Odds & Ends
Wednesday, May 07, 2008
Avery, Jones, Clampett
A really interesting bit of animation history appeared over at Thad Komorowski's blog: the infamous "Jones-Avery letter." It is an open letter written by Chuck Jones (and annotated by Tex Avery) angrily denouncing Clampett's attempts to "claim" the history of Warner Bros. cartoons. Michael Barrier adds his commentary from an old essay on the letter here; the letter also provides interesting backgorund to this essay by Milton Gray here.  It's one of the great stories of animation: the three best directors at Warner Bros., and I think arguably the three greatest figures - outside of Disney - of animation's Golden Age, start as collaborators and finish in their twilight years bickering over their legacy. Jones, in particular, would barely acknowledge Clampett's existence when he talked about the studio. One quibble I have with Barrier's commentary, though, is that he is overly harsh on Jones. While he may well be right that Jones wasn't a nice person in his later years (certainly he is correct that he was a lousy interview subject), and is right to be annoyed that Jones failed to provide Barrier chapter-and-verse rebuttal of Clampett's comments before the letter was published, the basic point is that pretty all of Jones' comments in the letter are spot on. On this point, I agree with Nate Birch's commentary in the comments on Komorowski's blog: Looking at this letter the situation as it went down back then really crystalizes much more clearly and nobody really ends up coming off like a bad guy. Clampett was long removed from Warner's or directing theatrical cartoons and some guy from a small-time publication comes to interview him, so he decides to show off a little. Maybe pass a few drawings that weren't his off as his, fudge a few facts. Clampett wasn't one to take things too seriously and and this was all stuff from a totally different period in his life... I'm sure he thought nobody would really pick up on the interview or care much. Of course he didn't count on Jones, who was still immersed in the world of animation and tended to take the artform more seriously seeing the interview, and he writes a letter trying to put the real history out there even though it probably wasn't really necessary (nobody was going to write history books entirely on the word of Bob Clampett). Still, you can understand where Jones was coming from. Tex was asked to comment and tossed off some notes he probably realized were a bit rash and later apologized. Really, much ado about nothing.I find it pretty easy to understand Jones' anger at works others (including but not limited to himself) labored on being claimed by Clampett, and in that context the tone of his letter is pretty easy to understand. Labels: "chuck jones", animation, clampett Posted by Stephen Rowley @ 7.5.08 - 0 comments  
Saturday, March 29, 2008
The Casting of Tintin
The Age, via The Guardian, have the news that Thomas Sangster has been cast as Tintin in the upcoming Steven Spielberg / Peter Jackson mega-series.  Sangster's best known as Liam Neeson's stepson from Love Actually. I liked him in that film; he was sweet without being saccharine, and he seems like as good a choice as anybody. But the casting of this part really underlines the difficulty that still confronts the Tintin movies. By casting the 17 year old Sangster, the Spielberg and Jackson have acknowledged the popular description of Tintin as a "boy reporter." But in the comics Tintin's age is deliberately ambiguous; indeed, the intriguing thing about Tintin is that he's such a "blank" character. We can read almost anything into Tintin - his age, background, job and so on are left almost completely unexplored. (Even his gender is soft-pedalled; while he's definitely a boy, he's a fairly androgynous one). But maybe Sangster will also become a cypher: we don't yet know quite how much the final film Tintin will look like Sangster, or whether his performance will be translated to a computer generated character who looks like the comic book character. I remain very curious about the proposed technique to be used for the film (and I talked about the difficulties of a computer-generated Tintin here); this could be either a breakthrough film for the medium or a Beowulf-esque testament to its shortcomings. The other interesting news is that Andy Serkis is cast as Captain Haddock. I have previously expressed my admiration for Serkis' collaboration with the Weta people, but perhaps it's time to call "enough!" on the idea that Serkis can play anything or anyone through computer animation. I'm surprised they didn't go with John Rhys-Davies; while Serkis was obviously a comfortable choice for Peter Jackson in particular, I'd have thought Rhys-Davies would have been even more of a natural selection. After all, his two most famous roles are in Spielberg's Indiana Jones films and Jackson's Lord of the Rings series, and he has the bellicose bluster to make a good Haddock. And whenever we mention Rhys-Davies, we have to mention his sort-of double: Brian Blessed. Perhaps he missed the casting call.  Labels: animation, peter jackson, rumours, spielberg, tintin Posted by Stephen Rowley @ 29.3.08 - 1 comments
Friday, March 14, 2008
Round-Up of the Frivolous Things
The site has had, until yesterday, another quiet few weeks, what with one thing another. Whenever I go through one of these periods where I don't have time to get something substantial up (or where, as was the was the case over the last week or so, I'm labouring over something that starts as a short post and ends as a great big one) the temptation is always to keep the page ticking over by posting the various silly things and rumours on this page. But then I get self-conscious about how lightweight some of this stuff is. After I've just published a "proper" article or post, though, I've got no such qualms. So on the coat-tails of my piece on Film Theory, it's time to catch up on the frivolous stuff from the internet. Bees! Bees! Millions of Bees! This one came from Jaime J. Weinman's Something Old, Nothing New, where Weinman was taking about Irwin Allen's The Swarm. A very dumb clip, but it gets me every time: as a commenter over at Weinman's blog put it, the way the guys says "Millions of bees!" makes it sound like he's selling them, not getting killed by them. Bosko Says What? Everyone loves it when a cartoon character swears. Via Cartoon Brew. Clampett Update There's been some good stuff on the internet about Bob Clampett over the last few eeeks: this post by Kristin Thompson looks at some freeze frames from his work and Michael Barrier talks about the cult of Clampett. The latter follows a debate that had played out following Barrier's earlier comments about the merits of Clampett's Buckaroo Bugs; you can follow that earlier debate through links from the more recent piece. If you're not that familiar with Clampett, I would humbly point you towards my earlier essay on him, which was intended as introduction for the uninitiated.  Wall-E.T. The main trailer for Pixar's Wall-E is out. YouTube below, but the much nicer HD version is here. People are really flipping out over this movie. I don't know - I don't find the trailer as completely convincing as others do, and Pixar have lost that aura of invincibility. But here's hoping. Speed Racer Trailer Now here's one that redefines the term "garish." YouTube below but this one you really need to see in HD (here). Who knows what to make of this. It kind of looks hideous and badly shot, but then I've commented just recently on what good action directors the Wachowskis are. Harry Potter and the Multiple Films And apparently Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows is to be two movies. Given the really good bits of the last book are in the second half (see here for my comments when the book came out) this strikes me as unwise. Perhaps they can give the first half of the book, where the kinds are wandering the country, an epic Lord of the Rings-ish scope. But I think they risk getting a real dud out of this. Labels: animation, bordwell, clampett, harry potter, humour, pixar, rumours, trailers Posted by Stephen Rowley @ 14.3.08 - 0 comments
