Category Archives: classic animation

by | March 22, 2014 · 5:08 pm

Mousekeeping

BookMouse-160Oh, yeah, hey.

I’d been meaning for some time to get around to reviewing Jim Korkis’s The Book of Mouse: A Celebration of Walt Disney’s Mickey Mouse, but if you’re like me, you’ve probably already gotten it. As is always the case with Jim’s books, it’s yet another fantastic resource for Disney history that makes even the most mundane trivia readable and entertaining. (My only caveat is that Jim didn’t go into detail about the other reason Riley Thomson’s unit was called the “Drunk Mickey Unit”; namely that its star players Fred Moore, Walt Kelly, and Ken Muse were all famous for their drinking.)

It’s one of several Korkis books published by Bob McLain’s Theme Park Press, a small-time player specializing in Disney history. You won’t find these lushly illustrated like those of Chronicle or Disney Publishing, but I think you’ll overcome the lack of pretty pictures once you dig into the books. McLain is also printing new installments of Didier Ghez’s important series Walt’s People. If you haven’t read the earliest volumes (shame on you), you can pick them up from Theme Park, as it’s reprinting the entirety of the series.

lifeMouseHouse-260I personally was anticipating Ghez’s assemblage of Homer Brightman’s memoir Life in the Mouse House: Memoir of a Disney Story Artist, and can heartily recommend a purchase of this breezy read. Brightman was a storyman at Disney’s from 1935 to 1950, where his most memorable creation was Gus-Gus the mouse in Cinderella, then a mainstay of the Walter Lantz studio.

Brightman’s name doesn’t exactly evoke most fans and historians’ interest for good reason: most of the cartoons he wrote stink. It’s difficult to discern his involvement in the Disney films given the highly collaborative nature of that studio’s storytelling (as Brightman reveals in keen detail), but it’s probably fair to assume he came up with a fair share of funny moments. While his gag sense was far better than the corn peddled by Ben Hardaway in the ’40s, the animation in the Lantz cartoons got too stiff to make much of a difference when Brightman was a writer there in the ’50s and ’60s.

Still, any firsthand memories of the medium’s Golden Age are to be highly cherished, and Brightman’s accounting (while neither as insightful as Shamus Culhane’s or acidic as Jack Kinney’s) is engaging enough that you’ll probably plow through this 100-pager in one evening. I grew a little annoyed with Brightman’s inflated self-importance, but that’s to be expected in a memoir (as if Carl Barks was as inept a storyteller as Brightman made him out to be). Brightman used pseudonyms for all of his coworkers and they are left intact as he wanted. They get in the way, but thankfully Ghez has included a key to who’s who.

Walt Disney was one of those mercurial personalities you couldn’t help observe sharply, and Brightman’s anecdotes ring true and his commentary is generally spot-on. The book has been oversold as “scathing,” as if it’s tantamount to the bile regularly exhibited in strikers’ interviews of the past or the psychopath Walt Peregoy’s taped talks of the present day. It’s revealing that despite receiving ostensibly brutal treatment, Brightman is able to write about Disney with fair admiration. The book abruptly ends when he leaves after Cinderella, with no mention of Walter Lantz (who easily valued Brightman considerably more than Disney did).

I was surprised when I brought up the subject of the filmed Brightman board pitches for “The Woody Woodpecker Show”, Didier said he had never seen them. So here is one embedded below, in which Brightman shows off part of the storyboard for Alex Lovy’s To Catch a Woodpecker. One anecdote not in the book is Walt Disney having a fit of laughter during a story session, and remarking to Brightman, “I’m not laughing at the story. I’m laughing at you.” As was often the case, he was right.

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Filed under classic animation, dead guys, people

by | November 22, 2013 · 9:17 am

Money’s Yoo-Hoo

You’ll want to direct yourself to Jerry Beck’s Cartoon Research site, where Mark Kausler has written an incisive analysis of the new 2D/CGI Mickey Mouse hybrid Get a Horse!, and specifically the comments from the short’s director Lauren MacMullan and head-of-2D-animation Eric Goldberg (and Mark’s response). While it’s orgasmic to see two of the world’s greatest animators arguing publicly about the shape of Mickey Mouse’s nose, the bigger problems have (understandably) fallen wayside.

