The Screengrab : faith hubley

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

It's a Dog's Life: Emily Hubley's "The Toe Tactic"

Phil Nugent — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 17:00:00 GMT

For animator Emily Hubley, filmmaking is a real family tradition. Her parents were Faith and John Hubley, the legendary team of independent animators whose work goes back to the 1950s. Emily worked on a number of her parents' films (including the classic feature The Cosmic Eye) and has been directing her own short films since 1981, but The Toe Tactic, which was well-received at this year's SXSW, is both her first feature film and her first experience mixing animation with live action. "I felt a little bad because people were so weepy," she says now about the reaction in Austin. The audience response was gratifying, though: it comments afterwards were "just all about the healing properties of art and making art. It really was a gift that it wasn’t just empty kudos, that it was really infused with people’s intense personal responses.” Now Hubley, a New York kid who lives in New Jersey, is bringing her act home: The Toe Tactic will have its Manhattan premiere on March 29 as part of the annual New Directors/New Films series.

The movie, which deals with its heroine's attempts to come to terms with the death of her father, features a "quintet of animated, shape-shifting dogs [that] recite poems and serve as a kind of Greek chorus for Mona." Maybe the biggest surprise about the movie is that the animation wasn't part of Hubley's original concept; she set out to make a live-action feature, but the dogs, which she and animator Jeremiah Dickey hand-drew, "nosed their way into the rest of the story...Poetry is one thing that is very hard to put into movies," she says, and "I just thought that the only way to keep it fun, or keep people from glazing over, or I guess to keep it from being too self-loving, would be turning it into something else completely.” In keeping with the family business, she brought in Ray Hubley, her brother, as editor, and hit on Yo La Tengo, which includes her sister Georgia, to provide the score. “This project could never have been turned into some kind of big-budget movie," says Hubley. "No one would want to or be able to turn it into a plastic product. It’s just a living, breathing thing.”

SXSW Review: "The Toe Tactic"

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 14:45:00 GMT

Emily Hubley comes from a family of legendary animators (her mother, Faith, is one of the medium's greats), and her reputation as a filmmaker rests on her clever and amusing animations, so it was difficult to know what to expect going into her new feature, The Toe Tactic. Although it contains a number of animated sequences, the bulk of the film is live-action, and viewers are faced with the uncertainty of seeing a filmmaker work in an unfamiliar medium as well as the notoriously finicky process of blending live actors with animations. Happily, The Toe Tactic succeeds far more than it stumbles, and while it's not without its difficulties, its relentless good nature and some exceptionally keen performances outweigh them in the end.

A semi-formalist meditation on the role of game-playing and ritual in our emotional lives, The Toe Tactic follows a few magical days in the life of Mona, a young woman who is unable to get past the death of her father in a car crash. In the film's longest animated sequences, a quartet of intelligent, extradimensional canines play a complicated card game, the results of which are to make major changes in Mona's life and allow her the possibility of transformation and redemption. There are also subplots that deal with Mona's new temp job working for a mysterious old woman, her flirtation with a singing elevator operator, and a young boy's attempt to take piano lessons as a gift to his mother. This all makes it sound more complicated than what it really is: a meditation on the healing power of art and the capacity for life to present you with little moments of epiphany.

The Toe Tactic isn't a perfect film by any means. Its live sequences aren't shot with as sharp an eye as its animated ones are drawn; David Cross' performance (as one of the game-playing dogs) grates; and the film presents us with far too many scenes involving people reacting with awed smiles to the wonder of the human pageant. But there are many moments, including the ending, that make us feel pretty awed and wonderful ourselves. The animation is engaging — less so for the game-playing sequences than for the little incidental bits where everyday objects are transformed — and the script presents us with many moments of genuine emotion and flat-out comedy. The music (provided by Yo La Tengo, the legendary indie-rock band of which Hubley's sister Georgia is a member) is fantastic, perfectly counterpointing the mood in every scene. And best of all, Hubley is able to coax some tremendous performances out of her actors; the Bronx-born indie fixture Kevin Corrigan, as an awkward piano teacher, is downright stunning. Mona is played by Lily Rabe (daughter of playwright David Rabe and actress Jill Clayburgh), and she's a real find: fresh, engaging and remarkably charismatic. Hopefully, its largely live-action format will get The Toe Tactic wider distribution than the animation circuit on which Emily Hubley's work usually appears; it deserves a chance to find an audience.