What About Thad?

I don’t want to turn this into the all about the Three Stooges movie abomination blog, but come on, guys, if you’re gonna do it, at least give one role to Billy West, the guy who was born to ‘play’ Larry Fine.

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If you like even further wasting your time on the Internet, please join the Intellitoons Forum started by Tom and I. We felt there was a necessity for an unfiltered cartoon message board in this wasteland, so you can pretty much say and do whatever you want here (except rip people off in our “For Sale” section).

http://s1.zetaboards.com/Intellitoons_Forum/index/

It’s nice to know some people have money to waste in this recession with things like this.

The idea that reusing footage/animation can be a sign of creative laziness offends a great number of people. In most cases it is not, and a common and accepted practice when money and time are a factor. But with two directors, reuse seems to be a creative decision, and it happens with the favorite films of the most savage subsets of animation fans.

One is of course the later Disney fans, who are aghast that anyone could call the animation in the Woolie Reitherman directed features anything short of brilliant. Reitherman was a great animator, sure, but he sure as hell wasn’t that good of a director, and budgets had nothing to do with the blatant recycling of animation (not to mention character designs) from earlier films. When any of the old timers I know tell me of their days at Disney’s during this era, it’s always about how it was the most comfortable work environment they ever worked in. So I can’t see how the blame of the film’s failures (and there are many, many) can be passed elsewhere when it’s plain that it’s primarily the fault of who’s credited as director.

The other hostile subset is of course the Bob Clampett clan, which functions like just about any church in the southern United States: point out one flaw in Bob’s cartoons, and you’re a Son of Sodom, trying to destabilize the natural order.

Going over the studio’s filmography, Clampett was primarily the only director at Warners to reuse animation on a regular basis. (Only Friz Freleng surpasses him in reuses, which to be expected given that most of them happened when Freleng was directing in the early 30s, when it was a common practice at all studios to reuse animation to save money in the Depression.) One common fact shared in a lot of the Warner animator interviews is that Clampett was always a cartoon or two behind for the studio. Keeping that in mind, it wasn’t laziness, just hacking out to play catch-up. If budget was the villain, the other directors would have reused as often too.

There didn’t seem to be a scene in the Warner catalog that Clampett couldn’t reuse, whether it be redrawing a big-lipped Stepin Fetchit as Elmer Fudd, tracing over a Harman-Ising fowl couple with Daffy and his wife, or just dropping in badly traced footage from one of Freleng’s late 30s pictures without caring about continuity (about the most polar opposite cartoon you can think of compared with Bob Clampett).

In his defense, sloppy reuse and editing aside, Clampett’s cartoons are some of the funniest, most beautifully animated, and just plain best ones anywhere. Then again, you can say that for just about any of the directors. Without the sloppy reuse and editing.

And spare the argument that these weren’t meant to be looked at like this, that general audiences wouldn’t be looking for these kinds of things. If we were just average joe’s, we wouldn’t be talking about these cartoons on the Internet. It seems technical analysis of these things is only welcome when it’s positive.

Just got in a copyright synopsis of the Tex Avery short Dumb-Hounded from David Gerstein. Fortunately the MGM copyright synopses are the most detailed of all the studios. No other’s synopses have scene by scene descriptions like this, so it’s easy to notice changes made in the reissues, like the wartime references that were originally in the newspaper headline, or how “Runnin’ Wild” played over the credits.

“Make your own film.” This is my favorite quote ever, because it comes up so often in the Internet age, when people get venomous over whenever their own film or a film they like is criticized. We got taught in theater class that this is usually the response from people who either make films that regularly get poor reviews, or from those who work on such bad films that even mediocre ones (older or current) seem like Godsends. So yeah, I guess if I worked on whatever’s running on Cartoon Network right now, I’d be in awe of a waste of film like Disney’s Robin Hood (the film Hanna-Barbera would have made if they got the Disney staff on loan for a year) too. If you know what I’m talking about, good. If you don’t, disregard this. Rant over and out.

Watching the great Chuck Jones short 8 Ball Bunny for the umpteenth time on film, I noticed something I hadn’t before: that in the wonderful Ken Harris scene of Calypso Bugs, when it cuts to the penguin building the boat, we still see Bugs in the background as an animated silhouette. Can anyone think of other scenes like this where a silhouette is actually animated, but is not the focus of the shot?

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This is another example of Jones and his unit at the height of their powers. The scene is made even funnier by how Bugs seems utterly offended by Bogart having the audacity to interrupt his song in this filler exposition scene, and then immediately resuming his deadpan expression.

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…)

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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).