Phyllis and I will leave this weekend on a long driving trip to points north and east, to places animation- and comics-related or, more often, not. I don't expect to resume posting until sometime in August. Thanks partly to my difficulties in dealing with my site's migration to a new server, I'm leaving a good bit of unfinished business behind. I have a long list of essays, interviews, photos, and such that I want to post, for my own enjoyment as well as to fulfill promises. Jenny, I will post that piece on Chuck Jones's involvement with Disney's Sleeping Beauty, and Thad, I will post the rest of those Song of the South drafts. Just not yet.
Egghead and Elmer. Here, though, is one bit of unfinished business I can sort of finish. Last March, I remarked that Elmer Fudd was not a modified version of his fellow Warner Bros. character Egghead, but that the two characters were always distinct. That was evidenced, I noted in Hollywood Cartoons: American Animation in Its Golden Age, by Elmer's being identified in a Warner publicity sheet for Cinderella Meets Fella (filed with the Library of Congress as a copyright description) as "Egghead's brother." Someone wanted to see that sheet, and I actually intended for a time to reproduce it along with a brief history of the two characters. But I haven't written that brief history, so here, for the record, is that publicity sheet:
(Although I refer to this sheet as a "press release" in an endnote in Hollywood Cartoons, it's not that, since it's directed at exhibitors rather than the press.)
The Egghead-Elmer story is actually a little messy, my sense being that most of the people involved, whether they were making the films or publicizing them, not only had trouble telling the characters apart but had no idea why they should bother trying. But that's a story for another day.
Benzon on Sita. I've spoken very highly of Nina Paley's Sita Sings the Blues, but I haven't gotten around to writing a full-scale review of it. Now I really don't need to, since Bill Benzon has said most of what needs to be said about that excellent film in an outstanding piece on The Valve. Once again: if you haven't yet bought Paley's DVD, you owe it to yourself, and to the animation medium that you presumably care about, to do so posthaste.
Summer reading. Finally, let me recommend James Wood's book How Fiction Works, which I read earlier this month. Wood has nothing to say specifically about animation or the comics—he's The New Yorker's reigning literary critic—but some of what he says struck me as directly relevant to those fields, as when he writes about Aristotle's famous formulation, in the Poetics, that a convincing impossibility is always preferable to an unconvincing possibility:
The burden is instantly placed not on simple verisimilitude or reference (since Aristotle concedes that an artist may represent something that is physically impossible), but on mimetic persuasion: it is the artist's task to convince us that this could have happened. Internal consistency and plausibility then become more important than referential rectitude.
The lack of "internal consistency and plausibility" is, of course, exactly what I found so unsatisfactory about Up. I've been reminded, though, when reading dozens of enthusiastic comments about that film, of how many cartoon fans reject and resent the need for "internal consistency and plausibility." For them, the unadorned impossible will always be enough, because that's what attracted them to animation in the first place, when they were kids.
I can't feel much sympathy for what amounts to an insistence that we should all stay frozen in place like so many perpetual eight-year-olds, but there's no denying the size of the audience that shares that attitude. It's not an audience that I'll ever be able to please, and thank goodness for that.
Thanks to the indispensable help of Rick Freesland, who set up this site for me six years ago, things seem to be back to normal here (and with no thanks at all to my ISP). I'll tread cautiously for the next few days, just in case.
Things have been quiet on the comment front, but I have made one correction to the "Disney Words and Drawings" Feedback page, to take into account an error that Gunnar Andreassen caught: a man I identified as Otto Englander, in an early-'30s photo, is definitely Pinto Colvig instead. I have a pretty good excuse for that mistake (well, I like it anyway), but I'll spare you.
A June 22 addition: And here's the direct link to that correction that I forgot to include when I posted this item.
My internet service provider, WebIntellects, migrated my site to a new server last week, and since then nothing has worked right. Uploading files through FTP (file transfer protocol) is so far impossible, and WeIntellects has been less than helpful; I'd welcome recommendations for a new ISP. Don't look for new stuff here until I get this problem solved.
I saw Pixar's Up in 3D yesterday afternoon, and I've added a few stray thoughts to my original review of the 2D version. You can go straight to the new stuff by clicking on this link.
The evening before I saw Up again, I watched the just-released DVD of Nina Paley's Sita Sings the Blues. It was the first time I'd seen Sita complete. I resisted watching it on my computer—it has been available for some time as a download—and I'm glad I waited. The DVD is beautifully produced and looks great on a big TV screen, perhaps even better than it looks on a theater screen, although I wish I'd had the opportunity to see it that way.
I love Sita. Paley's film is endlessly clever and inventive, always great-looking, at times affecting, at other times uproariously funny. It's even beautifully animated, within the boundaries of its technology; I never knew Flash could look this good. Paley made Sita single-handedly, for all practical purposes—other names are in the credits, but she performed the essential tasks of directing, writing, and animating—and in contrast to almost all Hollywood animated features, it's clearly the product not of an impersonal committee but of an artist's keen sensibility. It's one of the very few animated features of the last few decades that I can recommend enthusiastically.
Up is none of those things. But it is, of course, the product of a huge media conglomerate that employed the labor of thousands at a cost of tens of millions, and so it is playing in theaters everywhere and raking in huge sums at the box office. Sita, meanwhile, labors under the burden of an unconscionable copyright law, a law enacted by Congress at the behest of behemoths like Pixar's corporate parent, Disney, and so oppressive that Paley ultimately decided she had no choice but to offer her film to the world without copyright restrictions if she wanted it to be seen.
There's no justice in this life, but you can redress the balance a little by buying Paley's DVD. The DVD (which includes a number of bonus features that I haven't yet watched) cost me just a little more than I paid to see Up twice There's not the slightest doubt in my mind as to which was the better bargain. You can order the DVD of Sita Sings the Blues by going to Paley's blog. Buy it. Now.
I was a little slow in reading and thus recommending Keith Lango's excellent review of Up, but let me recommend it again. Keith noted in a follow-up posting that Michael Sporn and I were, like him, less than completely enchanted by that film. A lot of people can't tolerate skepticism about a Hollywood animated feature when it comes from a non-animator like me, but now, to judge from some of the responses to Keith's post, the merest whisper of doubt has become dangerous even for an animator as accomplished as Michael.
Those hostile responses seem to have been shaped by a poisonous feature-animation culture that Keith describes with unsettling vividness:
I'm finding that my own views on animation—especially the big studio feature film variety—have evolved a lot more now that I'm not in the belly of the animation studio biz like I used to be. That culture can be claustrophobically limited and tends to be very self-reinforcing (a dangerous hallmark of any brand of fanaticism, by the way). You always end up working with the same people, or people who know people, again and again. Everybody is one level removed from everybody else. So there is a strong, unspoken pressure to not rock the boat, to be as vanilla as possible. Keep potentially caustic opinions to yourself because you never know what thin-skinned person (or friend of said person) you might offend by expressing an original critical thought. Plus there is a tendency to elevate the profession of character animation to levels of importance and significance that are, frankly, just silly. One artifact of this is to navel gaze about the smallest of details, which is tiresome to me and misses the point. There is a noble benefit to self improvement and refinement of one's craft, but do we really need to study video reference of the tongue in slow motion in order to convincingly animate an "L" sound? Really? So often CG film animation misses the forest for the veins in the leaves on the twigs of the branches of the trees.
I must say that I'm flattered and pleased that Michael Sporn has now been bracketed with me as one of those cranky old men who chase kids off their lawns. It was getting a little lonely here at the Curmudgeons' Club. But it seems clear from some of his visitors' surly comments that Keith Lango had better be careful, or he'll find himself a member, too.
It's flattering to an author when someone takes his work seriously enough to really study it, whether to build on it or to find holes in his research or his reasoning. Gunnar Andreassen, a Norwegian friend of the site, was prompted by some postings here to devote that kind of study to what I wrote about the evolution of the Disney storyboard (and Albert Hurter's role in story work) in Hollywood Cartoons: American Animation in Its Golden Age.
Gunnar has written to me, sharing some discoveries, posing some questions about what I've written, and supporting his questions with vintage drawings, some of them new to me and probably to most of my visitors. I've posted his questions, and my extended response, on a Feedback page titled "Disney Words and Drawings: An Exchange."
If you've enjoyed past Disney-history postings like the one about the flypaper sequence in Playful Pluto, you'll probably find this one right up your alley, too.