I saw Get a Horse! earlier this week at the New York City Film Forum, where it was screened as part of its Mickey’s 85th Birthday Party retrospective (curated by Greg Ford). I don’t blame Mark for not retaining much of what he saw after only one viewing, because I couldn’t either. As I wrote in a comment on Mark’s review, the new cartoon is more reminiscent of the gimmicky Disney World rides (Muppet*Vision 3D comes immediately to mind), where you’re half expecting to get sprayed with water at any moment. The hand-drawn animation, which as Mark rightly states, is very good but more in this century’s mindset and literally hard to see (it all takes place on a movie screen-within-a-movie screen). For what it is, Get a Horse! is very enjoyable, but to hold out hope that Get a Horse! will usher in a new wave of traditional shorts is rather baffling.

The fact that the Kausler-Goldberg-MacMullan exchange immediately descended into a tantric discussion of whether Mickey’s face in the new cartoon more resembles that of The Barn Dance or The Mail Pilot underlies the bigger problem. MacMullan and Goldberg were perturbed by Mark’s comments that he viewed just the design as compromised, not the whole thing as compromised. MacMullan’s comment (“I was always being urged to have the plot spool along quicker than was normal for the era, and to have Mickey burst out of the 2d as early as possible, in case we lose the mainstream audience”) reveals the mindset at Disney’s: that because an audience can not be captivated by a traditional Mickey Mouse short on its own, it just had to have the CGI element, or else fear losing “the mainstream audience”.

That corporate theory was demonstrably false at the very screening I attended, where eleven Mickey Mouse cartoons (more than half of them made before 1934) preceded Get a Horse!, and every single one of them got a standing ovation (and often uproarious laughter) from the multigenerational audience. Get a Horse! got a rousing response, too, but I wonder how it will do in front of Frozen, when it doesn’t have the benefit of being in historical context (that is, the audience gets its point some 90 minutes of vintage Mickey later).

Mark certainly knows what he’s talking about more than anyone else on the subject of capturing early sound animation. His films It’s the Cat and There Must Be Some Other Cat are not mere throwbacks, but vessels embodying all that was invigorating and exciting about the medium getting retooled in the early 1930s. Much of that important work was done at Walt Disney’s studio, and that’s what makes some of Mark’s review sad to read. It’s as if he’s saying Get a Horse! is showing how much closer we are to getting 1928 quality in corporate Hollywood, and that alone is something to celebrate. But, geez, does anyone honestly believe this cartoon wasn’t made to solely pump money and attention into the original Mickey Mouse design just in time for when those cartoons’ copyright is set to finally expire? Gosh, what a racket like an old buzzsaw.

(Kudos to Milton Knight for the post’s title.)

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Filed under classic animation, modern animation

by | November 7, 2013 · 2:57 pm

What IS it about Thad, anyway?

A model sheet for Tex Avery’s WAGS TO RICHES. For probably the only time in animation history, why would you WANT to go off-model?


Good lord, has it really been five months since I last posted here?

I’m finding I have less interest in maintaining a blog on my own time and server, though I’ll still keep it up for posterity, and maybe post something every so often. I’ve relocated to New York City (well, really New Jersey) to continue my graduate studies, so I haven’t been idly passing time. I’ve also written several pieces for not only Jerry Beck’s revived Cartoon Research, but his Animation Scoop blog on Indiewire, as well as monthly column on Stefan Blitz’s Forces of Geek. I’ve learned, quickly, that if I’m going to devote time to, say, interviewing Tod Polson about his amazing book on Maurice Noble, reviewing a new oral history of the Nickelodeon cable network, or putting out a warning about the Blu-Ray releases of Fleischer and Disney animation (link coming soon), I want as many people as possible to read my work.

Ergo, collaborating with and writing for what I’ve come to consider “hub-sites” is the most sensible way to proceed, as I make no mistake that my humble personal site doesn’t attract many visitors. The death of the blog happened some time ago, as evidenced by the fact that all of wonderful blogs that began in 2006-07 related to animation have fallen to the wayside. I think this is directly related to the rise of social media and the growing, prominent OCD of our culture. If it’s not a couple of sentences directly communicated in a span of minutes, it isn’t worth the bother to read.

