This would have been fantastic! Back in the 40s and early 50s, “The Spirit” was a 8-page Sunday comic supplement in many newspapers across the country, chronicling the adventures of Denny Colt, a P.I. who battle the underworld much like the Batman and the Shadow, but with a cinematic and humorous flare.
This pencil test reel is done in Eisner’s style, look, film noir feel, cinematic layouts etc. This could have rivaled Bruce Timm’s “Batman” animated series. Too bad it didn’t happen. That movie of a few years ago was a wasted opportunity and a steaming turd served on a movie screen.
Today I found an interesting article about classic cartoons in a blog I regularly follow. Sometimes it seems to me that Jeffery D. sees gay subtext and symbolism in everything, so I often scratch my head at some of his entries. This one made me think a little.
You may want to read some of the other articles – they are very entertaining and tongue-in-cheek. Jeff tells some really funny stories about growing up, growing up a “baby boomer,” and growing up gay. There’s “beefcake” all over the blog entries, but they have been edited to prevent flat-out nudity. Jeff actually forbids anything pornographic, hateful, or obscene on his blog and or from blog follower posts..
It was previously released on Bluray DVD by Thunderbean, (And if you love classic, restored public domain artoons looking the best they ever have, check out the company’s line of collections and titles.)
“The Snowman,” created by animator Ted Eshbaugh for Van Beuren Studios, a cartoon studio pretty much forgotten except by us classic cartoon nuts, starts out pretty much like other Disneyesque cartoons of the era – frolicking animals, the old alarm clocks with a dial of months instead of minutes gag, a live bear used as a bearskin blanket in bed gag, etc. It’s set at a cartoon version of the North Pole or the Antarctic or something, and the human hero is dressed like the stereotypical Eskimo, and lives in a igloo. The little animals decide to build a big snowman…and that’s when things really get dark. The snowman comes to life, evil and monstrous, and it is probably one of the scariest things I’ve seen in an old cartoon. It clearly means to harm the little animals, and goes on a destructive rampage. The cartoon becomes a nightmare. It’s up to the little Eskimo to save his animal friends. You just have to watch it yourself. Remember these cartoons were made for adult theater-goers, not the little kiddies, and that fact is pretty darn obvious in this case. I suggest you watch the black and white version on Youtube first, because the B&W just makes it all the more unsettling. The color copy on Internet Archive is beautiful, but still….unusually creepy.
This is a lovely, thoughtful, heart-breaking little cartoon, created by the controversial Skyler Page. This short was made in 2011, and Page went on to work for Cartoon Network as a writer for “Adventure Time” and creator of “Clarence.” Page was later fired for alleged sexual harassment of a coworker. While not excusing what Page allegedly did, Page’s friends defended his actions as a manifestation of his mental illness. All of this kind of relates to this article I read online the other day, “A Short History of Mental Illness In Art.”
I have to confess. I have bipolar disorder, and I have a history of schizophrenia in my family. My illness, although not as pronounced as Page’s may be, is reflected in my work. All artists put themselves, consciously, and subconsciously, into their work. Put that in the perspective of Page’s actions and the little story told in his cartoon. I can not excuse his actions, but I can relate to what he must be going through. I see something more than a sexual assault at work here. The fact of the animated short juxtaposed with the facts of Page’s life, to me, brings home the very essence of the line from the article: “…all creativity is an irrational voyage.”
I don’t know what Mr. Page’s status is today. Hopefully he got his life back on track and we can soon see some good stuff from him.
Richard Williams is perhaps the greatest living animator of our time. He made an impression on me long before I knew who he was, or even before I developed my love of animation. I guess his first work I saw, as a six year old, was his adaptation of Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol.” Not only was it a cartoon done in a style I had never seen before, (Made to invoke the look of 19th century book engraved illustrations), but it contained one of the scariest interpretations of Jacob Marley’s Ghost I have ever seen, and it still sticks with me today. Below is a Youtube link to the special. The program in its entirety is there, including the truly frightening scene that made me hide my eyes…
Jacob Marley’s Big Mouth at 5m, 30s in…
The program condenses the entire story in 25 minutes, which is much too short – they could have done so much more given an hour running time.