From Thad Komorowski, this screen cap from a Web site that purports to rate blogs as if they were movies. I'm not sure how serious this rating system is supposed to be taken—are parents using it to block their children's access?—but my site is, as you can see, consigned to the furthest reaches of the nasty. I guess I should have been calling Dick Huemer "Richard" all this time...and the "cock" in question is, of course, Cock Robin, the star of a porno cartoon by the well-known child molester, W. Disney.
Like a few other people, I've complained about the cascading implausibilities in Pixar's Up. But the greatest implausibility, it seems, is the balloon-powered house itself. It turns out it would take far more balloons than Carl had at his disposal (and certainly far more than he could have deployed overnight) to send his house into the air. Details in the Slate article at this link (thanks, Bill Benzon).
Of course, Dumbo couldn't really have flown, either, but that film delivered in so many other ways that its central falsehood, if you want to call it that, didn't matter. No such luck with Up.
You've probably seen it by now, like millions of other people, enough to propel it to a very strong showing at the box office in its first weekend. You don't need me to to tell you what to think about it, but for what it's worth, my review is at this link. For different perspectives, let me recommend the reviews by Mark Mayerson, Michael Sporn, and Keith Lango.
I saw Up in 2D, but I hope to see it in 3D in the next week or so, and I'll add to my review any second thoughts that such a viewing inspires.
It took a bit of doing—and some invaluable help from my lawyer friend Tim Susanin—but the Walt Disney Company has concluded that my book The Animated Man: A Life of Walt Disney is in fact eligible for sale at the Disney theme parks. Questions about the copyright status of a few of the book's illustrations had prevented the parks from placing any new orders, since Disney did not want its stores selling The Animated Man if any of the illustrations infringed on its copyrights. Now that cloud has been lifted. Whether the book actually goes back on sale will be up to the parks' buyers, of course, but at least that possibility is now open. If you visit any of the Disney parks this summer, please tell me if you notice that the park stores are selling The Animated Man.
Sometimes I run across interesting discussions on the Web that seem to deserve more than a quick link, and I make a note to write about them when I have the chance. Too often, those notes sit untouched for weeks. That's true of a note about a Terry Teachout post inspired by his unsuccessful attempt to read weeks' worth of Charles Schulz's Peanuts at a sitting, and Jaime Weinman's response.
Teachout found Peanuts wanting: "A daily comic strip whose installments are free-standing rather than connected by strands of plot is an endless series of moments. To read it once a day is a fleeting pleasure. To read dozens of installments in a single sitting is to realize just how ephemeral that pleasure was." Weinman thought that Teachout was missing the point: "The impact of any good serial is cumulative. If you read one a day, you get a chuckle or a rueful nod out of it, but as you keep reading it, [you become aware of ] the running themes and recurring ideas. It's like a ritual, and all the great comic strips from Krazy Kat on have been very ritualistic. As you read the instalments, one at a time, it adds up in your mind to something more than a bunch of drawings doing something silly."
In reading both these posts, I found myself saying, "Yes, but..." Teachout evidently started his Peanuts marathon by reading 1961 strips, and my first thought was, "That's too late." It was in the the '50s, and in the last half of that decade especially, that Schulz was at his best, which is to say at his most acid. By the '60s, Peanuts was already softening fatally. And, contra Weinman, I think that the best comic strips almost always hold up well when read in bulk. Pogo certainly does, at least its early years, when Walt Kelly was fresh from the rigors of comic-book work, and so does Thimble Theatre, where the occasional summaries of our-story-so-far are vital elements of the strip's sly comic rhythms. When I read Li'l Abner in bulk, though, the harsh mechanical qualities of Al Capp's strip force themselves on me, as they did not when I was reading it a day at a time, decades ago.
The phrase is Keith Lango's, which he uses in a thoughtful post about the need to harmonize "motion styles" with the "realishness" of CGI films. As he says:
The motion simply must "match" the visuals. This is why old classic Golden Era cartoons from the 1940's can get away with motion styles that—if transliterated without interpretation—would look absolutely out of place in your typical, "hyper-real," textured, shaded, lit, detail-oriented CG film. Folks have tried to marry the two with limited success. The reason for the lack of pleasing result is simple—the two styles are not harmonious.
Absolutely correct, I think, which is why the rare CGI film that does strive intelligently for such harmony through a complementary stylization of design and movement—I'm thinking, as usual, of Brad Bird's two Pixar features, and especially of The Incredibles—is so exciting. But, as Keith Lango says,
the predominant CG feature film style (as first defined by Pixar and subsequently copied by everybody else) is orders of magnitude too complex to pull off with anything less than a veritable army of artists, animators, technicians and machines. The style complexity—reflected in its realishness—absolutely demands visual harmony on all levels. Drop the level of complexity in any area and you create a sort of "off-key" feel to the animated film. General audiences understand this. When the visual harmony is well done they immediately perceive the animated film as having "quality." In the past we've made the mistake in thinking that this complexity was itself quality. This is a false dichotomy which has been bashed into our heads for almost two decades now. There is such a thing as animation that lacks complexity or realism or literalism but yet still has a high degree of quality, simply because all the pieces "fit." So complexity or literalism is not the equivalent of quality—visual harmony is. If you want to make something of real quality, then make something harmonious.
In that connection—and here I'm departing from Keith Lango's observations about CGI—I've been wondering if a somewhat similar lack of "visual harmony" accounts for much of my chronic dissatisfaction with the Disney hand-drawn features of the last twenty years. It has been that long since The Little Mermaid was released, and the anniversary prompted a recent evening of celebration in Los Angeles. I watched a little of Mermaid recently, when a couple of four-year-old VIPs were visiting me and requested "Ariel." It had been years since I last saw the film, and I was startled by the visual ugliness of the early scenes aboard the ship, especially. It later occurred to me that the ugliness I saw might be due less to the drawings themselves than to the juxtaposition of characters working a little too hard to be pretty (Ariel herself, the prince) and characters working a little too hard to be "cartoony" (almost every other creature on the screen). Characters can look radically different and still seem to be occupying the same screen space, as Snow White proved more than seventy years ago, but when I consider the Disney features of the last twenty years, it's hard to think of any whose directors and animators mastered that trick.
Of course, "visual harmony," in a CGI film or a hand-drawn one, isn't a cure-all. One might argue that Home on the Range, to cite one recent Disney feature, is visually harmonious, in an Ed Benedict-derived style, but it's still a bad movie.
It's commencement season, 2009, and what better time to look back almost 71 years, to a month when Walt Disney picked up three nifty honorary degrees. One was an honorary master of arts that Harvard University presented to him on June 23, 1938. You'll find six photos from that occasion on the Essay page at this link, the seventh installment in my "Day in the Life" series. Each of those pages is devoted to photos taken the same day and often only minutes apart. While I'm at it, let me remind you about the first six "Day in the Life" photo essays:
On April 16 and 17 I was in Kansas City, Mo., to screen my films and
teach a class at the Art Institute.
On my way to the airport to return to NYC, my host took me by the old
McConahy Laugh-O-gram building.
I know you have been there and must have shared with me the feeling one gets when traveling to a historic site. By actually being there—at that building where Disney/Hollywood animation
began,
in the neighborhood, in the town—you get a real sense of where Walt, Ub, Hugh, Rudy, and Friz came from and perhaps a tiny frisson of
what it was like in the 1920s. I was thrilled.
I can vouch for how evocative the Kansas City Disney sites are, even in their current dilapidated state, if one is willing to make the imaginative effort.
John sent several photos, taken by Doug Hudson of the Kansas City Art Institute's staff, that show the current state of the McConahy Building; I've included a couple of them here. In the smaller photo, the two windows visible above and behind John are where Walt Disney's Laugh-O-gram studio was located in 1922-23. The building is in much better shape than when I last saw it, in 2005; to see the photo I took of it then, go to this page.
The Kansas City organization called Thank You Walt Disney owns the McConahy Building now and deserves the credit for what has been accomplished so far in an arduous restoration. It says on its Web site: "For the first time in many years, the building is standing strong. We have removed the bracing, and have completed the walls and the floor of the building. Now we are launching our 'Raise the Roof' campaign. Winter is soon approaching, our goal is to have the roof in place before the first snowfall."
