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

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

A CHARLIE BROWN CHRISTMAS (1965)

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

LUPO THE BUTCHER (1987)

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

MECHANICAL MONSTERS (1941)

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

MINNIE THE MOOCHER (1932)

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

MUNRO (1961)

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

RYAN (2004)

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

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

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent

Oscar Shorts, Part 2: Best Animated Short Film

Paul Clark — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 20:00:00 GMT

More often than not, the winner of the Best Animated Short Film category seems like a foregone conclusion. With such major Hollywood players as Pixar, Disney, and Blue Sky in the mix, it can be hard for the up-and-coming animator to compete for the prize. But this year is different. There’s no big animation studio in the mix, which should make for an interesting Oscar race. In addition, there are a number of worthy nominees in the race, so one hopes quality will be the primary factor in voters’ decisions.

At a time when Hollywood animated features all seem to boast a similar visual aesthetic — largely a modified CGI take on the classic Disney style — it’s good to see diversity in this year’s crop of Oscar-nominated shorts. Consider the Russian entry, My Love, animated in a painterly style with plenty of swirling brushstrokes. This style is a good match for its classically-bound story, set in czarist Russia and inspired by Turgenev. My Love, directed by Alexander Petrov, is a poignant evocation of first love, and a rich and rewarding film.

The film with the broadest mainstream appeal is Josh Raskin’s I Met the Walrus, which also boasts the best backstory of the five nominees. In 1969, fourteen-year-old Jerry Levitan snuck into John Lennon’s hotel room and persuaded him to do a short interview, and almost four decades later Levitan and Raskin have turned that interview into a film. If only the film itself were so interesting — Raskin’s style is shallow and uninspired, literalizing Lennon’s remarks by matching them with sub-Gilliam visual equivalents. As far as films like this go, it pales in comparison with Chris Landreth’s 2004 Oscar-winner Ryan, which was similarly inspired by an interview but made for compelling cinema with its expressive style and bittersweet tone. By comparison, I Met the Walrus is a stunt.

Also taking its cue from a dearly departed musical master is Suzie Templeton and Hugh Welchman’s Peter and the Wolf, a new take on Prokofiev’s classic. One of three stop-motion films in competition this year, the film follows Peter and his animal friends into the forest where of course they meet a wolf. The story is nothing new, but the animation is impressive. I especially liked the backgrounds, full of gnarly trees and dark corners, but the characters were fun as well, my favorite being a fat, mean cat who looked suspiciously like Orson Welles as Falstaff.

I was somewhat more mixed on the French stop-motion nominee, Même les Pigeons Vont Au Paradis (Even Pigeons Go to Heaven). Samuel Tourneux and Simon Vanesse’s short tells the story of a priest who tries to convince an old miser to buy a machine that will guarantee him entry into heaven. The animation is good-looking, but the filmmaking isn’t particularly inspired, and the pacing feels rushed. In the end, Pigeons is more or less a one-joke movie, not up to the high standard set by some of the other nominees.

Finally, the third stop-motion entry and the best of this year’s nominees is Madame Tutli-Putli, which follows the titular mousy heroine as she experiences a number of strange events on a bizarre night train. Chris Lavis and Maciek Szczerbowski’s film is light on story, but overflowing with style. In addition, Madame Tutli-Putli is a masterpiece of tone, perfectly capturing the forlorn feel of an overcrowded train car, as well as moments of humor, suspense, and visual poetry. Madame Tutli-Putli is perhaps too obscure for the Academy voters — pessimist that I am, I anticipate that they might go for I Met the Walrus or Even Pigeons Go to Heaven. But it’s a wonder, and I expect that it’ll still be watched long after the other films have been forgotten.

The Screengrab : chris landreth

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

Oscar Shorts, Part 2: Best Animated Short Film