Sunday, August 26, 2007
The Beowulf Express
A new trailer / preview reel for Robert Zemeckis' Beowulf has hit the net. The best version is here, but there's a YouTube version below in case that's too much of a download. Unfortunately, though, the trailer is sufficiently dark and choppy that it looks pretty awful when it's been Youtube-ised. I'll skip my standard spiel on the uncanny valley (see here for some of my earlier comments). What this Beowulf trailer made me think about is how conflicted I am about the potential of these sort of highly digitised movies. By that I mean movies where most or all of the environments are either computer generated sets, or highly manipulated with computers, whether these use human actors (as in Sin City) or live-action-like motion-capped animation (a la Polar Express or Beowulf). The divide between the animated and non-animated films in this genre seems to be largely trivial now: because these projects use animation that is motion-capped off real performers, and which aspires to photorealism, in an aesthetic sense they are essentially the same thing. (True animated films, like those made by Pixar, are a different beast again.) The films I'm thinking of are distinguished instead by their aspirations to harness realistic-looking performers to highly artificial environments. There are a whole lot of techno-geek directors who seem to have decided this is the way of the future: Zemeckis is one, but there's also James Cameron (with his uber-sci fi project Avatar), Robert Rodriguez (Sin City), George Lucas (given how far the new Star Wars films went down this road), and Peter Jackson & Steven Spielberg (with their upcoming Tintin movies, which I talked about here). As I said, I have mixed feelings about this. Looking at this Beowulf footage, and discounting the pointless pseudo-animation on the humans, you can see that there is enormous potential in this technology: it frees filmmaker form all sorts of logistical and technical shackles that go with traditional techniques. And we saw in Sin City that you could get a really distinctive look in this way. Yet so far for the most part what we are seeing is the aesthetics of computer games transferred to the cinema. The elimination (or minimisation) of sets means that we get the free-floating camera familiar to gamers. The fact that it's all put together in the computer, rather than having to work around the realities of celluloid and lenses and light, gives us the same cinematographic tics you get in games (bleach-bypassed looks like in 300, or other highly synthetic visual schemes). The bad animation in the Zemeckis films is reminiscent of game cutscenes. And when you add in all the other cliches of computer-effects (massive battle sequences, swarms of objects or creatures), you start to get a series of fairly indistinguishable looking films. I'm not such a luddite that I think the emergence of computer game aesthetics in cinema is an inherently bad thing. But what we're seeing at the moment is the influence of computer game cliches. Filmmakers are being granted enormous freedom, but having won that freedom they're all choosing to do the same thing. Posted by Stephen Rowley @ 26.8.07 - 0 comments
Monday, July 30, 2007
MIFF Report, Part I
A good start to MIFF this year, with two enjoyable sessions on the weekend. Before I get to my reports, though, it is worth noting that Paul Martin is keeping what looks to be a very helpful running list of films that are nearly sold out. The Best of Norman McLaren I had thought this retrospective of Canadian animator Norman McLaren might be the cinematic equivalent of eating my greens, but this was unexpectedly enjoyable. This selection of McLaren's films alternated between highly abstract animation and little comic skits done in a semi-animated style using human bodies. I'm not usually keen on abstract films, as the lack of any meaningful framework in which to assess the work leaves the artist completely unaccountable to the audience (who can ever say whether the work is of any merit?) Yet McLaren's work defied my expectations, especially surprising given that one long slog is hardly the way to appreciate this kind of film. The shorts are remarkable for the level of energy and inventiveness they achieve in an intrinsically painstaking artform: the earliest of the shorts, Stars and Stripes, felt so contemporary in its confrontational explosion of movement and colour that it was hard to believe it was from 1941 (some sources list it as 1940 or even 1939). Other highlights included Blinkety Blank and the jazzy Begone Dull Care, but the really startling film is the last, Pas de deux. It starts as a simple shot of a ballet dancer, with occasional freeze frames to give a Nude-Descending-A-Staircase kind of look, but becomes steadily more beautiful as it progresses. It left me seriously contemplating the Norman McLaren DVD set.   Rescue Dawn (Werner Herzog) Werner Herzog's Rescue Dawn is one of his most mainstream efforts: a prisoner-of-war movie (from a true story) about US navy pilot Dieter Dengler's escape from a POW camp during the Vietnam War. It's pretty conventional material - even star Christian Bale has been here before, in Empire of the Sun - but it's very well done. The performances - from Bale, and also Steve Zahn and Jeremy Davies as fellow prisoners - are extremely solid, and Herzog's eye for the landscape is as good as you'd expect. (I'm just glad someone had the courage to let Herzog film in a jungle again after Fitzcarraldo). It falls a bit short of greatness, though: there are enough little moments of eccentricity that you can feel it's a Herzog film, but not enough of that really off-kilter sensibility to lift it to quite the level of his best work. Last year's MIFF offering from Herzog, The Wild Blue Yonder, was a much less successful film but showed more hints of something truly brilliant (and Herzog has been wonderful as recently as 2005's Grizzly Man). Still, it's well worth catching when it gets its mainstream release, and should be Herzog's first really successful fictional film in years. It screens again at MIFF on 4 August. Labels: animation, herzog, miff Posted by Stephen Rowley @ 30.7.07 - 1 comments
Sunday, May 20, 2007
Tintin!
