable of far more than people like to believe.

I met Amid Amidi for the first time, and he was just brimming with excitement over his highly anticipated Ward Kimball biography. If you didn’t see his excellent presentation on Kimball’s life and work, you missed out on some priceless home movie footage of Kimball and Walt Disney back in the day, the live-action reference for the crows in Dumbo, and even some homoerotic gag drawings by Kimball that Amid wasn’t allowed to put in the book.

I had asked Amid earlier at the Cartoon Network Picnic why Kimball stayed at Disney’s for his whole career when he was easily the most singular visionary in the studio’s entire history, and he was asked again during his presentation. The short answer: because the footage rate at Disney’s was so low and there was so much paid downtime between projects, it wouldn’t have made sense for Kimball to work somewhere else. Had he worked at a studio with a normal footage rate like Warners, he would never have had time to devote to his music, trains, and fine art painting, and thus, we would never have had the eclectic and eccentric individual that was Ward Kimball at all. His life is a reminder of the importance of broadening your horizons and skill set, so you’re not wearing one hat all of your life.

Needless to say, I’m absolutely dying to read Amid’s book. If you buy one animation book next year that isn’t my Sick Little Monkeys: The Unauthorized Ren & Stimpy Story, it should be Full Steam Ahead. But you should probably buy both.

To clear up some misinformation I helped spread unintentionally years ago, Mickey Mouse’s fantastic dance in Mickey’s Birthday Party is animated by Ward Kimball. Why does the animator’s draft credit Ken Muse and Riley Thomson then, with that curious “music room” credit indicative of reused footage? Because, as Amid uncovered in his research, Kimball had animated that dance for The Reluctant Dragon and it was scrapped. For the 1942 cartoon, Muse and Thomson only changed Mickey’s outfit.

Amid’s presentation would have been my favorite part of the festival if Ralph Bakshi hadn’t been there. It was very disturbing, though also revealing, that the auditorium where Bakshi’s one-on-one talk with Morgan Miller took place was not filled to capacity. Not just a true animation legend, literally animation history was on stage, and hundreds of people could care less. But it is typical of this medium, one which regularly holds the mutilation of its history in highest esteem.

Bakshi is a polarizing figure. There’s certainly a case to be made for his self-destructive nature, while it’s still hard to build a passionate case against him when almost all of his movies were made for under a million dollars, with practically no storyboarding and zero pencil tests. Those are not the kinds of opportunities many animators in any era would be jumping at, most certainly not Richard Williams and Don Bluth (two guys hung up on a craft with ultimately nothing to say).

I saw two Bakshi films in the retrospective. The 35mm print of Fritz the Cat was absolutely gorgeous, and in spite of some of its inherent messiness and stupidity, I was struck by how accurately the film captures the white liberal art student’s mindset (which is messy and stupid) and just how beautiful and fun so much of the animation was. (You haven’t lived until you’ve seen Jim Tyer’s footage in that thing on a big screen.) Steve asked Bakshi what it was like working with Tyer, and the man’s eyes absolutely lit up at the question: “He was the greatest animator who ever lived.” I later asked Bakshi what John Gentilella animated, outside of Blue the biker-Nazi-heroin addict rabbit. He said and wrote his response as he was signing my copy of Ralph Bakshi: Unfiltered: “The car.”

Coonskin is another story, and not just because the print screened was a faded Eastman. The high level of pure incoherence that wrecked many of Bakshi’s later films isn’t there yet, but it could have easily been a much better film had it just been tweaked only slightly. For one thing, there isn’t a single compelling or relatable character in it, like Duke in Fritz or Ida in Heavy Traffic, which a film like Coonskin, just brimming with the makings of brilliant character animation, requires. (I actually first saw Bakshi when he arrived unannounced to introduce Coonskin. He left immediately after that, saying, “Nah, I don’t wanna fuckin’ see it.”)

Bakshi said he’s aware of his films’ rough edges and in some cases their badness. He seemed to almost relish critics taking him to task for it. The charge of “undisciplined” against Bakshi I’ve ready many times seems to be a bit unfounded when you apply it to any filmmaker. To fault Ralph Bakshi for a lack of discipline seems to miss the point of Ralph Bakhi – his films were always like him (unshaven and grungy) going back to the Terrytoons and Paramount shorts he directed in the 1960s. Critically and professionally irresponsible is another matter, and certainly applicable to a great many revered late twentieth century animators, Bakshi probably included. The criticism should not be entirely over the crass surfaces and execution of Bakshi’s films, but if there’s nothing beneath them. In many cases there almost certainly is, and, unfortunately, in many cases there absolutely isn’t.