To that end, there will be a fundraiser on Saturday, May 30, which the Web site says "will take place at the Screenland building, 1656 Washington in the Crossroads area of Downtown Kansas City ... from 6:00 to 9:00 p.m. The event will feature hors d’oeuvres, a cash bar and an auction of items donated by businesses and individuals to support the ongoing work to restore the site of Walt Disney’s first professional film studio. Among the items which will be auctioned are artwork done by major, nationally-known cartoonists and comic strip artists especially for Thank You Walt Disney, as well as dozens of other items."
Virginia Davis, who played Alice in the earliest of Walt’s "Alice Comedies," in Kansas City and Hollywood, will be a guest at the fundraiser.
Admission is $20.
Thank You Walt Disney's plans are nothing if not ambitious:
Walt’s office will be re-created the way it was in 1922, when he fed the mouse, which later inspired him to create Mickey Mouse.
Part of our programming for Laugh-O-Gram Studio includes an interactive animation lab that will educate kids of all ages on the art and history of animation. We will teach this art starting at the root of animation and move our audience through time to today’s technology. Our Laugh O Gram Studio will have a Café “House of da Mouse” as well as a merchandise area.
The addition of a production studio is in discussion with the Board of Directors and would
add a significant opportunity to draw more business into downtown Kansas City and provide earned income to continue our project down the road of success.
It's hard for me to envision so radically transformed a building in what is now a very rough neighborhood, but perhaps a revived Laugh-O-gram building will serve as a catalyst for revival generally.
Since John Canemaker's April visit, Thank You Walt Disney volunteers have been dressing up the McConahy Building with drawings derived from Walt Disney's earliest business card, as seen in the photo below.
Walt the Futurist: From Bill Benzon, a link to a New Scientist page that includes Walt Disney among "five of the most interesting future-movers and shapers." Bill writes: "This article puts Disney in some pretty interesting company, though I’m inclined to think he’s the most distinguished one on the list. Though perhaps H. G. Wells would give him a run for the money."
Robin Hood on DVD: I mentioned last month, in writing about the death of the director Ken Annakin, that The Story of Robin Hood and His Merrie Men, one of his four live-action films for Walt Disney, was not for sale on a generally available DVD. That has changed, and you can now order the DVD from amazon.com by clicking on this link. Unfortunately, the DVD uses the same master as the much earlier VHS and laserdisc releases; it's perfectly watchable but definitely inferior to most recent DVDs, not to mention Blu-ray discs. At least it's relatively inexpensive.
Sita Sings the Blues: I've seen only part of Nina Paley's feature on the internet, but I've loved what I've seen. I've resisted watching the whole feature on the Web, though, because I don't like watching films of any kind on my computer. I've kept hoping that the opportunity to see it on a big screen would come my way. No such luck so far. I've signed up to buy a DVD of the film as soon as one is released, and since I'll be traveling a fair amount this summer, who knows, maybe I'll luck into a theatrical showing somewhere. Anyway: to get to the immediate occasion for this post, you can find an illuminating discussion with Paley about her film at Kristin Thompson and David Bordwell's exemplary blog.
As has been widely reported, copyright issues—specifically the persistence of copyright on some very old recordings that Paley used on her soundtrack—have complicated the release of Sita. Paley has responded by, in effect, abandoning most of her own rights in the film and granting a broad license to do almost anything one wishes with it.
I won't try to deal with the legalities here. Suffice it to say that in its current state our copyright law is a disgrace. It is nothing more than a vehicle to further Big Media's financial interests, in particular by bestowing on copyright owners the opportunity to profit further from movies made many decades ago by long-dead creators who had no reason to believe that copyrights would last longer than 56 years. Copyright protection makes sense, but only for a much shorter period than current law provides.
Overreaching by Big Media copyright owners, more than "piracy" by people posting clips on YouTube or sharing songs on the internet, has created the current copyright crisis, one in which copyrights are freely disregarded by millions but the occasional creator, like Nina Paley, feels the full, arbitrary weight of an indefensible law. I can easily imagine that in a few years everyone will be suffering from the current stupidity and its consequences, truly creative artists perhaps most of all. The sobering picture that Keith Lango paints, in which the internet reduces "filmmakers, artists and creators to perpetual hobbyist status," is all too plausible.
Jim Korkis, who was recently laid off by Walt Disney World despite (or maybe because of) his exceptional knowledge of Disney history, has written to offer a possible explanation for a cameo appearance by "Walt Disney" in the 1944 Columbia feature Once Upon a Time, the subject of my May 6 post.
What Is Walt Disney doing in Once Upon a Time?
The short answer is, I don't have a clue. Was he trying to mend fences with Columbia? When he dropped Columbia as his distributor in 1930, there were hard feelings and even some veiled threats by Harry Cohn's brother, Jack, who ran the New York branch of Columbia, to Roy O. Disney.
I certainly never found any documentation of Walt agreeing to the use of his image for such and such compensation.
Walt had been impersonated by announcer John Hiestand on the Mickey Mouse Theater of the Air when he was unable to get to the RKO studio for rehearsal or recording but then it is probably easier to impersonate someone on radio. (I haven't tracked down the radio play that Once Upon a Time was based on, but somehow I suspect the character of Walt Disney wasn't it in and that Walt was only put in when it had to be expanded for the screen.)
So, I am going to go out on a limb and take a guess that it was a "thank you" to Columbia for helping out in a matter concerning the never-made Disney animated cartoon of Roald Dahl's The Gremlins, which was being worked on at the same as Once Upon a Time.
The Disney brothers were frantic that they couldn't get the Gremlins project off the ground and even more frantic when they discovered that other animation studios had gremlin projects in the pipeline that would come out before the Disney feature.Roy Disney, who was by all accounts more diplomatic than Walt, leveraged his Hollywood friendships to discourage competition atother studios.At Universal, Walter Lantz willingly withdrew his proposed titles, as did Fred Quimby at MGM. Leon Schlesinger at Warners had two cartoons, both directed by Bob Clampett, too far along to stop, although he removed "gremlin" from the titles and agreed to drop any future gremlin projects. Falling Hare was originally to be called "Bugs Bunny and the Gremlin" and Jerry Beck actually has a title card with that name on it. "Gremlins from the Kremlin" became Russian Rhapsody.
At Columbia was Dave Fleischer, who had become the head of the cartoon department soon after being ousted by Paramount from Fleischer Studios.
Roy informed Walt in a memo dated March 25, 1943, that "Dave Fleischer stated that he did not have the final say in his plant but promised his utmost cooperation not to use the title and not to make pictures on Gremlins.He discovered two story ideas in the preliminary stages of work."Behind the scenes, though, Fleischer apparently continued development of the cartoons,forcing Roy on April 16, 1943, to send this plea to the president of Columbia Pictures, Harry Cohn:
Excuse me for bothering you with this problem; but it's one that I think probably only you can understand and decide.It's in regard to the title and subject matter of pictures on the idea of "Gremlins".
Walt picked up this idea in connection with some RAF flyers many months before it was commonly tossed around in this country.We made a deal with one of them and a working arrangement with the RAF.We had a story written and had it published in Cosmopolitan.We put out publicity and launched on the making of a feature cartoon motion picture using the "Gremlins".
"Gremlin" publicity, as a result of our activities in a large part, has reached such proportions that the entire cartoon industry started to pick up the idea for short subject cartoons. Warners, MGM, Universal and your cartoon unit all started subjects in work and registered titles that ran afoul of our registrat ions. However, on technical grounds, the Title Registration Committee ruled against us.
Following this, I appealed to the different organizations personally, asking that in view of the fact that we had started early, had already a substantial investment in the project, and that we intended making a feature picture, that they refrain from using the subject matter of "Gremlins".... Within your organization, however, somebody still persists in the idea, and I understand plans are going ahead for the making of "Gremlin" subjects.
Harry, you know Walt and me well enough to realize wewouldn’t give two hoots about competition, short subject to short subject.But I am very worried when we start to make a feature that takes us at least a year to produce and costs us at least $600,000 to $800,000—I’m worried at the thought of having a property of this size undermined and hurt by a lot of single reels that may saturate the public’s desire to see a "Gremlin" feature and really do us considerable harm in the marketing of it.
If we were where we could drop it, I would rather do that than proceed under such circumstances.However, we are already in pretty close to $50,000; so that is the reason I’m bothering you with this—to earnestly and seriously request that you persuade your cartoon department to drop the "Gremlin" idea.Sometime the shoe may be on the other foot; and you know us—we’d be more than happy to return the favor.
B.B. Kahane replied for Cohn that Columbia would not do anything with gremlins. So possibly Walt and Roy "returned the favor" by permitting the impersonation of Walt in Once Upon a Time.