If you've been anywhere near the film geek webpages during the week you'll have seen this news: Peter Jackson and Steven Spielberg are making movies of Herge's comic book series The Adventure of Tintin. Spielberg in particular has been mentioned in relation to this property before, but it really seems to be moving forward now. Courtesy of Variety:
I have mixed feelings about this whole thing, but I'm certainly very interested. Tintin was a staple of my childhood; as I got a bit older, I cast them aside, deciding that the other big comic book series, Rene Goscinny and Albert Uderzo's Asterix was a bit hipper. Yet I came full circle when I revisited the Tintin books as an adult. They might superficially be pitched a little younger than the jokey Asterix books, but Herge was clearly the superior artist. His beautifully simple graphical style and grasp of the comic book form really sets the Tintin books apart. He also showed remarkable facility at different genres: the Tintin books range from the full-blown adventure of sending Tintin to the moon (in Explorers on the Moon) to the minimalist house-bound mystery of The Castafiore Emerald, a comic drama where the ultimate joke is that Herge generates a whole book around nothing of consequence. A lot of the books would work really well as films (and several versions already exist in both live action and animation, as you can read here), and both Spielberg and Jackson make sense as directors for the project. Spielberg's Indiana Jones films, for example, are not too far from the spirit of the most adventure-based of the Tintin books, while Peter Jackson, with King Kong particularly, also ventured in something of a similar direction. And who wouldn't like to see the two in a semi-collaboration? Jackson is the George Lucas of the new millennium, and you could imagine him bringing out the best in Spielberg in much the way Lucas did back in the early 1980s with Raiders of the Lost Ark. What worries me a little bit is the references to the animation technology to be used for the project. Peter Jackson's effects house Weta have apparently produced a 20 minute test reel of computer animated motion capture footage. Variety again: Jackson's New Zealand-based WETA Digital, the f/x house behind "The Lord of the Rings" franchise, produced a 20-minute test reel bringing to life the characters created by Remi, who wrote under the pen name of Herge.I would love to see that test footage, and I have enormous respect for the Weta people, who are far and away the best effects house at the moment and who did amazing work in the Lord of the Rings series and King Kong. But it doesn't quite sound right. Herge's signature style is based on simple linework, little shading and flat areas of colour: it is, apparently, one of the definitive examples of what has become known as the ligne clair ("clear line") style. So, for example, here's a classic image of Tintin and Snowy:  The obvious way to film this style is in conventional hand-drawn animation: while not all comic-strip drawing styles can be translated into animation, there's nothing terribly difficult about translating Herge's style. Yet Jackson and Spielberg are avoiding this option, presumably for a combination of reasons. Firstly, neither has a close relationship with a traditional animation shop (since Dreamworks Animation, which Spielberg helped establish, has gotten out of that business). Secondly, it would be harder to distinguish a traditionally animated feature from the earlier Tintin features that have already been made, and computer animation is seen as more marketable anyway. And finally, neither director has the skills to direct a hand-drawn feature themselves, since there's really very little common ground between the process of directing live-action and animation. Motion capture on the Robert Zemeckis / Polar Express model seemingly bridges that gap. It's an illusion, though. As I said when whinging about George Miller's direction of Happy Feet, the idea that live-action directors can capably direct computer-animation is something of a misconception: to date, there has been little evidence that those who have done so have understood the particular qualities of the medium in which they've worked. But perhaps more to the point, it is difficult to see how Herge's style would translate to computer animation. Simple, clean styles like Herge's work well in comic strip or traditional animation, but computer animation doesn't do that kind of thing well. Think of Mickey Mouse: the pure black circles of his ears work really well as a graphical shorthand when drawn, but in computer animation - which is more literal, and makes us resolve shapes into actual volumes - those circles quickly look very strange, like giant bowling balls. It's hard to see how Tintin would be any different. If kept simple, the characters features would quickly become grotesque (Tintin's head would end up looking like a melon), but I can't imagine how the more photo-realistic style Jackson evokes ("the pores of their skin and each individual hair") would reconcile with Herge's style. So I'm just hoping that demo reel really pulled a rabbit out of a hat. One other thing: the Variety story says that Jackson and Spielberg have three stories in mind, but doesn't say which ones. The obvious puzzle is which ones they've chosen. Here are my picks: Tintin in Tibet I think this one's the most certain. It's often cited as Herge's masterpiece, and certainly its beautiful visuals (with its stark white mountain environments) should look great on film. It also has the strongest emotional centre of any of the books, with the adventure being compelled by Tintin's search for his missing friend Chang. Put this down for Jackson. The Seven Crystal Balls / Prisoners of the Sun These two have everything: some occult elements, interesting locations (ranging from Captain Haddock's home at Marlinspike to South America), good stuff for supporting characters like the Thomson twins and Calculus, and lots of big action set-pieces. As long as they fix the silly ending (in which the characters are saved by an eclipse) it should work really well. I'm very confident on these as well, and could see either Jackson, Spielberg, or another director doing them. The Calculus Affair The third one's a bit of a roughie. I could imagine either of the other double volumes (Secret of the Unicorn / Red Rackham's Treasure or Destination Moon / Explorers on the Moon) being tempting, but looking at them, I'm not sure either would film specially well. So my pick is The Calculus Affair; after Tintin in Tibet it's the one I'd make if I were Jackson or Spielberg. If I'm right about the other two, then I think it becomes particularly likely: its espionage thriller style would make a great change from the more swashbuckling tone of the others. The central plot (about the fight for control of a cold war superweapon) is kind of retro but still compelling. And it has some awesome action sequences, including a helicopter / boat chase and another in a tank. Put this down for Spielberg. So there are my guesses. You read it here first. Labels: animation, peter jackson, rumours, spielberg, tintin Posted by Stephen Rowley @ 20.5.07
