Category Archives: classic animation

Life with Feathers is an important cartoon for another reason other than it was the first cartoon with Sylvester. I corresponded with Mike Barrier over when exactly Hawley Pratt began working as Friz Freleng’s layout artist, and this is what he had to say:

Owen [Fitzgerald] said that his last work for Freleng was in early ’44, on a cartoon that was almost certainly Life With Feathers (which he misremembered, understandably, as the first Sylvester and Tweety); Owen said that Pratt took over for him on that cartoon. Pratt’s next work for Freleng was probably Hare Trigger; Freleng told me twice that that was the first cartoon Pratt laid out for him, and it was the next Freleng cartoon after Life With Feathers on the release schedule. Holiday for Shoestrings has an earlier production number, and a Pratt credit, but it was released almost a year after Hare Trigger.

Pratt was an assistant animator at Disney, moved over to Warners as an inbetweener and then an assistant (to [Dick] Bickenbach) after the strike, until he became Freleng’s layout man.

People take for granted how Freleng turned out so many black comedies on a regular basis. He may have done more than Jones if we’re going by how many involve a character’s life-at-stake being played for laughs. This is by far the funniest cartoon turned out by the studio that year, and that’s not a small accomplishment. So much worthier of the Oscar than yet another standard Tom & Jerry. How many other times was an iconic character completely nailed (in design, voice, characterization, whatever) on the first go? (Well, other than the other iconic Freleng character established in 1945…)

[dailymotion id=x3li1j]

Judging by the comments over the ones Jerry Beck has posted over on Cartoon Brew lately, it seems that a lot of people take offense to these asshole wife/dweeb husband cartoons. I say the hell with ’em.

I am glad I didn’t say that the new Pinocchio release was perfect, just that it had accurate colors. DVNR is present on the new DVD, and while it’s not nearly as bad as the recent mutilation of Sleeping Beauty, it seems to be worst when the camera is moving (rather than when the characters do), as with this shot of the Coachman. I wonder if Disney has begun using DVNR (as they almost never have in the past) because it makes the image clearer for Blu-Ray. We should hope not.

Bill Tytla’s animation of Stromboli in this film is a marvel to look at. Every drawing carries an enormous amount of power. Tytla’s wonderful use of distortion to portray emotion here greatly foreshadows Rod Scribner’s work for Bob Clampett at Warners. But as Mark Mayerson said awhile ago, you can read Stromboli like a book; there’s no layers to this character. He’s just a psycho gypsy-fuck. It’s not as big a problem as it could have been, seeing how little screen time Stromboli has but I can’t help but feel Walt wasted his greatest animator in some ways. It’s a problem I have with just about all of the characters in Pinocchio, and also (to carry on with distortion) when watching too many of Clampett’s cartoons in one sitting too; too many generic, shallow characters, rather than multi-layered ones with real mental problems as in the very best ones. To make a food analogy, it’s too much frosting and not enough cake. These scenes of Stromboli are very broad and funny pieces of animation, but if you want to see Tytla putting most of these same rules into action with a multi-layered character, go back a few years to Grumpy.

I made a montage of Tytla’s animation of Stromboli: the scene where he has a shit fit over finding a single washer in the money he’s panhandled. Be forewarned: it’s about 4MB.

I also want to address a recent post over at Cartoon Brew, since it’s related to Tytla; the one erroneously attributing a piece of Little Audrey animation to Tytla. While it’s clear that this was just an innocent assumption made public (and that the actual Tytla drawing of Audrey looks nothing like the animation), some of the comments need to be addressed.

I’ve corresponded with Bob Jaques about it, and he recalled how he asked John Gentilella about Tytla; while he helped the animators and did an occasional drawing, Tytla never actually animated at Famous Studios. Something like this tells what I’ve known for years: that the credited “director” on the Famous shorts never really did any actual directing, they just supervised the voice recordings and the overall production. I’d be amazed if Kneitel or Sparber did a single drawing during their long careers at the studio.

This is the price we’re paying for years of Golden Age historians snubbing anything that came out of New York after the Fleischers left: this stuff wasn’t written down and recorded. Getting misty-eyed over anything spawned out of Disney and Warners, huge gaping holes with other studios’ histories were left in their wake. All people like me, who would have seen that it got recorded (and only haven’t because the artists are too dead to interview), have to go on are sparse interviews and anecdotes. I wonder how shallow art history in general would be if biases shaped how it was written.

It’s hard to believe it, but the Disney Empire is issuing one of their classic animated films with the correct colors, judging by the images posted at DVD Beaver. Pinocchio is a film I like less every time I see it, but the one time I did absolutely love it was seeing it in Technicolor at a collector friend’s place a few years ago. One of the many filmmaking arts that has been lost to the ages is using color to its full advantage. The colors in the Disney films of the 1940s and 1950s were all carefully planned to help carry the mood of the picture, so seeing a faded Eastman or maligned DVD of one of these things kills most of the effect.

There is of course going to be some disparity between an IB print and the new DVD (I for one don’t think anything digital comes even close to a projected print), but from what it looks like, this will be the first accurate release of Pinocchio in home video history. Hopefully Fantasia is next (a film I absolutely refuse to watch the DVD of seeing as it’s completely ruined).

I don’t think whoever put this together missed many Leghornisms. It’s sort of depressing to watch them all jumbled together like this because you see random flashes of McKimson’s director rot.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-LCsiWL6gn0&hl=en&fs=1]

Actually, whoever made it did… No scenes from the seldom-talked of classic from Bob McKimson’s later days, Banty Raids. Though most of its enjoyment comes from the poon-crazed beatnik’s antics than anything Foggy does. (Not to mention a Bill Lava score that actually (surprisingly) works well in a Warner cartoon.)

[dailymotion id=x16j0q]