I have a number of different projects going on, most pertaining to the art of animation, like a revised and expanded edition of Sick Little Monkeys, and I hope to post updates in the coming months. In the meantime, that capstone project of mine is still very much worth reading in even its imperfect form, if the reviews are any indication.

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Filed under classic animation, Ren & Stimpy, TV

by | June 4, 2013 · 4:25 pm

An Anal-Retentive Analysis of Sahara Hare

I hope I don’t offend anyone by saying that I hardly think Friz Freleng’s Sahara Hare qualifies for status as one of the classics of American cinema. It was one of the last Freleng cartoons (if not the last) to go into production in 1953, before the studio suspended operation for a six-month hiatus, and it always felt like a half-empty short, as if Freleng and Warren Foster ran out of ideas and fizzed out. It starts off with high ambition and character-based pieces, bringing to mind the strongest of the earliest Bugs/Yosemite Sam entries, before it descends into arbitrary (albeit well-done) blackout gags. Freleng and Foster had gone to the well (oasis?) once too often with this formula and there was a visible drought.

I’ve seen this cartoon hundreds of times and as I recently revisited it via IB Tech film stock, I remembered that the Looney Tunes Golden Collection Vol. 4 presented a ‘storyboard reel’ for Sahara Hare. I’ve made frame captures of those board drawings and assembled them in [relative] sequential order. The set of board drawings (by Foster) was incomplete on the DVD set, so apologies for some jumps in the continuity. Even so, comparing these boards to the final product is very revealing of how well-crafted and executed even the lesser Warner shorts could be.

“Act 1”

A lot of this “act”, as boarded, is a little too expositional. Once it’s established the cartoon is taking place in Africa, the point that Bugs is completely lost doesn’t need to be belabored – just show that he is and get on with it. Even if that does mean lifting some old animation from Jones’s Frigid Hare, a quicker set-up is always more satisfying. Note the change in the opening signs from “Sandy Isn’t It?” to the far funnier “Keep Off the Grass”.

“Act 2”

Unfortunately, many of the drawings of the “WHOA!” bit lifted from Red Skelton are missing. While a fine cartoonist, Foster doesn’t seem to get that after some seven years the joke is that Bugs has a dangerous adversary in someone half his height. That’s okay, though, he was paid to write, and he did a fantastic job. Which is kind of why the cartoons then were so much better than they are now, when the writer and storyboard artist were the same person and focused on writing rather than making sure that every scene or drawing hooked up or staged a scene perfectly.

“Act 3”

The cartoon gets a little pedestrian at this point, but with these boards, you get a taste of how gifted Freleng’s direction was. The cannon gag, as boarded, isn’t nearly as funny as it is in the finished cartoon, where Freleng applied the “less is more” theory to great effect. Tbe build-up: Sam actively struggles to get the block of the fort out, only to find the cannon and struggle once more to get the block back in. The payoff: he still gets blasted, and we cut to a background by Irv Wyner of the damage done to the desert landscape.

Deleted Gag

This scene, dropped from the film, also feels a little belabored. Sam tries to blast open the fort, and Bugs blows a board onto the detonator. Huh? Then again, the board gag that did make it into the film, with Bugs splitting it and Sam in half with an axe, is one of the few off-putting moments in the Warner cartoon canon.

“Final Act”

This is a well-staged finish. It milks Sam’s eternal frustration for all its worth, and the marriage between Milt Franklyn’s music and the funny animation by by Art Davis is sublime. It should’ve irised out after the explosion, but I guess it required more footage, so we got stuck with the ending with Daffy that makes no sense.

Freleng and Foster (and Hawley Pratt) were among the only people kept on staff while the studio was on hiatus for half of 1953. Most of the old energy and zeal would vanish once the studio resumed normal operation, but a cartoon like Sahara Hare illustrates that the bloom had faded. But the cartoons were still funny, if not inventive.

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Filed under classic animation