Saturday, April 07, 2007
Here, Under Protest, is "Beef Burgers"
Now here's an oddity. For years a bootleg audio-tape has circulated of Orson Welles berating the directors of an advertisement for frozen peas, complaining about the script and the quality of their direction. It was a strange little curio, mentioned in David Thomson's Welles biography Rosebud, and one of those little pop-culture artifacts with its own tiny infamy - witness the existence of its own Wikipedia article. (Just thinking about it now, I wonder if it wasn't also the inspiration for the routine in Tootsie where Dustin Hoffman's Michael Dorsey complains about the script for an ad in which he played a tomato.) Anyway, that bootleg was the inspiration for a sequence in the nineties TV cartoon Pinky and the Brain where a slightly cleaned-up version of the dialogue was performed by the mice. (Maurice La Marche, who voiced the Brain, is known for his Welles impression: he overdubbed Vincent D'Onofrio as Welles in Tim Burton's Ed Wood). And now someone has gone and reunited the original Welles audio with the Pinky and the Brain animation. The result is, well, an even stranger little pop culture oddity. (This was brought to my attention, as so many of these kind of things are, by Jaime J. Weinman over at Something Old, Nothing New). Incidentally, I asked over at the the original post what The Brain had said instead of "I'll go down on you," and apparently it was "I'll make cheese for you." Which is a fortuitous substitution, as it preserves the lip-synch. If nothing else, the existence of the original Pinky and The Brain animation is a testament to the strange kinds of things that get slipped on to kids television when nobody at head office is paying attention. What on earth did the 99% of people who'd never heard of the "Frozen Peas" tape make of this? Labels: animation, commentary, humour Posted by Stephen Rowley @ 7.4.07 - 1 comments
Saturday, February 17, 2007
Kill the Cartoon Oscar
In the lead-up to the Oscars, there's always a lot of discussion around what will win, the overwhelming majority of which centers on the "big five" awards (Picture, Director, Actor, Actress, Supporting Actor and Supporting Actress). And whatever you think about the Oscars, there are usually some interesting features battling it out, even if they aren't quite what you might think are actually the best films. ("Best Picture Made in America, By a Big Studio and Seeming Important Without Being Too Challenging" might be a better name for the night's biggest award). But how's this for a strange little Oscar Contest? Best Animated Feature has three nominees (down from five because less than sixteen films were eligible): Cars, Happy Feet, and Monster House. I have already expressed my dissatisfaction with the okay-to-mediocre Cars and the surprisingly bad Happy Feet. I haven't seen Monster House, and from most reports it's actually pretty good. But it is a heavily motion-captured film (as, to a lesser extent, is Happy Feet), which means that however good it might be, its pretty dubious as an example of the best of the animated form. Which brings up the question: should the Animated Feature award exist at all? It's a recent invention, having only been started in 2001, just as the big nineties revival of theatrical animation was winding down. Despite the downturn in fortunes of the industry (particularly for hand-drawn animation), the award has been saved from outright embarrassment by Pixar, Japan's Studio Ghibli, and Aardman. (The winners, for the record, have been Shrek, Spirited Away, Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, and Wallace and Gromit: Curse of the Were-Rabbit). This year, though, both Pixar and Aardman have produced mediocre movies (Cars and the un-nominated Flushed Away), meaning that there's nothing that can win that won't be something of an embarrassing choice. Which leads to my conclusion that the award should be scrapped. The pool is too small, for a start: there were less than sixteen eligible films last year, and many in that sixteen would have been virtual non-starters like Curious George or Barnyard. In reality, it becomes a lucky dip for that year's film from one of about four or five studios: Dreamworks, Aardman, Disney, Pixar, Ghibli, and maybe Blue Sky or a couple of others. This year's spectacle of a non-deserving film getting the award looms as an all-too-likely recurring problem. It's been something of a fluke that there have been good films to award each year: a glance through the nominees reveals just how thin the pickings has been. (Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron? Treasure Planet? Shark Tale?) Only a couple of times - with Howl's Moving Castle in 2005, and The Triplets of Belleville in 2003 - has there been a good film nominated that had to miss out. The original hope was that the award would lead to more recognition for animators and the animation field generally, and the animated short award has certainly served such a purpose admirably. But with the arguable exception of Miyazaki's Spirited Away, the interesting, edgy films are shut out, and big studio films with plenty of recognition are all that get rewarded. So in practice, all the award is doing is reinforcing the ghetto effect, relegating animation to its own category so it doesn't have to compete against the "real" movies. (Animated features are eligible for the regular