Whether or not you like Bakshi’s films or the man himself, though, is irrelevant. He had an original point-of-view and he achieved what he set out to do: to make American animation outside the Disney ghetto acceptable to the public. In spite of its flaws, I still think Heavy Traffic may be the greatest animated feature ever made.

While writing Sick Little Monkeys, I came to the conclusion that a lot of what’s perceivable as Bakshi’s flaws is largely inherent to what animation is in general: “a subsection of humanity’s most uniquely talented and dysfunctional.” By default, it’s unrepairable. As Bakshi told the audience though, it’s just amazing at what one can do single-handedly in this age of technology, and there is no excuse to be tied to any one system with so many options available.

The Ottawa Festival itself is also largely reflective of this. The conglomerate waste, pretension, and frauds are never going to go away. Yet there is much inspiration to be found in its crevices. The way for anyone with an interest or career in animation to retain the little sanity they have left is to ignore everything else and just pursue that little inspiration as positive reinforcement. The medium is beyond mending, so let’s have fun if we can. I will certainly try returning to Ottawa just for that alone.

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Dicking Around

Dick Huemer has been on my mind a lot lately. It was springboarded by reading the wonderful tome from Classic Comics Press, The Adventures of Buck O’Rue, a complete labor of love by Dr. Richard Huemer (Huemer’s son) and Germund von Wowern. Anyone with an inkling interest in animation and comics history should not hesitate to buy this. (And buy it from CCP, not Amazon!)

Buck O’Rue didn’t even have a two year-run, but that’s because the strip never found its market, not because it was weak. Huemer’s writing is beyond charismatic and entertaining. The serio-comedy western reads like a smarter, more likable version of Al Capp’s Li’l Abner, with a hint of Walt Kelly’s Pogo for good measure. While not in that league, the strip is certainly worthy of any fan’s time.

Former Disney animator Paul Murry drew the strip. I’ve actually always hated Murry’s art for the Disney comic books. While he drew some decent stuff early on, it was his ugly, mushy, and wordy Mickey Mouse stories that were always shoved in my face in various reprints. It got under my skin and made my flesh crawl. Having read the Buck O’Rue book in its entirety, I think his career was completely wasted drawing Mickey – this is the kind of stuff he was born to draw. Creepy, gangly humans, buxom girls, and the occasional stupid animal. I am often claustrophobic looking at the compositions in Murry’s Disney art, but not here. Just fantastic cartooning.

No shittin', boys, this character's gonna make us MILLIONS.

From left to right, that’s Jack Carr, Sid Marcus, and Huemer with the ill-fated character Toby the Pup for RKO. Harry McCracken is obsesso over another creation all three men were involved with for Columbia Pictures: little boy Scrappy. His old site Scappyland is now a blog, and I urge you to go over and give it the once over. Not just for the priceless photos of useless Scrappy paraphernalia, but the absolute history on display.

I once derided this series when I was assembling a collection of every theatrical era cartoon I could get my hands on. Since then, I have come to love the ones done when Huemer was directing. The best Scrappys and Tobys (which would be all of the surviving ones I’ve seen) are the best and funniest of the pre-code sound era, outside of the Fleischers. As far as I know, only Harry and Steve Stanchfield may feel the same way.

Harry also reminded me that the 1968 and 1969 Dick Huemer oral history conducted by Joe Adamson is available in its entirety on the UCLA website. Save it to your harddrive while you can. This is essential reading. Huemer lived the history of animation and tells stories of the medium’s beginnings in New York to Disney in its Golden Age with great accuracy and personal detail. There’s also two great “Huemeresque” columns from Funnyworld available on Michael Barrier’s site: “Ted Sears” and “The Battle of Washington”.

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Yow!


For several years now, comics historian/writer Frank Young has been offering reams of prime material on his blog Stanley Stories free of charge. Now is your chance to show some genuine appreciation. Frank has put together a wonderful illustrated bibliography of John Stanley’s 1940s comic book work, which you can purchase for $2.99. Details at this link. This is an important piece of comic research, as no one has attempted to document, or at least chronicle, what Stanley did outside of the Little Lulu series. More to follow in the future, hopefully.

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