The Screengrab : animation

Cartoon Fever: The World’s Greatest Animated Shorts (Part Five)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 22:00:00 GMT

ONE OF THOSE DAYS (1988)

With his distinctive squiggly style and surreal, only-in-animation humor, Bill Plympton’s prolific output is so consistently good it’s hard to pick just one representative sample. This being a shorts list, it’s easy enough to eliminate his features (even really short ones like his musical, The Tune, which comes in at a trim 69 minutes and features the insanely catchy "In Flooby Nooby."). After that, though, it gets tricky: should I highlight his 1987 Oscar-nominated short, Your Face, MTV/animation festival faves like How To Kiss or 25 Ways To Quit Smoking or one of his videos for the likes of Kanye West and “Weird Al” Yankovic? Ultimately, I picked One of Those Days simply because it was the most representative stand-alone Plymptoon I could find on YouTube (though it's also included, along with the other three aforementioned shorts, in Mondo Plympton, which compiles nine of the animator’s finest squiggly moments for your own private Plymptopalooza).

SUSPICIOUS CIRCUMSTANCES (1984)

Jim Blashfield has the style of an exploding junk shop, with every bit of detritus somehow landing in just the right place. After applying that style to other films and a number of music videos, this story of a man who got a little too curious about the world hiding inside the dark corners of our world remains his masterpiece. But we're confident that someone will be calling him any minute now with an offer to finance the film version of The Crying of Lot 49 that we know he's got in him.

THE TENDER GAME (1958)

The history of animation has a number of brother acts -- the Disneys, the Fleischers, the Quays -- but the Hubleys probably have a hammerlock on the title of First Family of American Animation. John used to work for the big boys: he labored at Disney Studios (where his credits include the "Rite of Spring" episode in Fantasia) until he left over ill feelings stemming from the infamous animators' strike of 1941, after which he created Mr. Magoo for UPA. Hubley was driven out of the majors after running afoul of the House Un-American Activities Committee -- what were they expecting him to do, name Foghorn Leghorn as a Trotskyite? -- and began turning out a long stream of gorgeously imaginative animated shorts with his wife, Faith. The Tender Game is a high point and a representative example of their taste for stylized, childlike imagery, music and narration that seems to have sidled in from the nearest beatnik coffee house. After John's death in 1977 -- their last collaboration was the 1977 Doonesbury Special for TV -- Faith worked for many years to turn out the career-apotheosis feature The Cosmic Eye, on which her daughter, Emily, served as associate producer. Emily's first feature, a mixture of live action and animation called The Toe Tactic. premiered on the festival circuit earlier this year.

THANK YOU MASK MAN (1971)

All his life, Lenny Bruce desperately wanted to get into the movies, but the only thing that he had in common with the people who ran the studios in his day was that neither they nor he could ever quite figure out how to use Lenny Bruce in a movie. Lenny's own attempts to star himself in an independent production, such as the infamous Dance Hall Racket (directed by Phil Tucker, the guy whose Robot Monster gave us the indelible image of a guy wearing a gorilla suit with a diver's helmet), never got beyond the camp embarrassment stage, and even the feature length filmed concert (reduced as The Lenny Bruce Performance Film) wasn't made until Bruce was so far gone into his obsession with his own legal case to be very funny. It wasn't until after Bruce's death that the director John Magnuson managed to pull together this animated version of one of Bruce's greatest stand-up fantasies (about the Lone Ranger), which he may have done as penance for directing the Performance Film. That movie often played the midnight circuit in tandem with this cartoon (whose ratty-looking animation is perfectly in sync with Bruce's grungy-minded satire). It was a useful pairing: the live action feature showed Bruce as a broken man, and the cartoon revealed just what had been lost in the breaking.

VINCENT (1982)

Tim Burton conceived and co-directed (with Rick Heinrichs) this uncannily beautiful example of his pop-Gothic style, captured in black and white stop-motion animation. (It was made at a time when Burton, not yet a live-action director, was laboring in the animation department at Disney, where he managed to do little but confuse his employers.) Whatever you think of Burton's later work, it's hard to argue that he didn't nail most of what he had to give in these six and a half minutes. And he made Vincent Price, who had the honor of narrating this tribute to himself, a very happy man.

WHEN THE DAY BREAKS (1999)

Wendy Tilby wrote this strange, beautiful cartoon about a pig who experiences a memento mori when she witnesses the death of a chicken while out shopping for groceries. It was directed by Tilby and Amanda Forbis. No description can really do full justice to its striking look and emotional impact, which is a testament to just how good and just how unearthly good animation can be.