Best Picture award, but you can bet there won't even be a nomination while the separate category exists). Sure, if they get rid of the category, there won't be a lot of Oscars going to animated features. Prior to the category, only one was nominated for Best Picture: Beauty and the Beast, in 1991. But that example is instructive. When that film was nominated, it was a big deal, one of the real signals that Disney features were back and worth seeing. It was a rare breakthrough, but it was infinitely more worthwhile than all the meaningless nominations now animation has its own category. It's difficult to imagine any of the US features from the last decade having been nominated for Best Picture if the animation category hadn't existed. But it's not so implausible that something like Spirited Away couldn't have given the Best Foreign Language Film category a real shake if its American distributors had given it a marketing push for that award. How much more would that have meant for the medium than the current annual Best Kids Movie spectacle? Labels: animation, commentary Posted by Stephen Rowley @ 17.2.07 - 3 comments
Monday, August 21, 2006
The Endearing Charms of Friz Freleng
My contribution to the Friz Freleng blog-a-thon organised by Brian over on Hell on Frisco Bay. Let's deal with the hard part up front and get it of the way. Friz Freleng will always suffer by comparison with his more prodigiously gifted colleagues: Tex Avery, Bob Clampett, and Chuck Jones. I'm not going to shy away from the fact that he wasn't as good as those three illustrious directors. But that's okay. Avery, Clampett and Jones are pretty far clear of the pack when it comes to the great Hollywood cartoon directors. Noting that Freleng wasn't their equal doesn't get you anywhere: it's just what happens when you make comparisons to the incomparable. Freleng deserves to be acknowledged for what he did, not downplayed because of the exceptional company he kept.  That's particularly the case if we argue, as I think we can, that the others probably needed someone like Friz around. After all, it's hard to believe that Freleng's proximity to so much greatness was purely coincidental. I'm not suggesting he was a hidden hand behind the others - the films show that he was a follower, not a leader, of the more pioneering directors that he worked with - but certainly he was the backbone of the Warners studio, the one constant through its entire golden era. He was there as lead artist for the inaugural Warner directors, Hugh Harman and Rudolf Ising, when the first Looney Tune was released in 1930; and he was there as head of DePatie-Freleng studio that produced some of the studio's last cartoons. In between that inauspicious beginning and rather sad finish, Friz plugged away for three decades, directing more Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies than any other director, by a comfortable margin. As Steve Schneider put it in his book That's All Folks, if anyone was Warner Bros cartoons, it was Freleng. He was the linchpin of the studio, giving it a much-needed stability, and it is hard to believe that such able support didn't help to foster the achievements of his even more talented colleagues. Freleng's longevity means that filmography is a cross-section of the wider Warners canon. When the studio's films were twee faux-Disney musicals, so were his; likewise, when they had descended into largely unredeemed formula outings, his had too. Yet in between those periods, when the studio was at the top of its game, Freleng's work lifted with it. Freleng never had a period of consistent brilliance in the way that Clampett did from about 1942 to 1946, or as Jones did from about 1948 to 1954. Instead, Freleng peppered his best cartoons throughout his career. And while there is perhaps not a single cartoon on Freleng's resume that matches, say, The Great Piggy Bank Robbery or Rabbit of Seville, there is still an embarrassment of riches. I would say the first really great Freleng cartoon would be his wonderful musical take on a construction site from 1941, Rhapsody in Rivets, and the second is another musical cartoon, Pigs in a Polka, from 1943. Also that year is the enchanting yet very funny Jack Wabbit and the Beanstalk, while 1944 saw another fairy-tale effort with Little Red Riding Rabbit. Several more of the most fondly remembered Bugs Bunny cartoons followed in 1946: Baseball Bugs, Racketeer Rabbit, and Rhapsody Rabbit. 1948 sees Bugs Bunny Rides Again, while in 1949 we have the deceptively simple High Diving Hare and the exuberantly brutal Mouse Mazurka. Golden Yeggs, from 1950, sees the early 1950s Daffy at his most appealing. In 1951 he produced one of the classic Sylvester shorts with Canned Feud, as well as one of the slyest Bugs / Yosemite pictures, the election themed Ballot Box Bunny. In 1952 there's the hugely under-recognised Cracked Quack, in which Daffy hides out in Porky's house to escape the winter migration. And while the creeping decline that set in to all the Warner directors' work in the mid 1950s dragged Freleng down particularly badly in this period, he managed to produce perhaps his single most enjoyable film in 1957 with The Three Little Bops.  This very limited selection of Freleng's best work highlights one of the most noted of his strengths as a director: his knack for musical cartoons. The precise timing allowed in animation allows for particularly satisfying melding of image and music, a fact that the Disney studio exploited for aesthetic effect in the Silly Symphonies and ultimately in the grand showpiece Fantasia. But it was in the Warners cartoons that the strength of music in selling cartoon gags really came to the fore, and Freleng was especially adept at harnessing this effect. One of the earliest critical appreciations of the Warner cartoons was James Agee's 1946 piece on Rhapsody Rabbit, in which he praised the way it used "brutality keyed into the spirit of the music to reach greater subtlety than I have ever seen brutality reach before." Which seems to be Agee's way of noting the extra "punch" that the gags get from the pairing with the music in a film like this. Yet it goes beyond that. If I can read my own views into Agee's a little further, I'd argue that the subtlety Agee talks of comes from the way Freleng uses