The first entertainment biography that Bob Thomas wrote was King Cohn: The Life and Times of Harry Cohn, published by Putnam in 1967. As part of the research for that book, Thomas very briefly interviewed Walt about Cohn on May 25, 1965. Here is an excerpt from that interview:
I never had any business dealings with Harry Cohn, just saw him socially.I understand he was a bastard to work for, but they say that about every head of a studio.They say it about me sometimes, too.Once, I was on the Riviera with my daughters, and I ran into Harry Cohn.He said I should give one of them a screen test.I said that was the last thing in the world I wanted.
"Roy Walley" is the parody version of Walt Disney who has been mentioned here in connection with the various screen impersonations of Walt. "Roy" (it is surely no accident that his name is that of Walt's brother) is played by Eddie Bracken. He turns up at the end of National Lampoon's Vacation (1983), the vacation in question being a disastrous driving trip by Chevy Chase and his screen family from Chicago to "Walley World," a parody Disneyland in southern California. Just so there's no doubt about the parody's target, the park's presiding divinity is "Marty Moose." The YouTube segment you can watch here is all there is of "Roy" in the film.
Eddie Bracken has been made up to suggest Walt's appearance—dark hair, mustache—but there isn't much else about him that recalls Walt. Probably there wasn't much of an effort made to summon up memories of the man. It had been seventeen years since Walt's death, and even though he was still visible in television reruns and otherwise, he was by no means the familiar presence he had been when he was alive. A vague resemblance was probably more than enough to satisfy the director Harold Ramis and his colleagues.
(Thanks to Larry Varblow and the other visitors who caught my misidentification, in this item as originally posted, of the actor portraying "Roy Walley" as Eddie Albert, rather than Eddie Bracken. Needless to say, I'm sure, I deliberately insert such boneheaded mistakes just to make sure that you're paying attention.)
Cartoon Brew has posted an item about John Lasseter's receiving an honorary doctorate on May 2 from Pepperdine University, the conservative Christian institution in Malibu where Kenneth Starr, Bill Clinton's tormentor, is dean of the law school. Lasseter's late mother graduated from Pepperdine in 1946. His honorary degree inspired some predictably adulatory comments at Cartoon Brew, but easily the most remarkable was this one from Mike Gabriel, a Disney veteran who co-directed Pocahontas and The Rescuers Down Under:
Congratulations, John. You are a legendary leader and visionary. It is an honor to work with you and try to live up to all that is in your brilliant head. Thanks for putting passion for excellence above all ego and studio competition. You honor the profession and the art form by your devotion to excellence wherever it may be found. You do all you can to inspire greatness in everyone in the industry. Because of one simple fact—-you love good animation. You get fired up wherever true believers kick in their honest passion to create something special. Thanks for coming back home to Disney to lead us not to crush us, which you could have easily done if you were a spiteful lesser man. Let’s take it to the next level if people are willing to admit they have much to learn and far to grow. We all need to keep the mind set of wearing robes of learning and being educated about how to make it better yet. This is your attitude and it permeates the new Disney.
I guess Gabriel hasn't seen Bolt. No, wait...he worked on it.
One of Dave's first jobs for Walt Disney [after he was hired in January 1930] was to animate
Clarabelle Cow. She wore a skirt carrying a pattern of dots drawn as
circles. Dave animated the scene—inbetweens and all—then added the
dots at random, not knowing that random would make them "explode"
when projected. Walt probably had the circles deleted. At least I
have never found them.
David writes:
You can find them, or what I believe to be them, in The Shindig [delivered July 11, 1930, as the fifth of Disney's Mickeys for Columbia]. In thisYouTube version, the scene starts at about 3:15. Walt definitely didn't have them deleted. I even notice a confused YouTube viewer wondering why Clarabelle's "clothes are spinning so fast."
Warning: I haven't checked an original draft on this one, so I'm not absolutely certain this is the scene, nor am I sure it's Hand's
work. But it does match the date.
I don't believe a draft for The Shindig with animators' credits even exists. Back in 1990,on a visit to the Walt Disney Archives, I spent several days making notes from all the drafts for the Disney shorts from the '20s and '30s, and I have no notes for The Shindig. David writes:
My notes show that the "draft" Disney holds is a later thing, typed
up long after the fact, evidently meant to substitute for a missing
real one. It doesn't have animator IDs in it.
Another source for authentic credits on Shindig, though, would be notes from the 1939 Mickey's Revival Party conference—where Walt,
Hand, and Riley Thomson were going to make a clip-show featurette,
and screened and commented on some nineteen BW Mickeys, identifying animators for the secretary's minutes as they went; if you can believe it, Walt was specifically
looking to highlight Horace and Clarabelle's development as part of
the clip show. In those notes, Walt speaks of "Dave's stuff" in The Shindig, referring to Clarabelle and Horace's dance and directing the others
to look at the dots.
You can read more about the unmade Revival Party and a great many other Disney films, made and unmade, in David's beautiful and indispensable book, Mickey and the Gang. See especially, on Revival Party, page 230.
You should be visiting Ramapith: David Gerstein's Prehistoric Pop Culture Blog. A lot of fans have been excited, in particular, by David's clearing up the question of just how the original version of Hare-um Scare-um ended, and in the process putting to rest a rather bizarre urban legend (involving the supposed decapitation of the hunter and his dog). Blogs make it easy to spread misinformation, but as the response to David's post shows, they can also clear up such misinformation rather quickly.
Hare-um Scare-um is a Warner Bros. cartoon directed by Ben Hardaway and Cal Dalton and released in August 1939. It's not much of a cartoon, its animation lacking in punch and its staging uniformly dull and unimaginative. But its star is the earliest version of Bugs Bunny, and it was with this cartoon that Bugs got his name (he is identified by name in the copyright description and in a review in the Motion Picture Herald for August 13, 1939). That's why Hare-um Scare-um draws more attention than it deserves on its own merits.
Back on January 18, 1979, at the Warner Bros. lot in Burbank, Mark Kausler and I watched what I would imagine is the same nitrate print of the complete Hare-um Scare-um that David saw at an archive he doesn't identify. I was in California to gather artwork for my ultimately unpublished Warner Bros. book, and to see as many cartoons as possible that I hadn't already seen, including a number of nitrate prints with original titles from the Warner vaults. My handwritten notes for Hare-um Scare-um read in part:
At the end of the original version, the rabbits jump on the hunter, there's a fight in a dust cloud and the rabbits disappear in a streak of dust (actually, we haven't seen the rabbits for the dust from the start of the fight). There are shots offscreen, then Bugs comes back with the hunter's battered gun and tells him he ought to have it fixed, then bounces away on his head, whooping like Daffy. The frustrated hunter does the same.
And that's just about how David describes the ending, too—but with the terrific added advantage of screen shots he made with a digital camera (one of which I've borrowed above right). I'm a little sorry that I never did something with my knowledge of that original ending, instead of sitting on it for thirty years, but perhaps that's just as well, since David's screen shots add so much. As to why the ending was truncated, I think my reference to Daffy Duck may provide the best lead. As David himself suggests, that ending may simply have made the two characters, and their cartoons, seem too much alike.
A footnote: there's a restored 35mm print of Hare-um Scare-um at the Library of Congress, but like all the other prints that I know of, except for the version David, Mark, and I have seen, it is missing the original ending.
Yesterday's item about an appearance by "Walt Disney" at the Kansas City Public Library generated some fascinating responses about the various impersonations of the man; you can read them by clicking on this link.
Jenny Lerew, proprietor of The Blackwing Diaries, wrote to let me know that Once Upon a Time, the 1944 Cary Grant vehicle in which "Walt" makes a very brief cameo appearance, is available in its entirety on YouTube; I've embedded the segment with that cameo just above. "Walt" appears at 8:55 in this clip. And below is the segment in which Dunhill (the uncredited Paul Stanton), supposedly a Disney representative, tries to buy Curly, the dancing caterpillar, from its owners, played by Cary Grant and the young boy Ted Donaldson, starting at 5:12.
I haven't watched the whole movie yet, but these Disney-related segments feel odd to me. Once Upon a Time was a Columbia picture, and the film's version of Walt, and of the Disney operation in general, smacks more of Harry Cohn than of the real Disney. Dunhill is hardnosed at first, but then Walt gets caught up in the enthusiasm for Curly and calls to pay Grant his asking price, $100,000. That's a laughable figure, especially considering that the wartime Disney studio didn't have a dime to spare, but the transition from an icy bargaining stance to something like hysterical panic—this wonderful dancing caterpillar I've never seen might get away, give me the checkbook quick!—has what strikes me as an authentic Hollywood flavor. So equivocal is Walt's part in the story that he is sometimes described as one of the film's villains.