Click Here For Part One, Part Two, Part Three & Part Four

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent

Cartoon Fever: The World’s Greatest Animated Shorts (Part Four)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 21:30:00 GMT

A CHARLIE BROWN CHRISTMAS (1965)

There's been plenty of fine animated entertainment on television over the years (Ren & Stimpy, The Simpsons, South Park, King of the Hill, The Grinch What Stole Christmas, Davey & Goliath, etc.), though for our purposes here today (and with the exception of shorts that later became TV staples, like "Duck Amuck"), this list mainly celebrates more festival-friendly fare. And yet, a celebration of classic cartoons without A Charlie Brown Christmas just seems downright un-American somehow, considering how deeply the characters, dialogue, plot and Vince Guaraldi score have embedded themselves in our collective national sense of childhood and the holiday spirit...though not deep enough, sadly, to shift the overall landscape of "family-friendly" animation from blaring, consumerist junk food to the quiet, thoughtful humanity of writer Charles Schulz and director Bill Meléndez's depiction of what even the most cynical among us would have to admit ain't such a bad little tree.

LUPO THE BUTCHER (1987)

In the last twenty years or so, gross-out cartoons have become a staple of animation festivals. With Lupo the Butcher, Danny Antonucci managed to get in on the ground floor of what would quickly become a growth industry and a played-out sub-genre. Antonucci has said that Lupo's bloody slapstick and cussword-plastered soundtrack were powered by his own career frustrations: he made the film over the course of a couple of years while supporting himself by working on shitty children's animation. Lupo is a creature of pure, self-destructive rage, a nightmare image of man's inability to use his anger to do anything but drive himself further into the ground like a tent spike. The world being what it is, the character was quickly licensed to appear in commercials for Converse shoes and MTV bumpers. Antonucci went on to create the Ed, Edd n Eddy series for the Cartoon Network.

MECHANICAL MONSTERS (1941)

Superheroes do go back a ways in the movies. The series of Superman cartoons produced by the Fleischer brothers and directed by Dave Fleischer remain little pieces of pop art gold, with a clean, stripped-down graphic style that was an obvious influence on the superb work done on Batman: The Animated Series and its Superman and Justice League spin-offs. There have been other good superhero movies since, but these remain the template.

MINNIE THE MOOCHER (1932)

This constantly morphing, surreal, spooky short spotlights the Fleischer brothers' goofball side as flamboyantly as anything they ever did. It also brings together, for the first time, their two great totemic Jazz Age figures: Betty Boop and Cab Calloway. Quick: which one's the cartoon?

MUNRO (1961)

The inspiring story of a four-year-old drafted into this man's army, Munro is a tiny example of how easily perfection can be achieved by just hooking up the right people and turning them loose on the right material. This faithful adaptation of a Jules Feiffer comic strip is the best movie work by the illustrator-animator Gene Deitch, today perhaps best remembered as the father of underground-comics legend Kim Deitch, and his sometime collaborator, Simon Deitch. Also holding his end up: Your Show of Shows alum Howard Morris, whose voice-over work here could have thrown a good scare into Mel Blanc.

RYAN (2004)

Chris Landreth's uncanny masterpiece is a profile of Ryan Larkin, a Canadian hippie animator who had a great success with his 1969 short film Walking but quickly slid into non-productivity and alcoholism. Landreth's film, which incorporates actual tapes of his conversations with the ruined but still mostly affable Larkin (who becomes nasty only when he thinks that Landreth is suggesting that he stop drinking and pull himself together), is a layered, sympathetic portrait of someone Landreth clearly admires for his talent and at the same a troubling act of self-criticism from an artist who isn't sure that he isn't exploiting another human being. It's also a stunning demonstration of how much the animator's art can matter.

Click Here for Part One, Part Two, Part Three & Part Five

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent

Cartoon Fever: The World’s Greatest Animated Shorts (Part Three)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 21:00:00 GMT

QUASI AT THE QUACKADERO (1975)

I can't say for certain whether or not I first encountered the work of Sally Cruikshank in general (or Quasi at the Quackadero in particular) on the USA Network's 1980s stoner staple Night Flight, but either way, I'm pretty sure I wasn't entirely in a legal frame of mind at the time. Not that psychedelic substances are required to appreciate Quasi's dreamy, stream-of-consciousness groove: Cruikshank's anarchic style is a mind-altering substance all by itself, a subterranean version of the (relatively) clean, orderly mainstream Disney/Looney Tune style of animation with all the color, personality, wisecracking animals and fairy tale fancy reflected in a funhouse mirror of surrealistic Id.