the high spirits of the music to inform the character of Bugs Bunny. One of the classic Bugs moments is his jubilant, on-all fours bounce down his piano's keyboard in this film, orchestrated to the climax of Liszt's second Hungarian Rhapsody. It is the fusion of the music's exuberance with Bugs' own temperament that takes the unpleasant edge off what is, otherwise, a fairly villainous Bugs in this cartoon. Freleng's musical sense is not limited to his overtly musical cartoons, though. His strongest trait as a director is his instinct for timing, which is fundamentally musical in nature, even when the overt synchronisation with a musical piece isn't present, or at least not as obvious. One reason I think it is easy to underestimate Freleng's strength as a director is that we tend to focus on the purely visual aspect of a director's style, and Freleng's composition and shot design were always the most pedestrian of the major Warner directors. Yet the timing, rhythm and editing of his cartoons - aspects that animation directors have much more control over than their live-action counterparts - is impeccable. Freleng's cartoons often feature gags that are only jokes because of the timing. In High Diving Hare, for example, one sequence underscores Bugs' complete control over Yosemite Sam by stripping the actual jokes out and simply showing Sam climb the high diving platform and fall repeatedly: the escalating pace of Sam's ascents and falls creates the gag out of nothing. Similarly, one of Freleng's favourite gags (turning up in Ballot Box Bunny and Show Biz Bugs, amongst others) involves a booby-trapped piano set to explode on a certain note of "Those Endearing Young Charms." The joke here works so well because of the repetition of the "off" note that repeatedly causes the trap to fail. Because the musical sequence cues us to want to hear that final note played, the urge of the perpetrating character to intervene and play it properly is psychologically much more effective. One difficulty with trying to note the great Freleng cartoons is the number he made that are relatively undistinguished overall, but which have individual sequences of great inspiration. Most of his Tweety and Sylvester cartoons fall into this category, being generally pedestrian but lifted by Freleng's handling of Sylvester. While Freleng's conception of Tweety turned the character into a pale, unsatisfying imitation of Bob Clampett's original, his Sylvester is constantly a joy to watch. I note that some, like John Kricfalusi (here), have taken to deriding Freleng's Sylvester, preferring the occasional use of the character in Clampett or Jones' cartoons, or even Robert McKimson's lacklustre efforts. Yet I can't think of a character in the Warner cartoons as consistently empathetic as Freleng's Sylvester. Freleng's poses for the character might be much less self-consciously funny, but his Sylvester benefited from not being over-designed, feeling real and likable in a way that the other directors' Sylvesters didn't. (One of my all-time favourite pieces of animation is Sylvester prancing along the top of a fence, singing his theme song "Miaow," at the start of the otherwise undistinguished Tweety's Circus. It is a moment that shows Sylvester at his most irresistibly free-spirited and cat-like, perfectly illustrating Freleng's affinity for the character.) Similarly, I'd argue that Freleng's take on Bugs Bunny was particularly vital in that character's development. In the early 1940s, as all the Warner directors jumped on the Bugs Bunny bandwagon and tried to flesh out the basic template laid by Tex Avery's A Wild Hare, it was not the bigger names at the studio that immediately saw the direction to take the character. Avery always struggled with creating likable lead characters, and it showed in his few shorts with Bugs before he left the studio. Similarly, Clampett's Bugs was, for the most part, too brash (his Bugs Bunny cartoons have always struck me as amongst the weakest of his 1940s films). Jones was moving in the right direction with some of his early Bugs shorts, but was still maturing as a director and would do his best work with the character later in the decade. Freleng, however, by about 1943 to 1944 had absolutely nailed Bugs. Freleng's Bugs has an innocent, childlike quality that makes the character much more engaging. It was a more moderate version of the infantilism Freleng brought to Tweety, and while it basically ruined the latter character, it was vital to the formation of Bugs as an appealing, fully-rounded character. The classic Bugs of Jones' shorts of the late 1940s and early 1950s is unimaginable without the influence of Freleng's Bugs of the mid 1940s. And to the extent that Jones started to lose a handle on the character later in the 1950s, it is largely because he started to conceive the character as an adult sophisticate: in other words, shifting the character away from the qualities Freleng's Bugs had epitomised.  The down-to-earth nature of Freleng's Bugs is reflected in the distinct lack of pretension of Freleng's work more generally, and this is key to both the weaknesses and appeals of his cartoons. Compared to the lofty ambitions and obvious striving for greatness of Clampet and Jones' best cartoons, Freleng's can look a little pallid. I'm sure Freleng took great pride in his work, but you also sense that at the time, he probably didn't see his cartoons as significant artistic achievements in the way that Jones or Clampett seemed to. But if this meant his shorts didn't have quite the high aspirations of his colleagues' films, it also helped give his best films an easy charm that their work sometimes lacked. For example, in the late 1950s Jones produced two of his best known musical cartoons: the uber-cartoon What's Opera Doc? and the simpler Baton Bunny, something of a riff on the basic template of Rhapsody Rabbit (as well as Jones' earlier Long-Haired Hare). Both are fine cartoons, but for sheer enjoyment, neither can really compete with Freleng's much more effortless, jazzy The Three Little Bops. Where in What's Opera Doc? Jones is at his most ambitious, and straining against his budget to produce something really spectacular, Freleng's picture shows him accepting the budgetary constraints that closed in on the studio in its later years, and just having fun. It is perhaps the archetypal Freleng picture: unapologetically gag-based, impeccably timed, swept along by its music, and with an irresistible joie de vivre. While I'm all for taking cartoons seriously and appreciating their artistry, The Three Little Bops is about as straightforwardly enjoyable a cartoon as has ever been made. Freleng's best work is amongst the most fun of the Warner canon to watch, and I think that is his great achievement. Related Items For my previous essay on bob Clampett, click here. For more of my animation-related writing, click on the In Depth page of my main site, and look under "Recurring Interests." Labels: animation, commentary Posted by Stephen Rowley @ 21.8.06 - 1 comments
