The Screengrab : winsor mckay

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

“Pinocchio in Outer Space” and Other Forgotten Cartoons

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 16:00:00 GMT

Have you seen Mad Monster Party lately? “Featuring the final screen ‘appearance’ of horror icon Boris Karloff, Mad Monster Party was co-written by comics legend Harvey Kurtzman, creator of the original Mad comic books, and featured character designs by cartoonist Jack Davis of Mad Magazine and EC comics — a genius at combining humor and grotesquerie.” Or how about Down and Dirty Duck? “Likely assembled as a quick cash-in on the underground success of Ralph Bakshi's Fritz the Cat, Down and Dirty Duck was put together with the assistance of erstwhile Turtles (and Mothers of Invention) Mark Volman and Howard Kaylan (nee Flo and Eddie), who contributed voice, music and plot elements. (The duo’s former employer, Frank Zappa, makes a cameo appearance during a particularly bizarre segment in which his head rises, sunlike, in the sky over the main characters.)”

These are but two entries in Bullz-Eye.com’s eye-opening Animated and Forgotten: Feature Length Cartoons You May Not Remember. (The key words there being “may not.” It’s a fun list, but how could we ever forget The Incredible Mr. Limpet and The Iron Giant?) You can read the whole thing here, but if you want to see video clips from some of these obscurities, you’ve come to the right place:

PINOCCHIO IN OUTER SPACE (1965)

One advantage to being a wooden boy: when you travel to other planets, no space helmets are necessary. But why is that goofy turtle trying to romance him?

MAD MONSTER PARTY (1969)

Little Tibia and the Fibias rock, but what could be more disturbing than a stop-motion Phyllis Diller unwrapping the poor Mummy while he’s trying to get his groove on?

THE POINT! (1971)

The animation in this acid-trip inspired Harry Nilsson musical is a little, how shall we say, crude by today’s standards, but you’re never going to hear a more charming ditty about decomposition than “Think About Your Troubles.”

ROCK AND RULE (1983)

Apparently Mick Jagger didn’t care much for Lou Reed’s performance as “Mok Swagger” in this “post-apocalyptic tale of satanic magic and the rock and roll lifestyle among mutated, extremely anthropomorphic, cats, dogs, and rats.”

LITTLE NEMO: ADVENTURES IN SLUMBERLAND (1989)

Not to be confused with Finding Nemo, this adaptation of the Winsor McKay comic strip is hard to find, but you can watch the whole thing on YouTube starting here:

Animated Film Awards Announced: "Ratatouille" Takes the Cheese

Phil Nugent — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 16:00:00 GMT

The 35th annual "Annies" awards, held in Los Angeles by the International Animated Film Society, has given a slew of prizes, including the top award of Best Animated Feature, to Pixar's Ratatouille, thus making it the No Country for Old Men of films about gifted culinary-minded vermin. The film's writer-director, Brad Bird won for Best Director and Best Screenplay; the film also took home prizes for Best Music, Best Character Design, Best Character Design, Best Storyboarding, and Best Voice Actor: Ian Holm, who played the villainous French chef Skinner, and whose thorough deservingness of this award can perhaps be measured by the fact that I myself saw the movie twice and didn't realize until I saw this announcement that I was listening to Ian freakin' Holm! Awards also went to a couple of Ratatouille spin-offs: the movie's animated video game and the short film Your Friend the Rat, which features characters from Ratatouille and is included in the movie's DVD editions. The awards for Best Animated Effects and Production Artist went to the penguin-hits-the-waves movie Surf's Up, possibly because whoever labels the awards just got really sick of writing "Ratatouille." The Best Animated Feature award is seen as a strong indicator of which film is liable to take the Academy Award in that category, though this year it may not be as strong an indicator of Ratatouille's chances as the fact that if Bee Movie wins instead, we're gonna burn Los Angeles to the ground! The society also celebrates excellence in the field of television animation; notable winners this year included Seth Green for directing the Star Wars episode of Robot Chicken and Ian Maxtone-Graham and Billy Kimball for writing the episode of The Simpsons that lampooned 24, choices designed to set an army of geeks somersaulting past Forbidden Planet at noon with Roman candles held between their teeth. The society also its Winsor McKay career achievement awards on independent animated filmmaker and animation historian John Canemaker, Disney filmmaking veteran Glen Keane, and Ren and Stimpy's dad, John Kricfalusi.