"Wade Sampson" wrote about Once Upon a Time and other Disney portrayals for MousePlanet in January 2007, in a piece called "The Man Who Was Walt," but, unfortunately, he offers no information about any negotiations between Disney and Columbia over how Walt would be portrayed. Columbia had been Disney's distributor, more than a decade earlier, and the two studios had parted company with lots of hard feelings on both sides. Disney surely had some control over the script—or was this use of Walt's name and likeness simply waved through, as a favor to one of Walt's peers? I can't find any references to Once Upon a Time in my notes and photocopies from the Walt Disney Archives. The answers to my questions may be somewhere in the Disney studio's "main files," those files of continuing legal significance.
This is, by the way, my first stab at embedding YouTube videos. Either YouTube has made that easier for sites like mine, which fall outside the usual blog boundaries, or I didn't understand YouTube's instructions earlier. In any case, I'll be posting videos from now on.
From the Kansas City (Mo.) Public Library about an event this evening:
Kansas City Public Library Director Crosby Kemper III interviews Walt Disney, portrayed by Dr. Bill Worley, as part of the Library’s Meet the Past series on Tuesday, May 5, at 6:30 p.m. at the Central Library, 14 W. 10th St. ... Worley is an instructor in history at the Metropolitan Community Colleges of Kansas City – Blue River and a longtime Kansas City historian. He is the author of J.C. Nichols and the Shaping of Kansas City. He has performed as Disney countless times and has earned several honors for his portrayals of Disney, President Harry S. Truman, basketball inventor James Naismith, and others. Worley portrayed Tom Pendergast in the first Meet the Past event.
The "Meet the Past" series is being "filmed," the library says—I assume that means taped—for prime-time showings on Kansas City's public television channel 19 next fall. Admission is free, but if you want to attend, the library asks that you RSVP online; here's a link to a page with the details.
I can't recall ever hearing before of Worley's "countless" portrayals of Walt. Such impersonations are evidently rare. I've read about (but not seen) a cameo impersonation in one film made while Walt was alive—Once Upon a Time (1944), starring Cary Grant, with, according to Internet Movie Data Base, an uncredited Walter Fenner portraying Walt—and IMDB lists a very few from the years since his death. There have been a few plays with a character who is called "Walt Disney" but who from all reports bears no resemblance to the real man. Probably the forthcoming Philip Glass opera based on the wretched novel called The Perfect American will give us an equally farfetched "Walt."
I finally got around to seeing it the other day, in Imax 3-D. Monsters is a handsome film (and I thought the 3-D was effective, especially on the huge screen), and it's not offensive in the snotty-adolescent manner of earlier DreamWorks Animation films like the Shrek series. Unfortunately, it's not very good, either. Like many other CGI films, Monsters feels unfocused; the technology has absorbed so much of the filmmakers' attention that more important matters, like the story, have been neglected.
The fundamental mistake was to make the central character Susan, an attractive (theoretically, at least) young woman who accidentally becomes a giant; such casting works against comedy, because you can subject a vulnerable girl to very few indignities before they cease to be funny. Reese Witherspoon's voice performance is excellent, but it boomerangs by making Susan too intensely sympathetic a character. And are we supposed to believe, at the movie's end, that Susan will prefer to remain Ginormica, in the company of her monster buddies, as opposed to living a normal life? That makes sense only as the set-up for a sequel, one in which Ginormica will no doubt meet an appropriately scaled guy.
Perhaps the fear was that a male lead and a stronger emphasis on comedy would invite unflattering comparisons with the likes of Futurama, although DreamWorks has not shrunk from such comparisons before. As it is, the film feels so much like a rather odd science-fiction melodrama that the jokes come sometimes as not especially welcome surprises.
This is yet another CGI film with two directors (always a bad sign), many more screenwriters (a worse sign), and an obsession with mottled surfaces that left me wondering if any of these people ever noticed that one reason Brad Bird's Pixar features look so good is that Bird shunned such pointless refinements. And did anyone in that horde of screenwriters ever read Gulliver's Travels, specifically the part about the voyage to Brobdingnag? If they had, and if they had thought about how unattractive even the most attractive woman might be if she were blown up to many times her normal size, they might have been able to turn that obsession with surfaces into something interesting.
Dana Gabbard writes, in regard to the great Little Lulu artist/writer John Stanley and Frank Young's Web postings about him, which I praised on April 25:
Frank Young got bogged down in the complexities of doing a website and eventually stopped, only to re-start Stanley Stories this time as a blog. The first blog post explains the transition.
The Wikipedia entry I created has the most complete biography of Stanley extant. I can vouch for that—Lord knows I spent a year researching it. A friend said with some surprise, "I'd have thought there was as much written about Stanley as there is about Barks." Such is not the case. In fact my bibliography for the Wikipedia entry essentially lists everything in English dealing with Stanley except the mentions of him in comic book histories.
We are in the midst of a bit of a Stanley renaissance, with the impending first volume of the Drawn & Quarterly reprint series along with the release of fresh Lulu reprints from Dark Horse. Plus son James hopes eventually to create an official website celebrating his father's work and legacy, which will include scans of script drafts and unpublished artwork.
I've had trouble communicating by email with Børge Ring the last couple of weeks, thanks apparently to Comcast's berserk spam filters, but he has managed to tell me, via Hans Perk, that the photo of Dave Hand I posted on April 26 is not the one he had in mind, the one that he thought showed Dave as a "pasteurized missionary." The correct photo, Dave's official portrait as head of the J. Arthur Rank animation studio in England, is just below. And under that photo you'll see depictions of Dave by some of his former colleagues. At the left, Hand as depicted by Jack Kinney in his memoir, Walt Disney and Assorted Other Characters; next, Hand as caricatured in the internal Disney publication from the '30s called The Mousetrap; and at the bottom, a menacing Hand as depicted by, probably, Nick George, advancing on Carl Barks and George when they were writing Donald Duck stories and Dave was in charge of the Disney shorts.
And speaking of the Rank cartoons...I had forgotten about Bob Egby's remarkable Web page devoted to his memories of the Moor Hall Studios. Lots of photos and model sheets, and links from that page to other pages devoted to the Rank cartoons and Dave Hand himself. A tremendous resource.
Thanks to Gunnar Andreassen and Hans Perk for their help in assembling the images below.
That was the title of a centennial celebration of Milt Kahl's life and work at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' theater in Beverly Hills a few days ago. Kahl was, of course, the animator who defined the "Disney style" for more than three decades, starting with Pinocchio and Bambi in the early '40s and continuing at that studio through The Rescuers (1977). The Academy's show was so wildly popular—and the Academy so ill-prepared for that popularity—that more than 150 ticket holders were denied seats. You can read responses to that mishandling, and to the Kahl show itself, on Cartoon Brew. Hans Perk offers scans of the program (there were too few copies of that, too).
It's encouraging, I suppose, that so many people should turn out for such a tribute, and certainly I wish I could have attended. But I'm puzzled by the evening's title. "The Animation Michelangelo"? Surely Kahl was not that, but "The Animation Raphael" instead.
As it happened, I got to spend a good bit of undisturbed time with both those Renaissance giants at the Vatican last November. The crowds were thin, the Sistine Chapel was all but empty for an hour, and there was time and quiet enough to think about what I was seeing. Michaelangelo, especially in "The Last Judgment," painted with an overwhelming passion and physical energy, so much so that the restored "Last Judgment" disturbs the chapel's harmonious proportions. If any animator has ever merited comparisons with Michelangelo, it has to be Bill Tytla. Raphael—his famous Stanzas at the Vatican weren't overcrowded, either—was a very different kind of artist: an intimidating draftsman whose paintings' dominant characteristic is not passion and energy, but cool, exquisitely balanced perfection. Kahl was more like that.
I can't say that I've ever felt any great enthusiasm for Kahl's animation, or for his broader influence on the Disney features. It was Kahl's version of Pinocchio as a wide-eyed innocent, barely a puppet, that Walt Disney adopted in one of his most unfortunate decisions, and Bambi's deer as Kahl envisioned them are much too sugary. Those characters, and others that Kahl designed and animated later, have what seems to me not real warmth but a calculated appeal whose artificiality Kahl's beautiful drawings can't quite conceal.