Wednesday, June 21, 2006
At Least It Isn't Speedy vs Daffy
Thad Komorowski, over at Animation ID, has posted the five Larry Doyle-produced Looney Tunes that were made but never released a few years ago (here). Larry Doyle was an ex-Simpsons writer who was hired by Warner Bros to produce these shorts, and he picked up a whole lot of writers from The Simpsons and the then-recently-axed Family Guy to assist. Six shorts have now surfaced: The Wizard of Ow (with the Road Runner), My Generation G-G-Gap (Porky), Museum Scream (Tweety and Sylvester), Cock-a-Doodle Duel (Foghorn Leghorn), Hare and Loathing in Las Vegas (Bugs), and Attack of the Drones (with Daffy). Only The Wizard of Ow was ever widely seen: the others were quietly shelved. Larry Doyle tells his side of the story, in an interview dating from before the series was scrapped, here. Komorowski calls them the "worst Looney Tunes ever," arguing that they are worse than the Daffy vs Speedy cartoons produced in the 1960s, or the Rudy Larriva-directed Road Runner shorts from the same era. Which isn't true - those cartoons really are just about unwatchable - but certainly most of them are pretty bad, and you can see why Warner Bros wouldn't give them a proper release (they slipped out in Australia on a bonus disk with selected editions of Looney Tunes - Back In Action). The comments to Komorowski's post are full of derogatory comments about what happens when TV people try to do theatrical animation, and are generally pretty insulting to those involved. I think its better to look on these shorts as a cautionary tale: the interview linked above shows Doyle had the right sort of ideas about what he should be going for, and he assembled some talented people, but the results show just how hard it is to emulate the classic Looney Tunes. After all, they spent most of the thirties making Looney Tunes before the first good ones started to appear. Doyle's group, by contrast, was being asked to produce good cartoons straight away and use beloved characters others had created and work without anywhere near as good animators and overcome the fact that we know the originals so intimately and manage without the original voice talent and deal with much more studio interference and second-guessing than the original staff and try to live up to the legacy of the several of best animation directors ever... So let's just say they failed at a supremely difficult task.  However, there is a bit of a diamond in the rough here, and that is the Daffy Duck short, Attack of the Drones. I don't want to oversell this, either, but it's pretty good, and deserves much more credit than Komorowski gives it. Directed by Simpsons and Futurama veteran Rich Moore, the timing of the gags is much sharper than the other shorts, and the animation better across-the-board. There's even a variation on the age-old mirror-that-isn't-a-mirror routine. It isn't really a Looney Tune, so much as the strange bastard child of a drunken one night stand between Duck Dodgers and Futurama. But as a fan of both, I'm happy with that. And as a Star Wars fan, I had to laugh at Moore's take on the opening credits for the Star Wars films, which references the infamous opening lines of The Phantoim Menace: A complex trade negotiation threatens to bog down as three distinct federations of interstellar actuaries blah blah blah blah blah...If only that were really how Phantom Menace started. One footnote to this is that the list of shorts that were started but never finished includes a short called Guess Who's Coming to Meet the Parents. The concept: "Bugs brings a squirrel home to dinner. His mother disapproves." With plots like that, perhaps it is just as well the plug was pulled - the strange, limited virtues of Attack of the Drones notwithstanding. Labels: animation Posted by Stephen Rowley @ 21.6.06 - 0 comments
Thursday, June 01, 2006
Clampett vs. Jones
Noted animation historian Michael Barrier has posted a couple of pieces by his long time collaborator Milt Gray on his website. One is a piece on Coal Black and De Sebben Dwarfs which is merely okay (it gets too distracted by the whole argument about the film's racism, or lack of it, while adding too little to that discussion), but the other is a fantastic essay about Bob Clampett, which you can read here. Gray's essay - informed by his encounters with Clampett and other figures from animation's golden age - is the most illuminating piece I've read about the long time feud between the two great Warner Bros. cartoon directors, Bob Clampett and Chuck Jones. (My own piece on Clampett is here). It is fascinating reading for anyone even slightly interested in animation, but in the context of my recent commentary about Star Wars, I was also struck by this comment: On a few occasions, Benny [Washam, one of Chuck Jones' animators] was quite specific that if Chuck could have his way, all the Warner cartoons made before 1948 would be destroyed forever. I realized immediately what that meant: All the great Clampett and Tashlin Warner cartoons would become unknown, as well as all of Chuck's second-rate early works.In internet discussions about preservation of the Star Wars films, you'll often come across people arguing that they're George Lucas' films, and he can do what he wants with them. The above comment is a reminder that what artists think in later years about their own work cannot be an infallible guide as to what is important and warrants preservation. Labels: animation Posted by Stephen Rowley @ 1.6.06 - 0 comments
Sunday, April 30, 2006
The Funniest Cartoon Ever?
