The Screengrab : bambi

Final Farewells: The Best & Worst Death Scenes In Cinema (Part Five)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 21 May 2009 22:00:00 GMT

Bambi’s Mother in BAMBI (1942) & Debra Winger in TERMS OF ENDEARMENT (1983)

The actual moment that Debra Winger’s character dies in Terms of Endearment is all well and weepy (and fairly Goth, what with that deathbed make-up job), but the real reason James L. Brooks’ ten-hanky drama makes the list is the gut-punch scene where Winger’s dying Emma Greenway Horton says goodbye to her two sons in the hospital, easily the most harrowing family tragedy scene since the national trauma induced by the off-screen demise of Bambi’s mother (thanks to goddamn Man entering the forest) way back in 1942. In the all-time Top Ten of throat-lump-inducing lines of dialogue, it’s hard to beat Mr. Bambi’s grim pronouncement, “Your mother can’t be with you anymore.” But for me, no single moment of cinema is sadder than Winger’s Emma telling her youngest son, after their final visit together, “I think it went pretty well, don’t you?” -- except maybe the look on the little kid’s face when he bravely nods goodbye. (Now if you'll excuse me, I...uh...think there’s something in my eye...) (AO)

Warren Oates in BRING ME THE HEAD OF ALFREDO GARCIA (1974)

Bennie the down-on-his-luck piano player just wanted to make an easy buck. Some rich guy who calls himself El Jefe was promising money in exchange for proof that a poonhound Bennie knows, one Alfredo Garcia, was dead. Sure, Bennie knew that proof might involve a little grave robbery, but the promise of money and a new beginning with his ladyfriend Elita gave his small-change dreams a lift. What he didn't know was that every step he made was shadowed by death and failure. First he has to kill a couple of bikers who intend to rape Elita. Then, when he finds the body, he loses Elita along with whatever remnants of his soul he had kept scraped together. After he recovers his precious proof of death, the severed head of the poonhound, the death toll mounts furiously while Bennie grows more and more unhinged, monologuing in his car to the filthy, fly-streaked bag in which Garcia's head rots. There's something rotten in Bennie now. There's something rotten in the whole scenario, and when he finally confronts El Jefe, he's beyond caring about life and death. He has nowhere else to go, and the trajectory of his life will soon converge into a single point with the probability of his death. (HC)

Warren Oates in MAJOR DUNDEE (1965)

It's supposed to be Moby-Dick in the Old West, but where the Great Whaling Book starts cooking with grease about 2/3 of the way in, Major Dundee falls to pieces. With Charlton Heston and Richard Harris in the lead roles, there's a Christmas dinner's worth of ham smeared all over even the good parts. But the supporting cast is excellent. And when Warren Oates, playing ne'er-do-well Confederate soldier O.W. Hadley, deserts and is captured, the supporting staff quietly, almost wordlessly, shows up the stars of the movie. In the above scene, consider how natural Oates seems, how L.Q. Jones and Ben Johnson express their characters' tension, sorrow, and anger with barely a sentence between them. The movie falls apart after this. It seems that Oates, with his weird energy and comic timing, was the thread holding everything together. (HC)

Joel McCrea in RIDE THE HIGH COUNTRY (1962)

Although the clip is nowhere to be found on YouTube, Joel McCrea's Steve Judd goes out with a dignity that all who live by the gun -- or whatever "living by the gun" means metaphorically these days -- should aspire to. Earlier, he tells his old friend Gil Westrum (Randolph Scott) that he "just wants to enter [his] house justified." When Westrum makes to steal the gold that's under their protection, Judd is a step ahead of him, but the disappointment in the way he looks at Westrum is almost worse than his threat to make Westrum stand trial. The final shootout isn't about the gold, though. It's about the girl they're protecting from the feral mining family she's gotten herself mixed up with. Westrum redeems himself at the end, choosing to take the honorable side and stand with his friend. When Judd is mortally wounded, Westrum has the wisdom to step back, shield the young people from the blunt reality of death, and give Judd the closure he wants: alone, justified, eyes gazing up at his beloved high country. (HC)