Ironically, it is "sincerity," that Disney shibboleth, that is most conspicuously lacking in Kahl's work. I have to think it was others' awareness of that shortcoming (as well as appreciation of Kahl's superior draftsmanship) that led eventually to his being assigned almost exclusively to realistic human characters in later decades. I can think of any number of other Disney animators whose work I would rank above Kahl's—Tytla, of course, but also Ward Kimball, Frank Thomas, Marc Davis, Fred Moore, Norm Ferguson...a long list.
There's no question, though, but that for the moment Kahl's animation is the gold standard, at least in the Hollywood studios. Certainly it's understandable why an outstanding contemporary animator like Andreas Deja would admire Kahl so much. Their work has much in common, especially the high quality of their drawings. But what is it about Kahl that makes him attractive to so many other people in today's animation industry?
I met Milt Kahl only once, in the fall of 1976. Milt Gray and I interviewed Kahl at his home, a penthouse apartment on the Avenue of the Stars in Century City. It was, as I recall, a beautiful place, furnished in exquisite taste in a modern style. Kahl himself was friendly but forceful, very much as others have described him. He had only recently been pushed out of Disney, after run-ins with Woolie Reitherman during production of The Rescuers, and he was resentful and contemptuous of some of his former colleagues.
I remember feeling vaguely dissatisfied with the interview when Milt and I were driving away, but Milt was not, because, he told me, he had been so impressed by Kahl's integrity. I think Milt was right—Kahl did have a great deal of integrity, which took the form of an unyielding dedication to his conception of the art of animation, well-drawn animation above all. But it seemed to me that as an animator, Kahl lived inside a sort of cocoon in which nothing mattered except the high quality of his animation, with "quality" rather narrowly defined. (Grim Natwick, whom I also interviewed on that trip, struck me as the same sort of animator.)
Perhaps it's that very cocoon that is attractive to today's animators, because what's outside the cocoon is so often disagreeable. If one is working on, say, The Princess and the Frog—Disney's return to hand-drawn animation—I would imagine that one can't help but be aware of the swamp of political correctness that has threatened to swallow up that film long before it is completed. And as for the people working on most computer-animated films, well... Given the alternatives, living inside a cocoon and aspiring to become the next Milt Kahl may actually have a great deal to recommend it.
Needless to say, probably, that's Milt Kahl at the center of the Bambi publicity photo above, leaning over (from the left) Ollie Johnston, Peter Behn (the voice of Thumper), and Frank Thomas. In the publicity photo below from the Disney TV show of the '50s, Kahl is at the left; the others are Marc Davis, Frank Thomas, Walt Disney, Wilfred Jackson, and (seated at the easel) Ollie Johnston.
I meant to post the image below on April 12, but I forgot; I missed the Orthodox Easter on April 19, too. But what the hey, Easter is not just a day but a multi-week period in the church calendar in the Episcopal Church and, I assume, many other Christian denominations, so maybe this post isn't really all that late after all. And the artist of this cover of Warner Bros.' house organ? Looks like Bob McKimson to me.
When I put up Dan Briney's photo of the intersection of Hyperion Avenue and Griffith Park Boulevard—the location, long ago, of the Disney studio in its greatest days—on April 13, the great Danish animator Børge Ring was prompted to send me his memories of one of the most important people at that studio, the animator and director David Hand. Ultimately, what Børge wrote outgrew the comments slot for the Hyperion item, and so I've set up a separate Feedback page devoted to his memories not just of Dave Hand (they worked together in Denmark around 1950) but also of Jack Kinney, another veteran Disney director. You can go to the new Feedback page by clicking on this link.
I have lots of photos of Dave Hand in groups, but I could come up with only one portrait photo, the one at the right, which comes from Dave's "Disney Legends" page and is, I believe, the target of this comment by Børge: "The official publicity photo of Dave is worse than awful. It makes him look like a pasteurized missionary." A scary thought.
Børge suggests that there is a better way to get a sense of what Dave Hand was like, and it's by watching a movie that was made several years after he left the Disney studio:
David Hand liked physical activity and at fifty was a whack of a ping pong player. If you want to see him in action, go watch "Bongo" [in Fun and Fancy Free]. Ward Kimball caricatures Hand acutely as Lumpjaw the villain. Lumpjaw is DH to a tee, with timing, quick walks, and everything—for instance in the scene walking with heroine Lulubelle at his hand.
That's a frame grab from the scene in question at the right.
I wish Dave and Ward were still with us so I could test Børge's theory on them, but, alas, they're not. In my acquaintance with Dave—I spent a few hours with him on two occasions, years apart, and we exchanged letters and phone calls—it never occurred to me that he might have inspired the animation of Lumpjaw, but it's an entertaining thought.
And let me remind you that Dave Hand's own words, in the transcript of part of my 1973 interview with him, and in an audio clip from that interview, can be read and heard at this link.
Ken Annakin, who died last Wednesday at the age of 94, was that great rarity among the people who made Walt Disney's live-action features, a director whose own sensibility shaped the films in significant ways. The typical Disney director—the kind of director Walt favored, alas—was a faceless traffic cop, but in Annakin's four Disney films the actors make up a true ensemble, each of them responding to one another with a seeming genuineness that has few parallels in other Disney features or, for that matter, in live-action features generally.
My favorite among Annakin's Disney features is Third Man on the Mountain(1959); I write about it and another of his features, Swiss Family Robinson (1960), on a page devoted to the DVDs of live-action Disney. Two of Annakin's Disney features, The Story of Robin Hood and His Merrie Men and The Sword and the Rose, have not yet been released on generally available DVDs, and that's unfortunate; they're charming films that deserve to be seen.
Annakin made other good films, but not as many as he had in him, I'm sure, and some that he did make would have been better if he'd had his way. He wanted Dick Van Dyke to star in what is perhaps his most famous non-Disney film, Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines (1965), but for reasons he explains in his 2001 autobiography, So You Wanna Be a Director, he wound up with Stuart Whitman instead. Watch the film sometime and imagine Van Dyke in the Whitman part, and I think you will understand immediately why Annakin was right.
I spent a couple of hours with Ken Annakin and his wife, Pauline, in Los Angeles four years ago, interviewing them for The Animated Man: A Life of Walt Disney, and I came away liking them both. One of the great pleasures of working on that book was meeting and interviewing a few of the people who worked on the Disney live-action features, a badly neglected part of Walt's output. Ken Annakin, Richard Todd, Fess Parker, James MacArthur (by phone), and others whose names are less familiar illuminated Walt's personality and helped me understand why too many of his live-action features fell short of his best work in animation—and they were a lot of fun to talk to, besides.
Click on this link to go the New York Times obituary for Ken Annakin. The extraordinary British cinematographer Jack Cardiff, who was also 94, died the same day as Ken Annakin; his Times obituary is at this link, and you can read Jenny Lerew's sensitive tribute by clicking here. Does it seem out of place to mention a live-action cinematographer (who never worked for Walt Disney) on a Web site devoted mostly to animation? If you think so, watch Black Narcissus (1947), one of Cardiff's breathtaking Technicolor movies for Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, and you may change your mind.
I realized a few weeks ago that I had committed myself to helping with no fewer than five book or book-sized projects—reading manuscripts, writing part of the text, providing research materials, and so on. The time I was spending meeting those commitments was eating up most of the time I would otherwise have spent on this site and my own next book. Now I've just about cleared away those commitments, and I've already turned down another one. I'm hopeful that both site and book will benefit.
One casualty of my overload was my usual checking of my Sage feeds. I visit a few sites, like Michael Sporn's, almost daily, because their proprietors are so frighteningly prolific (Michael's blog is especially rich in animation artwork), but for the most part I depend on RSS feeds to tell me when something new has gone up. As a result, I've fallen behind in posting links to some excellent material that no one should overlook if they find my own site of interest. For those links, see below.
I've praised Hans Perk's blog on many occasions, and no one who cares about Disney history, in particular, should fail to visit it often. Hans posts a tremendous number of documents of great historical interest, but I want to single out one that I think is truly extraordinary: the transcript of one of Don Graham's action analysis classes, this one held on February 20, 1936; the guest speaker was the animator Dick Huemer (seen at right), and his subject was "timing."