It was so good, it was released theatrically, and received the only Oscar ever for best animated short film in 1972. The Academy members got so bent out of shape that a mere television cartoon won an Oscar, the rules were changed so it wouldn’t happen again.
Williams is a driven perfectionist, and it shows in his spectacular projects. Although he has other animators working with him, unlike Walt Disney, the man CAN draw, and often does segments of his films himself, as well as closely supervising his staff.
Williams’ true masterpiece was never finished. Titled “The Thief and the Cobbler.” Williams’ perfectionism would not let him let the film go, and he obsessively worked on it for 28 years, until his financial backers finally got impatient and took it away from him. The creditors had the film finished by other, far inferior hands, and released it half-heartedly, like a throw-away, to get it on the market and try to get some of their investment back. What they did to the film in an effort to finish it was travesty, and “finish” it they did. The finally version of the film, called “Arabian Night” to cash in of the popularity of Disney’s “Aladdin,” bears almost no resemblance to Williams’ story or intent. It is butchered, given horrible dialogue to characters who are supposed to be mute, added unnecessary musical sequences, and a voice over that is so inane, it’s painful to listen to. Williams was so hurt and bitter about the outcome of his life’s work, he has refused to directly speak of the film to this day.
Fortunately, in a way, the original “Thief and the Cobbler” lives on. Richard Williams’ work print, containing pretty much the entire film, made its way into fan circles in the late 1990s. This work print contains intermittent sections of raw animation in pencil and storyboard form to indicate exactly what parts were left undone and preserve the flow of the story. Fan enthusiast Garrett Gilchrist has worked on a definitive version, based on this work print, for years, in an attempt to make a better, more watchable version based on Williams’ vision. Since 2006, Gilchrist has released four versions of the recreated version, entitled “The Thief and the Cobbler Recobbled Cut.” There have been four consecutive releases of Gilchrist’s continual project. Each version has been improved on, thanks to the animation fan community’s contributions of rare lost footage, stills, dialogue snippets, production drawings and storyboards. The latest “Recobbled” cut, called “Mark 4”, has been declared by Gilchrist as the last version, since he believes the reconstruction is as finished as it is ever going to be.
I fell in love with this film. Vincent Price, one of my all-time favorite actors, voices the main villain, Tic Tak, the Grand Vizier. Notice in the first segment of the Recobbled Cut, posted below, Tic Tack’s shoes curl and uncurl with each step, and this detail is carried all the way through the film. The film contains incredible complex sequences, from the slide down the spiraling staircase in segment two, and the incredible War machine in Segment six and seven.
One other advantage to seeing the film as an unfinished project, as unfortunate as that may be, is that we as animators and animation fans get an inside look at how classic animation is (was) produced, as just about every step in the classic process is represented here.
Check out “The Thief and the Cobbler: Recobbled Cut,” represented here as a continuous playlist on Youtube, beginning with the first segment and running through the entire film in seven segments.
Richard Williams is also a brilliant animation instructor. His book, “The Animator’s Survival Kit,” is an industry standard and readily available to aspiring animators. I own a copy myself, as well as the video version based on the book, but is quite pricey.
If you haven’t seen this film, PLEASE do yourself a favor and check it out right now!
I have some new material to post about, but right now, after what happened in Paris this week, I’m a little too down (and angry) to think about writing reviews and showing off cool stuff.
I went through my past blog entries yesterday, and discovered several of the classic cartoon videos I had linked to had, in the interim, been removed by Youtube for one reason or another. I was able to find the same content elsewhere on Youtube, in most cases, so those links have been updated.