Jerry Beck, co-author of the site Cartoon Brew and one of the most knowledgeable people on animation around, has let slip on the Golden Age Cartoon Forums that a collection of Tex Avery cartoons is potentially on the way: At this time, there are no plans to release any MGM cartoons as collections on DVD - except for the TEX AVERY cartoons, which will hopefully be restored in time for release NEXT year (no promises however)...Beck is in a position to know, being "in" with Warner Bros., who own the MGM cartoon library, so this is great news. (The significance of the reference to Feltenstein is that he oversees Warner Home Video's classics division: if he is in charge, it means the DVDs are being given a respectful treatment, as happened for the Looney Tunes, rather than the more slapdash release given to the Tom and Jerry series. This is crucial not just for the quality of prints and extra features, but for the chances of seeing the cartoons uncut). An Avery set is pretty much the holy grail for classic animation fans on DVD, now that so much of the Warners and Disney catalogue has been released. Avery, for a long time, was considered pretty much the greatest of the non-Disney directors from the classic era of Hollywood cartoons, due in no small part to Joe Adamson's book Tex Avery: King of Cartoons, which was one of the earliest full length studies of the field. While these things can never be quantified, I get the impression that in recent years his reputation has slipped a bit, with most thinking his successor at Warners, Bob Clampett, was a better director. (I wrote about Clampett here). I certainly prefer Clampett's cartoons: at his best, I think he out-Averied Avery, if that makes any sense. Yet Avery was more of a trailblazer. It was Avery, in his time at Warners, who started the shift to crazier humour, and when he moved to MGM he perfected his style. The most famous trait of Avery's cartoons are their extreme "takes," although this aspect of his work is not as central as some of his less skilled imitators (like the makers of The Mask) seem to think. Perhaps more crucial is his emphasis on speed and escalation, with gags building on each other in a rapid-fire, cumulative manner. Yet I think Clampett made funnier cartoons in a similar style, while also managing to foster some actual characters: Avery made the breakthrough Bugs Bunny short, A Wild Hare, but then proved unable to come up with a notable cartoon character for MGM. I also think Clampett had slightly better collaborators: I'm thinking particularly of his master animator Rod Scribner, and composer Carl Stalling. (MGM's composer, Scott Bradley, was very talented, but his scores always sound a little too brash and aggressive: Stalling's jaunty melodies work better for me). Having said all that, Avery still made some of the best animated shorts ever, and once they are released on DVD many of the absolute best shorts of the Golden Age will be available. And then we animation couch potatoes can settle down, watch the great cartoons of the era one after the other, and get into the serious business of fan-ish arguments about serious questions. Like: what's the funniest cartoon ever? Such questions never have a single right answer, obviously, but the fun is in coming up with the nominations. I would consider several of Clampett's films up there: A Corny Concerto, Kitty Kornered, and The Great Piggy Bank Robbery, for example (all these are on the Looney Tunes DVDs). Chuck Jones' shorts are a little less inclined to side-splitting hilarity, but there are a few of his that are in contention too: Rabbit of Seville, No Barking and perhaps Duck! Rabbit, Duck! or Robin Hood Daffy. Avery's strongest nomination, in my mind, is not one of his more famous "Red" pictures or the overrated King Size Canary, but Bad Luck Blackie, which you can see here. (I'm not crazy about copyrighted works being hosted online, but this isn't available anywhere else: just make sure you support the DVD sales when it's released). Seeing a low quality clip on the net doesn't do the film justice: it's a remarkable short to see with an audience, because you realise how good Avery's instinct for audience response was. Avery not only judges the internal timing of each gag perfectly, but also knows how to space the jokes to let them build on each other. There's a merciless beauty to the speed with which the black cat's bad luck is visited on the bulldog, but it's the timing between each such gag that creates the film's cumulative impact. This effect is strengthened by the way each gag is tied to all the others: the film conditions us to a particular sequence of events - the small white cat will blow the whistle, the black cat will cross the bulldog's path, and an object will fall on the bulldog's head - and then starts varying them each time the joke is repeated. The progression of ever larger and / or more unlikely objects hitting the bulldog is inevitable, but Avery and his story man, Rich Hogan add more value by playing with everything each time the gag recurs. Each time the whistle blows, there's a funny variation on where the black cat appears from, the manner in which he crosses, the object that falls, and the consequence of the impact. (Even the music that plays as the cat crosses is played around with). Each gag, than, is actually a little cluster of mini-gags that all reinforce each other, and which add up to sequence of multiple simultaneous running jokes. By the end of the film, the Pavlovian response to the "whistle blows / object falls" sequence has become so strong that Avery can dispense with the black cat entirely and simply drop the object, as in the famous penultimate shot, in which the whistle brings a piano, a steamroller, a plane, a bus and then a battleship plummeting from the sky. I doubt many people notice the omission of the cat: at the end of the day, comic logic is stronger and more important than story logic. The film as a whole is not just one of the funniest cartoons ever made, but also a textbook example of cartoon joke construction at its very best. Note: If you find any of this interesting, you really should check out Thad Komorowski's remarkable blog Identifying Animators and Their Scenes, which in a short time has become vital reading for animation buffs. Not only does he delve into the usually obscure business of exactly who did what, but he has come up with remarkably revealing posts like this one, which contrasts directorial styles by comparing the way Bob Clampett and Friz Freleng timed identical gags. Labels: animation Posted by Stephen Rowley @ 30.4.06 - 0 comments
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This page is for assorted musings and editorialising that don't fit elsewhere on Cinephobia. Stills Avery, Jones, Clampett The Other Jones Iron Man 2: Early Review Location, Location, Location The Casting of Tintin Round-Up of the Frivolous Things Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Quicktime Tra... Franchising December 2003 May 2004 December 2004 January 2005 February 2005 March 2005 April 2005 May 2005 June 2005 July 2005 August 2005 September 2005 October 2005 November 2005 December 2005 January 2006 February 2006 March 2006 April 2006 May 2006 June 2006 August 2006 September 2006 October 2006 December 2006 January 2007 February 2007 March 2007 April 2007 May 2007 June 2007 July 2007 August 2007 September 2007 October 2007 December 2007 January 2008 February 2008 March 2008 April 2008 May 2008 Want to contact me? 
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