The mere existence of this transcript was a great surprise to me; I've accumulated dozens of transcripts from the Graham classes, but I didn't have this one, and I'm almost certain that Dick Huemer himself didn't have one, either. When I knew him, Dick tended to disparage his abilities as an animator, but he comes across in this transcript as the serious artist he actually was. There's a wonderfully strong sense in this transcript—I can't think of another that matches it—of just what an exciting place the Disney studio was in the middle '30s, and of how much in flux everyone's knowledge of animation really was. It feels as if Huemer is reporting on what he and his colleagues have discovered as they advanced into unexplored territory.
Great stuff. As Hans Perk's mentor Børge Ring wrote after reading the transcript, "'Dick Huemer on Timing' is one of the best pieces I ever read on a blog: Huemer debates precisely all the brass-tack problems that make up the wonderful game of chess that lively action animation can be." Exactly right.
Hans has also posted a followup to my March 18 item about Emil Flohri, the Disney background painter in the early '30s, with a larger and much clearer version of the photo of Flohri and Carlos Manriquez that accompanied my item. With the help of Alex Rannie, Hans has been able to identify the two background paintings visible in the photo, one in Manriquez's hand and the other on Flohri's desk, and even the bound volumes of Judge on the shelves above Flohri's desk.
Hans sometimes laments the lack of response to his postings, and I sympathize. It often seems that the sillier the post, the more eager are the morons and subliterates among animation fans (a high percentage of the total, I'm afraid) to tell the world what they think about it. Blogs encourage speedy responses—seeing your inane comments go up a few minutes after you've submitted them is just one more of our society's many forms of instant gratification. Serious stuff, like so many of Hans's posts, and a good many of mine, call for a more serious response, and often there seems to be no time for such in the blogosphere.
Another admirable blogger, David Levy, has worked out one of the best blog schedules I can imagine—he posts every Monday, and only on Monday, as reflected in the title of his blog, Animondays. What I enjoy most about this blog is its strong sense of real life, specifically the real life of someone working in animation in New York City. Michael Sporn's blog is similar in that regard, but I think Dave Levy's blog feels even more real than Michael's, simply because Michael casts his net wider and covers much more, historically and geographically. Animondays is more focused on daily life. I've said that today's New York feels to me like a healthier environment for animation and animators than today's Los Angeles, and Dave's blog benefits from that disparity. Too many L.A.-based blogs read like the ravings of megalomaniacs or the whining of childish jerks, and Animondays is nothing like that. Dave Levy has a second book coming out this fall, and you can read about that on his blog, too.
Floyd Norman, aka Mr. Fun (that's him at the left in the gag photo), is the author of a frequently updated and highly enjoyable blog about his long career in the animation business, with the emphasis on his years at Disney. But I'd overlooked, until Milt Gray called my attention to it, a longer piece on Floyd's site called "Animation Lockdown." It's an eye-opening comparison of the open and relaxed animation studios that Floyd first knew, in the '50s and '60s—when young visitors from Disney could stroll the halls at the Warner studio without anyone's raising an eyebrow—with the tense, rigid, and tightly controlled industry of today. Highly recommended.
Finally (for the moment), let me recommend most heartily Frank Young's Stanley Stories. The Stanley in question is John, the brilliant cartoonist and writer whose name is most readily associated with Little Lulu but who, as Frank makes clear, has a lot of other great things on his resume. Frank Young is not just a Stanley fan, but also a student of his work who can identify it even when it's under the veneer of another cartoonist's drawings, as it usually was. Stanley Stories reproduces some of Stanley's best (and most obscure) stories and includes a glossary of "Stanleyisms," the distinctive characteristics of his writing. A biography is promised. This is the internet at its best.
My new comment format, which is more like that of standard-issue blogs, seems to be working out reasonably well. As a general rule, I'll post on my home page comments about items on this page, whereas I'll post on my Feedback pages responses to longer pieces, like my reviews. For example, I've added to the Feedback page on CGI films some criticism of my review of Happy Feet, by Henry Baugh, with my responses.
Two years ago, I published an essay about the discovery of several pages of sketches that appeared to be preliminary drawings by the great Disney animator Norman Ferguson (seen above in a publicity photo from the 1930s) for the famous flypaper sequence in the 1934 Mickey Mouse cartoon Playful Pluto. Now the Oscar-winning Danish animator Børge Ring has offered a persuasive opinion about the role the sketches played in Ferguson's animation of that sequence, along with some information about how the sketches came to light. You can go to the essay, with the new information at the top, by clicking on this link.
I attended this annual festival in Canada two years ago and enjoyed it. It's certainly worth a few days of your time if you have any kind of serious interest in animation. Basic information is now available online, at this link, with much more to come. The dates are October 14-18, but for people who want to submit films for the judging, the critical dates are June 1 (the deadline for the online form) and June 15 (the deadline for submitting films on DVD). There's no entry fee. You can sign up on the festival site for a monthly email newsletter. The subjects of this year's retrospectives will be Don Hertzfeldt, Suzan Pitt, Jim Blashfield, Stan VanDerBeek, and Studio Film Bilder.
I've used my review of The Art of Pixar Short Films and The Alchemy of Animation as a soapbox for some thoughts about Disney's new "online community" and related matters. You can read my review by clicking on this link.
Up for auction on eBay last weekend, the original 8 x 10 negative for this publicity photo of Bob McKimson at his animation desk at the Schlesinger studio, circa 1936, with model sheets for Porky Pig and the Friz Freleng Merrie Melodie Boulevardier from the Bronx on display. The winning bid: $284.99. No, I can't believe that figure either.
My copy of this photo originated with Bob Clampett, who had a copy negative and print made for me from his 8 x 10 print at Producers Photo Lab in Hollywood—at a cost to me of considerably less than $284.99, I hasten to add.
Back on February 7, I ran a 1927 photo that Gunnar Andreassen had found, of the intersection of Hyperion Avenue and Griffith Park Boulevard in Los Angeles. The very early Disney studio was just out of the camera's range. Dan Briney was inspired to visit that intersection and take a photo of it as it is today, and you can see the result above. Dan writes:
Today I decided to drive up to L.A. to visit an address we all know well: 2719 Hyperion Avenue. Or at least, the supermarket parking lot that used to be 2719 Hyperion Avenue. Even with the old Disney Studio long gone, it is still a profound experience to walk where the most fabled chapters of animation history were written. (David R. Smith's article "Disney Before Burbank" from a 1978 Funnyworld was a huge help in trying to pinpoint the location of Walt's original office.)
The picture (attached) isn't at an angle perfectly corresponding to the original photo—which I wish I had brought along as a reference—but it's still interesting to compare the two views. In particular, you can see a mountain peak in the background of my photo that is dimly visible in the 1927 photo. It's about the only feature that's recognizable across 82 years.
Visiting Los Angeles usually cures me of any desire to do so again for a very, very long time; God only knows what this area is going to look like whenever I summon the spirit to go back. I think about Walt and his crew toiling away here in the '20s and '30s and wonder if they could ever, in their wildest imaginations, have imagined Hyperion Avenue in the 21st Century. They were probably better off not knowing.
We are very pleased to inform you that the Holland Animation Film Festival is from now on an annual event.
The 13th edition of the festival takes place from 4 - 8 November 2009.
We kindly invite you to submit your film for this festival edition, for the following competitions:
Competition for Independent Animated Shorts in the categories narrative and non-narrative
Competition for Applied Animation in the categories commercials, educational films, music videos and leaders
The entry forms for these competitions are available at www.haff.nl.
Deadline for all entries: 1 July 2009.
Holland Animation Film Festival,
the unique five-day international meeting place for all professionals, animation lovers, producers, students, upcoming talents and all interested audiences. Featuring retrospectives, thematic programmes, master classes, talk shows, exhibitions, installations, SFX/VFX and much more.
...And from Voice Artist Bob Bergen
I'm performing my one-man show in New York City April 22 and 23. If you happen to be in NYC or have friends in the Big Apple who are fans of all things cartoon, please spread the word, come and see the show, etc!
Here's the scoop: "BOB BERGEN: SO, HERE'S THE DEAL" (the story of a nice Jewish boy who wanted to be Porky Pig) makes its NYC debut April 22 & 23 at Don't Tell Mama.
Reservations NOW being accepted!!!
Click here to reserve for April 22 OR here for April 23. Check out the show trailer.
My April 2 post about Don Bluth stimulated several interesting comments, which you can read by clicking on this link. I particularly like Marc Colangelo's comparison of Bluth and Hugh Harman.
