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.