NEIGHBOURS (1952)

You wouldn’t get very far in a discussion of great animated shorts without mentioning the National Film Board of Canada. Since 1941, the NFB has supported and funded important and groundbreaking works from some of Canada’s most important animators, beginning with the great Norman McLaren. McLaren experimented with a number of animation techniques throughout his career including pixellation and even scratching and painting on the film stock itself. But today, his most famous work is Neighbours, a hybrid of stop motion animation and live action photography. The film -- an allegory for the Cold War -- finds McLaren using his human subjects not as actors, but as mannequins to be literally manipulated in the service of his story (somewhere, Robert Bresson must have swooned). Stylistically playful yet thematically serious, Neighbours became one of the most feted animated shorts of its day, yet it’s a testament to its topicality that it ended up taking home not the Best Animated Short Oscar, but rather the Academy Award for Best Documentary Short Subject.

MIRACLE OF FLIGHT (1974)

Terry Gilliam made this five minute film after the original Monty Python's Flying Circus TV series had completed its final season but before Python caught on in the United States, a development that, along with the success of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, made it clear that the troupe would remain a going concern for years to come. Gilliam would later develop his own voice as a live-action filmmaker, but this cartoon is basically a stray Python skit that's developed at greater length than most of the animated bits that Gilliam contributed to the TV shows. Not that there's a goddamn thing wrong with that.

CREATURE COMFORTS (1989)

Nick Park, the co-founder of Aardman Animation (and the creator of Wallace and Gromit) had a weirdly accomplished triumph with this award-winning short, which attaches the thoughts expressed by man-on-the-street interview subjects to animals doing time in a zoo. The success of the film led to a series of TV commercials in a similar style and then, in 2003, to a brilliant TV series that ran for two seasons in Britain. (CBS commissioned an American version for a summer series last year but pulled the plug after broadcasting three of seven completed episodes.)

THE CRITIC (1963)

Pauline Kael once wrote that "the best way" that Mel Brooks "could be employed on any movie" would be for him to "hang around on a cloud" during shooting, "with permission to replace any actor at any point." Nice image, Pauline, but Ernest Pintoff trumped you when he made this parody of an arty animated short, and then put the icing on the gravy by asking Brooks to assume the persona of an old Jewish man -- this was back when Brooks was still a young Jewish man -- and record this worthy's baffled responses to what the hell his eyeballs were being subjected to as punishment for having dared to venture into a movie theater with an expectation of being entertained. It's too bad that Brooks doesn't still have a way of getting in touch with that cranky old guy; we'd love to sit next to him at Young Frankenstein on Broadway.

FRANK FILM (1973)

Frank Mouris wrote, directed, edited, and narrates this autobiographical collage, which aims to sum up the artist's life as best he can through nine minutes of words and images. Mouris talks about his experiences and impressions on the soundtrack while pictures of things important or just pleasing to him crowd onto the frame. The total effect is of an amazingly cool, elegant fever dream.

Click Here for Part One, Part Two, Part Four & Part Five

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Paul Clark, Phil Nugent

Cartoon Fever: The World's Greatest Animated Shorts (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Last week, it seemed like a good idea to salute The Top 20 Animated Feature Films of all time, which opened a Pandora’s Box of possibilities for this week’s obvious follow-up list: the Greatest Animated SHORTS of all time.

And by “short,” of course, we mean anything from seconds to approximately 40 minutes, which is the length of time when (according to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences) a movie officially becomes a feature (which, I suppose, means 1999’s 75-minute Pokémon: The First Movie wasn’t technically a rip-off).

Anyway, as your post host, I should note that most of this week’s Jumbo Shorts list is the work of Screengrabbers Paul Clark and Phil Nugent, who both clearly have a severe case of Cartoon Fever. The condition is highly contagious and not even Acme has a cure, so don’t say we didn’t warn you!

GERTIE THE DINOSAUR (1914)

This film by Winsor McKay, the creator of the comic strip Little Nemo in Slumberland, is sometimes called the first animated short; it isn't, but it may have been the first to demonstrate that an artist with as much skill and imagination as McKay could create a personable animated character that would charm and captivate audiences as well as any live actor. You can see McKay at the start of the film, and that's supposed to be him talking to Gertie in the intertitles: this is the film version of a live vaudeville act he originally did in which he appeared on stage and played ringmaster to Gertie as the film was projected on a screen behind him.