Toshiro Mifune in THRONE OF BLOOD (1957)

Here's something all of you aspiring regicides should know: when the witch or witches make a prophecy about your success or failure, don't share it with anyone. Macbeth saw his thanes defect to the other side and was finally dispatched by Macduff, whose rough birth made him Macbeth's ideal assassin. Toshiro Mifune's Lord Washizu meets death at the hands of his own archers in a spectacular rain of arrows as he runs from place to place, bamboo shafts sticking out of his body at odd angles, his face a mask of horror, fear, betrayal, and anger. It's a crime that this scene isn't available on the youtubes. (HC)

Takashi Shimura in IKIRU (1952)

Takashi Shimura's face is, even in rest, a remarkable vehicle for his emotions. Perhaps its highest calling was carrying the stricken look he uses throughout Ikiru as Kanji Watanabe, a dying bureaucrat who realizes that his life will mean nothing when he is gone. He decides that his decades of pointless public service will be worth it if he can turn a stinking cesspool of a lot in an unappreciated corner of Tokyo into a park with a playground for children. The final third of the movie leaps forward to his funeral, as his family and co-workers discuss his drive and mission, growing more and more grief-stricken as they realize why he fought so hard for this little playground. At the end, we hear and see the testimonial of a police officer who saw Watanabe on the final night of his life, sitting on a swing in the park that is his legacy for the world, with his face transformed. All of the fear and sadness that he had been carrying in every scene of the movie has become into a beaming look of pure and simple satisfaction and joy. It's one of the most impressive and powerful emotional gut-punches in all of cinema. (HC)

Click Here For Part One, Two, Three, Four, Six, Seven, Eight & Nine

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Hayden Childs

"Earth": Disney Gets Back to Nature

Phil Nugent — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 15:00:00 GMT

The Disney "True-Life Adventure" series of nature films that the studio began putting out in 1948 were not begun with grand ambitions. Walt Disney wanted to provide his animators with actual footage of animals in their natural habitat for research purposes, and Disney was not a man to waste stuff. Originally produced by Walt's nephew Roy Disney, the series wound up running a dozen years, winning a shelf full of awards, inspiring comic books and a panel cartoon newspaper series that outlasted the film series by a decade, and being recycled on Disney's TV show. (They can now all be had as a four-volume, double-disc DVD series.) Now, emboldened, perhaps in the sense that the fox was emboldened by the sight of those grapes, by such successes as the elevesn-part Discovery Channel series Planet Earth, Disney is looking to tap back into the audience for nature documentaries, which is now associated with the enthusiasm for all things green. The new movie is called Earth, and you may feel that you're picking up hints about the mindset at Disney these days when you see the TV commercials for the film (which opens on April 22, Earth Day) and hear a disembodied voice insisting that it's "even better than March of the Penguins." One the other hand, Disney has a history of using animals, both live and animated, to mangle kids' hearts, that it may have to live down if it wants to appeal to this market. Donna Farmer, a Los Angeles Web designer with two kids, told The New York Times, “I don’t need another Bambi moment."

The movie, which was made by the Planet Earth folks (including producer/director Alastair Fothergill) and is narrated by James Earl Jones, is the opening salvo from Disneynature, a new branch of the company headed by Jean-Francois Camilleri, with offices based in France. “Movies have grown so artificial — computer-generated and such, says Camilleri, "that there is a strong desire to see something beautiful and real.” Of course, we all have different ideas of what's beautiful. And not all nature documentary makers even have the same idea of what's real. The "classic" Disney series used a lot of sweetening, including staging scenes to create a "narrative", which sometimes made the animals seem as anthropomorphic as Cinderella's mice pals. (At the same time, Brooks Barnes notes, some cultural theorists "draw a line between his empathetic depiction of animals and the eco-political climate of the 1960s and beyond. Before the “True-Life” documentaries, wild animals were largely depicted on the big screen as objects to be killed and collected...Walt Disney gave them personalities, a vision that would draw criticism but ultimately influenced modern distaste for zoo cages and cramped aquariums.") The new movie depicts a year in the lives of three animal "families", and while the movie doesn't deny that nature often plays rough, it tries to finesse the ways in which it shows this truth so as to minimize the number of traumas in the audience. Baby elephants bite the dust, but off-screen. Originally Disneynature hoped to release two pictures a year, but a reality check has obliged them to scale those plans back. As Roy Disney probably could have explained to them over the course of a phone call, it takes a long time in the field to shoot one of these things.

