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

Forgotten Films: "Suspicious Circumstances" (1984) and "Face Like a Frog" (1987)

Phil Nugent — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 19:00:00 GMT

In recent weeks, packages of the short films nominated in the twin categories of Academy Awards (Best Live Action Short and Best Animated Short) devoted to such work have had some play in a few major movie markets, just as they do every year. Because of the hook that an Academy Award nomination provides, Oscar season is one of the rare times when short films can get any attention from theatrical distributors and theater programmers. Now, thanks to DVD and the Internet and such specialty cable channels as IFC and the Sundance Channel, things are a little better for makers of short films than they used to be; if a short gets a lot of attention on the festival circuit, it may turn up on TV, often jammed together with an hour's worth of other shorts and used to plug a hole in the schedule. Or if a director breaks into features and develops a name, his or her early shorts may be recycled as "bonus features" on the DVD of a bigger movie, as Lynne Ramsay's early shorts are used in the Criterion Collection DVD for her debut feature Ratcatcher. At least it's a way to keep the films alive and in circulation. Other short filmmakers — those who don't "graduate" to features, maybe because their talents are more naturally suited to the short form — may get a lot of attention for awhile and then slip through the cracks. This may be especially true in the case of independent animators, who have to work long and hard to produce a ten-minute masterpiece, and who lost a means of getting their work seen when such annual showcases as the Tournee of Animation began drying up several years ago.

Jim Blashfield's Suspicious Circumstances, which was made in 1984 and barnstormed the country via cable TV and animation festivals in the mid-to-late '80s, is a remarkable specimen of homegrown, handmade American surrealism. The film has its own xerox-stop-motion look, which is less startling now only because Blashfield capitalized on the attention he got from the movie by accepting jobs to apply the same style to music videos for Talking Heads ("And She Was"), Joni Mitchell ("Good Friends"), Michael Jackson ("Leave Me Alone"), Paul Simon ("Boy in the Bubble"), and many others. Blashfield has a new short film, Bunnyheads, which, according to his website, is "currently infesting film festivals internationally."

Sally Cruikshank's work goes back to the seventies, when she made her classic Quasi at the Quackadero, but like Blashfield, she experienced a bump of attention in the 1980s, when she made the throbbing, mutating Face Like a Frog. It's a choice example of Cruikshank's style, which is more devoted to outright cartoonishness than many independent animators of her generation, but which has a slightly sinister, contemporary edge to it; trying to recapture the anything-goes spirit of early animated cartoons, she makes films that sometimes suggest what it might have been like if the Fleischer brothers had experienced an acid flashback. (Cruikshank worked on "It's a Good Life", the Joe Dante-directed segment of the 1983 Twilight Zone — The Movie.) Cruikshank suffered a career setback when she lost her funding for an attempt to complete a feature, but like Blashfield, she offers some of her films on DVD for sale at her website.

The Screengrab : jim blashfield

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

Forgotten Films: "Suspicious Circumstances" (1984) and "Face Like a Frog" (1987)