BAMBI MEETS GODZILLA (1969) and ANIJAM (1984)

Marv Newland was a mere stripling of an animation student when he created Bambi Meets Godzilla, an instant midnight classic and, at a minute and a half in length, one of the all-time great one-joke movies. Fifteen years later, Newland had founded the animation production house International Rocketship Ltd. and used his name and contacts to get twenty-two different filmmakers to contribute their talents to Anijam. The animated equivalent of a comics artists' jam or a game of Exquisite Corpse, the film starred a Newland character called Foska; each animator was given the last frame of the sequence created by whichever animator had preceded him (without knowing anything else about what action had come before or would follow), and the requirement that whatever he did with his thirty seconds of film would end with Foska on-screen; aside from those stipulations, they were allowed to go nuts. The results are a ten-minute film festival that serves as a record of what animators around the world were doing at one fertile moment in the history of their art form.

DUCK AMUCK (1953)

In making this list, we might have selected one of any number of Chuck Jones classics. But honestly, Duck Amuck seems the only suitable choice here. For one thing, it’s funny as all get out, with some of Daffy Duck’s best moments. But what makes it stand out from the rest is the way it carries the self-referentiality that’s present in many of Jones’ Looney Tunes shorts to brilliant extremes. From almost the very beginning, the Warner Bros. animators positioned themselves as the irreverent alternative to the Disney juggernaut. And cartoons like Duck Amuck are the reason why: instead of bowling the audience over with virtuoso artistry and emotional appeal, they won our hearts with wit and no small amount of mischief. And nowhere is this more evident than Duck Amuck, which doesn’t simply break the fourth wall, but has the fourth wall reach out and exact brutally funny revenge on the star.

REJECTED (2000)

Nearly half a century after Duck Amuck, big-budget animation has become more popular than ever, with the style perfected by Uncle Walt remaining the dominant formula. But on the fringes of the medium, there are a number of independent animators keeping the old Chuck Jones spirit alive, and foremost among them is Don Hertzfeldt. Combining absurdist humor, low-fi doodles, and occasionally profound insights, Hertzfeldt (still only 32 years old) has amassed a sizable and extremely vocal cult following. Some of us (okay, it was Paul) proposed the idea of including Hertzfeldt’s most recent masterpiece Everything Will Be OK on this list, but we couldn’t bring ourselves to snub Rejected, the film that remains the animator’s most popular and even garnered him an Oscar nomination, quite possibly the coolest move the Academy has made this century. In a way, it’s Duck Amuck in reverse -- whereas Jones’ film was predicated on the idea of the animator subjecting the cartoon to his every whim, Rejected is about the animator losing all control of his creation. Only it’s way funnier than that. Don’t believe us? Once you’ve seen it, we defy you to watch a baby uneasily walk around without thinking of the convulsively hilarious fate that awaits the tyke in Rejected.

STREET OF CROCODILES (1986)

The accepted masterpiece by stop-motion masters the Brothers Quay takes on the task of adapting Bruno Schulz's unadaptable, surreal writing to the screen, pulls it off, and then keeps going until it turns into its own special, unclassifiable thing. To say that it helped create the look we associate with cyberpunk would be to reduce it to a mere style; it'll still be alive and kicking when the hundreds (thousands?) of music videos and TV commercials and God knows what else that have plundered it for its looks have been reduced to period pieces and covered with dust.

Click Here For Part Two, Part Three, Part Four & Part Five

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent, Paul Clark

Trailer Review: WALL*E

John Constantine — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 22:15:00 GMT

As buzz has had it for over a decade now, Pixar really is the true successor to the Disney animated feature dynasty. They’re fast approaching their silver anniversary as the most critically and commercially adored animation studio in the Western world. With the exception of A Bug’s Life — which is pretty standard kiddie-picture fluff despite being beautiful — their reputation is flawless. From the look of this trailer for WALL*E, Andrew Stanton’s directorial follow-up to Finding Nemo, it looks like Pixar’s poised to make their most exciting work yet. It isn’t that their quirky subjects du jour are mechanical, that territory having already been covered by Cars. It’s that it looks like the movie is going to be largely devoid of dialogue. The studio’s no stranger to silent animation but this would be their first full length feature to forego an imminently quotable script voiced by recognizable celebs. Ballsy stuff. Color us excited.

You can check out Empire’s exclusive trailer here.