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

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

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

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

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

GERTIE THE DINOSAUR (1914)

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

BAMBI MEETS GODZILLA (1969) and ANIJAM (1984)

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

DUCK AMUCK (1953)

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

REJECTED (2000)

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

STREET OF CROCODILES (1986)

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

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

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent, Paul Clark

P.S. Your Deer Is Dead

Leonard Pierce — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 15:00:00 GMT

Disney, as Disney is fond of reminding us, is not just a movie company or an entertainment conglomerate: it's a kingdom, a lifestyle, almost a religion. And if that's true, its position on the major issues of the day are more than just fodder for the back pages of their annual stockholder report: they're front page news, or even the subject of scholarly tomes.

Such, as the New York Times reports, is the case with Disney's environmental record. Throughout its history, Disney has played both sides of the ecological fence: it recently announced the formation of a new film unit exclusively dedicated to creating nature documentaries, while its theme parks are denounced by environmentalists as resource-draining, pollution-spewing nightmares; its previous science films have sparked the interest of children in wildlife and conservation, while attracting charges of exaggeration or outright fakery; and its beloved animated children's classics have cemented a protective attitude towards nature in the minds of entire generations, while both hunters and animal rights activists claim that they present a distorted and dangerous view of animal life.

Two new books have recently appeared on the market, reflecting the Disney dichotomy as regards the world of nature. David Whitley of Cambridge University has penned The Idea of Nature in Disney Animation, a prolix pro-Disney statement of purpise in which he argues that Disney has done perhaps more than any other institution to promote environmentalism: "These films", he says of Disney's animated canon, "have taught us variously about having a fundamental respect for nature. Some of them, such as Bambi, inspired conservation awareness and laid the emotional groundwork for environmental activism." Ralph Lutts of Oxford, however, takes issue with that notion in his The Nature Fakers: Wildlife, Science, & Sentiment, taking the films to task for their "Sunday School vision of nature as a place without stress, conflict, or death."

The debate looks to intensify with the foundation of Disneynature, and author Patricia Cohen notes that even internally, the message isn't always clear-cut, as the John Muir unspoiled-wilderness environmentalism of early Disney films like Bambi is giving way to a Nature Conservatory view in movies like Finding Nemo, where humans and animals find a happy medium of coexistence. One problem, though: what of Pixar? What message are we sending our children about the issue of safe spaces for robots, living toys, and talking cars?

Ollie Johnston, 1912--2008

Phil Nugent — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 15:00:00 GMT

The death of animator Ollie Johnston, at 95, marks the end of our first-hand access to an era: Johnston, who worked at Disney from 1935 until his retirement in 1978, was the last member of the core group of the studio's animators who were known collevtively as "the nine old men." (Most of them were in their twenties when they were given that label.) Johnston worked in various major capacities on such features as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Fantasia, Pinocchio, and Bambi; among other accomplishments, he was famous, or notorious, for having animated the death of Bambi's mother, thus making him responsible for several generations of childhood traumas. A real company man, he married a co-worker, a Disney pen-and-ink artist named Marie. (The marriage lasted for 63 years, until his wife's death in 2005.)

Among animation geeks, his name came to be closely associated with a fellow member of the nine old men, Frank Thomas, who he knew at Stanford University and who retired from Disney the same year he did. The two were popular attractions on the lecture circuit and co-authored a number of books aimed at recording and preserving the story of how the Disney classics came to be made, including Bambi: The Story and the Film, The Disney Villains, and Disney Animation: The Illusion of Life. Their own story was the subject of a 1995 documentary feature, Frank and Ollie, which was made by Frank's son Theodore Thomas. Their shared website is here. Frank Thomas died in 2004.