My post was a response to a sort-of-pro-Bluth post by Michael Sporn. Michael responded to my post with a lengthy rebuttal, which has inspired a lot of comments from his visitors. I wonder how many years it has been since anyone thought this much about Don Bluth. That's Bluth above at the center, with animators John Pomeroy, left, and Gary Goldman, in a photo taken in 1979, soon after Bluth and his colleagues had left the Disney studio to start Don Bluth Productions. Their first feature followed three years later.
The critical question, I suppose, is whether Bluth's generally dismal features benefited the animation industry as a whole, as Michael believes and as I do not. I regard the "Bluth saved the industry in the 1980s" argument as skeptically as I regard the argument that Hanna and Barbera's TV cartoons "saved" the industry a quarter century earlier. As I wrote more than a year ago:
It's undoubtedly true that in one sense Hanna-Barbera and, later, Filmation "saved" the Hollywood animation industry. I'm not sure that was necessarily a good thing. For decades, thanks to the success of the H-B cartoons and their imitators, the industry has been dominated by studios of an intensely commercial kind, and most of its product has been dismissed, rightly, as kiddie junk. If the industry had survived in a much-diminished form, but making better films—that is, if it bore a closer resemblance to New York's animation industry—would that have been so bad?
Likewise, Bluth's films, even more than the Disney features themselves, encouraged the idea, especially among lazy critics, that real animation, the only kind worth taking seriously (certainly as a commercial proposition), was pseudo-Disney animation—"full, rich, warm, colorful" animation, as a Bluth press release put it—and everything else was second- or third-rate.
As Michael Sporn mentions in his response to one of his commenters, he and I sat together when we heard Bluth speak at the Kennedy Center, in the American Film Institute's theater, around the time that Bluth's first feature, The Secret of NIMH, was released in the summer of 1982. Michael and I saw a lot of each other in those days. Phyllis and I lived in Alexandria, Virginia, right across the Potomac from Washington, D.C., and Michael and his friend and collaborator Maxine Fisher drove down from New York often to stay with us for the weekend. We drove or trained north for short visits with them. None of us had much money to spare, but most of the Washington museums didn't charge admission, and ethnic restaurants and AFI tickets were cheap. The AFI theater was wonderful in those pre-video days, a haven where you could see lots of films that were all but impossible to see otherwise.
I had forgotten about Bluth's 1982 appearance, and I've struggled to call up memories of it. I can remember vividly the AFI appearances by many other animation people, including Chuck Jones, Bob Clampett, Friz Freleng, Woolie Reitherman, Frank Thomas, Ollie Johnston, Joe Oriolo, Shamus Culhane, Faith Hubley...the list is a remarkably long one, especially considering that most of those people lived on the other side of the country. But Bluth's speech is hazy in my memory, I think because he seemed opaque as a person. Michael remembers Bluth's talk as resembling a sermon, and that sounds right.
In that connection, I don't think it's necessarily bigoted to point to Bluth's Mormon faith as an element in his personality as a filmmaker. (He grew up in Payson, Utah, and quit as a Disney inbetweener in 1956 to spend two years as a Mormon missionary in Argentina.) Mormons seem to be as culturally distinct a people as, say, Jewish New Yorkers; that is certainly my impression after several visits to Utah, including a few hours in Temple Square. No one would think it bigoted to suggest that Woody Allen's identity as a Jewish New Yorker is a driver of his comedy, and Bluth's strong identity as a Utah Mormon invites speculation in the same vein.
Possibly Bluth's personal history has even shaped his films in unfortunate directions. I haven't seen The Secret of NIMH since it was released, but I've carried the phrase "unearned exaltation" in my mind since then. Mrs. Brisby's triumph somehow seemed like a religious victory achieved without enough work. But maybe I should see that film again, since there's wide agreement that it's Bluth's best.
Michael Sporn has posted a couple of items recently in connection with the DVD release of Don Bluth's 1979 short Banjo the Woodpile Cat. Michael's comments on the film, and on Bluth's work generally, are typically generous and open-hearted. He says: "My only sadness is that the Bluth studio isn’t moving forward with more features. I’m sure it’s difficult in these 3D days, and the energy required is for the young, but I wish he could engender the cash to continue on with the medium."
I couldn't disagree more. Bluth is for me a white-bread Ralph Bakshi, someone who sucked up money that should have gone to other people, then used it to make terrible features that tanked at the box office and ultimately made it more difficult for good films to get produced. If Bluth is finally on the sidelines, that's cause for rejoicing. I hope he stays there.
I haven't devoted much time to thinking or writing about Bluth, but I did write at some length about his films in my review of the Disney disaster Treasure Planet; it was one of the first reviews I posted on this site, almost six years ago. I've just re-read that review, for the first time in a few years, and I'm pleased with how well it holds up. I think you'll enjoy my piece, unless you're longing for a sequel to Bluth's Anastasia.
As you probably already know from Cartoon Brew, I was interviewed Monday by Doug Fabrizio of KUER, the University of Utah's public radio station, on the hour-long show called RadioWest. You can hear the podcast by going to this link. We talked not about Disney, the subject of most of my occasional radio interviews the last couple of years, but about the Warner cartoons and my book Hollywood Cartoons: American Animation in Its Golden Age, among other things.
The New York Times has a story today about the Walt Disney Family Museum in San Francisco's Presidio, which is scheduled to open in October. You can also visit the Family Museum's Web site (now being reconstructed in anticipation of the October opening) at this link. The online version of the Times story includes a seven-item slide show; the above photo of Walt's daughter Diane Disney Miller, in front of the museum, is from that slide show.
The Times story says that Diane, the Family Museum's founder and presiding intelligence, was "dismayed" by Neal Gabler's 2006 biography, Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination. That will not come as news to longtime visitors to this site, who will recall the 2007 piece in which I reported that Diane had denounced the book to Disney executives—who gave Gabler lots of help—as "a monstrous piece of libelous junk." (The last I heard, she had received no response.) The Gabler book got mostly adoring praise in the mainstream media, the Times included, so it's good to see a least a whisper of dissent in that newspaper. Perhaps over time Gabler's book will be displaced from its wholly unjustified position as the "standard" Disney biography.
I've never made any secret of my own low opinion of Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination. My review is at this link, and a list of the book's errors and distortions is at this one. I haven't added much to that list lately, but that's not because new mistakes don't keep turning up. I just get tired of keeping track of them.
The Times also says:
Speaking of the company, Mrs. Miller hasn’t been especially thrilled with aspects of its stewardship, either. "They try, but there is nobody there anymore who actually knew him," she said. Disney the man, she frets, has gotten lost as his empire pushes its brand across the globe.
"My kids have literally encountered people who didn’t know that my father was a person," said Mrs. Miller, who has seven children with her husband, Ronald. "They think he’s just some kind of corporate logo." ...
Disney executives declined to comment. They are probably puzzled by Mrs. Miller’s concerns, given the attention the company gives her father. Disney releases DVDs called "Walt Disney Treasures" that feature his television appearances and operates a museum-style attraction about his life at Walt Disney World. The company recently issued collectible figurines in his likeness and runs a fan club and magazine dedicated to him; part of its California Adventure Park is being rebuilt to reflect Disney’s early days in the state.
"Collectible figures in his likeness"...what more could one expect, really? Only that the theme parks sel
It's flattering to an author when someone takes his work seriously enough to really study it, whether to build on it or to find holes in his research or his reasoning. Gunnar Andreassen, a Norwegian friend of the site, was prompted by some postings here to devote that kind of study to what I wrote about the evolution of the Disney storyboard (and Albert Hurter's role in story work) in 
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I can vouch for how evocative the Kansas City Disney sites are, even in their current dilapidated state, if one is willing to make the imaginative effort.
Jim Korkis, who was recently laid off by Walt Disney World despite (or maybe because of) his exceptional knowledge of Disney history, has written to offer a possible explanation for a cameo appearance by "Walt Disney" in the 1944 Columbia feature Once Upon a Time, the subject of my 
You should be visiting 
When I put up Dan Briney's photo of the intersection of Hyperion Avenue and Griffith Park Boulevard—the location, long ago, of the Disney studio in its greatest days—on 
Børge suggests that there is a better way to get a sense of what Dave Hand was like, and it's by watching a movie that was made several years after he left the Disney studio:
I've praised 
Floyd Norman, aka Mr. Fun 
Michael Sporn