The Screengrab : jules feiffer

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

Famous Last Words: Round 1 Finale... or is it?

Paul Clark — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 19:00:00 GMT

In its initial Broadway run, Jules Feiffer's pitch-black satire Little Murders lasted a grand total of seven performances. Likewise, Alan Arkin's big screen adaptation, his feature debut and the source of last week's quote, was a box-office flop. However, time has been extremely kind to the film, a hilariously nasty piece of work. Little Murders boasts a perfect early-seventies cast, starting Elliott Gould as the near-comatose antihero Alfred, who takes perhaps the most darkly funny subway ride ever. The ensemble also includes Gould's MASH costar Donald Sutherland as a blissed-out preacher, Arkin himself as a typically Arkinesque police detective, Marcia Rodd (who thereafter worked primarily in television) as Gould's girlfriend Patsy, and Vincent Gardenia and Elizabeth Wilson as Patsy's bizarre parents. It's Wilson who gets to deliver that last line, which only sounds like something out of Norman Rockwell. Congrats to those of you who guessed it.

I had originally intended to post the winners of our first round of Famous Last Words this week, but unfortunately we've got more contenders for the three top spots than we have Criterion gift cards to give them. So rather than continuing the round ad infinitum, I've decided to run a three-quote tiebreaker this week that will hopefully determine our winners. I've already informed the contenders who they are via e-Mail, but I'll go ahead and post their quotes here as well, in case anyone else wants to play along for fun. Here they are:

1. “That was a lot of running. I’m out of breath.”

2. “Come on, chums! Snap out of it!”

3. “We’ve been friends a long time now. I never asked a friend to do something he really couldn’t do if I knew he couldn’t do it. Have a nice day.”

Remember, if you still want to submit guesses for these quotes (even though they won't count for anything), send them to famouslastwords@nerve.com no later than 11:59 PM Eastern next Wednesday. And tune in next week, when hopefully I'll be able to post the winners.

Video of the Day: "Little Murders"

Peter Smith — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 17:00:00 GMT

In the first flush of his stardom, Donald Sutherland was a counterculture hero: the original Hawkeye Pierce in Robert Altman's M*A*S*H, a key participant in the anti-Vietnam "F.T.A." shows, and the movies' only stoned-hippie-World-War-II-tank-commander in Kelly's Heroes. It must say something about the culture, though God knows what, that he now plays a white-maned capitalist lion in the TV series Dirty Sexy Money. The show is pure cheese, but Sutherland is terrific in it. (We don't know what ABC is paying him, but whatever it is, he deserves twice as much just for continuing to report to work, knowing that every week Peter Krause is going to refer to him, in the explanatory voice-over that precedes each episode, as "Tripp, the empire builder.") In the most recent one, he walked his much-divorced, sexy-airhead daughter (played by the peerlessly glassy-eyed Natalie Zea) down the aisle yet again, a chore that he prepared for by getting and staying good and plowed the whole day and night, the better to dull the pain when she made her inevitable announcement that this marriage, too, just wasn't working out. It was hard not to watch the wedding scenes without remembering one of the funniest moments from the blazing youth of everybody's second-favorite lanky, now-elderly Canadian hippie. (A.: Neil Young, dummy.) We refer of course to his cameo in the 1971 Alan Arkin-Jules Feiffer film Little Murders, where he presides over the nuptials of his M*A*S*H co-star, Elliott Gould. It made us laugh the first time we saw it, and it's still all right. Everything is all right! — Phil Nugent