The “Truth” About Krazy Kat? by H. Lee Parten
January 2, 2015 at 11:26pm
“Four-Color Brick Brutality,” by Hourthirteen
The original Herriman panel
I oil paint from time to time – scifi themes, classic art forgeries, land]scapes, etc. Some of these I have on my wall in my bedroom..I was in bed this morning just starering at the pictures on my walls, particularly my latest painting, Ignatz Mouse beaning Krazy Kat with a brick. And then I started looking at it metaphorically…and I realized: My God! The picture if full of sex! Look at the two pictures here, one is the original art and one is my painting. I duplicated the panel almost exactly, except I changed the sound effect of the brick hitting Krazy’s head, and slightly curved the horizon a little more than it is in the original. The colors are based on the coloring used in the Sunday comics, and the setting is a flat, dessert-like Arizona, with a few towering rocks and mesas.
So look at it…See the phallic symbol? The position of the brick? The clouds? Interesting. If you’re only familiar with the limited animation television cartoon of the early 60s, you may not know that Krazy Kat was probably comics first transgender character. That’s right, she was definitely female in the cartoon, but in the strip, Krazy’s sex was malleable – in some strips she was referred to as a “she,” but in others as a “he,” depending on the situation, or seemingly, the whim of George Herriman, the strip’s creator. Either way, Krazy’s personality was consistent; dreamy, poetic, befuddled…the epitome of a “sensitive” type who may not be sure of her/his own identity.
Now what makes it even weirder is that Ignatz is definitely male. (He is shown with a wife and a ratpack of children in several strips.) He doesn’t seem to HATE Krazy Kat, but he rejects her/his total adoration in the most violent way. This is typical behavior of someone repulsed by what they see as an unwanted and “unnatural” interest, which would certainly be applicable to a cat in love with a mouse. Ignatz is also disrespectful to the local law, represented by Offica Pup. Meanwhile, Offica Pup is also male, and he is in love with Krazy, and the strip is ostensibly about Pup’s efforts to stop Ignatz from assaulting Krazy with bricks. Krazy sees Offica Pup’s affection for her/him as simple, almost casual, acquaintance, and never seems to notice the torch the cop carries for her/him.
What does it all mean? Hell if I know. But I’m forming a theory that Herriman’s strip was subversive. It operated on three levels. Some saw and loved it as a simple humor strip, other, slightly more intellectual, (Or at least believed themselves to be so,) admired it for its poetic turns and ethereal qualities…But maybe a third view is possible. To me it depicts the story of a sexually….oh, I hate to use the word “confused”….when maybe another would fit better. Maybe “Krazy Kat and Ignatz Mouse” is a story about the need for tolerance of sexual identity. The three characters constantly reenact their little passion play, with only slight variance, like one continual dream for over 30YEARS, until Herriman’s death in 1944.
Pretty deep for what some, including me, considered a silly little cartoon once upon a time, huh?
On a side note, “Krazy and Ignatz” had racial undertones too. Turns out that although Herriman identified himself as white, his birth certificate says he was “colored,”of mixed races – white and black. It seems Herriman went through more than a little effort to repress his racial identity during his lifetime – this was the 1920s and 1930s America, after all. He let people assume he was Italian, and always wore a hat to hide his “kinky hair.” Certainly this fact of his life bled into his comic more than once. In a few running sequences in the strip, through a convoluted set of events, Krazy’s black fur is dyed white, and it’s the only time Ignatz falls in love with Krazy. On the flip side, once when Ignatz gets covered with black soot, Krazy rejects him. She refers to him as “A lil Eetiopium Mice.” When he looses the soot covering, she loves him again.
Every artist puts some amount of his or herself into their art. We often express part or parts of ourselves in ways they cannot express in any other way. I know from experience. In my very early writings and drawn stories from my pre-teen and teen years, I see my then-repressed homosexuality all over it, to embarrassing levels. So I’m thinking Herriman might have been at least bisexual, if not flat-out gay. Also, being of mixed race, he needed, out of necessity, to not only pass for white, but straight, in a time when being one or the other, or both, could get you lynched. He had a wife and at least one child, but that has never prevented anyone from “straddling the fence,” so to speak, or outright jumping it from time to time.
So there you have my theory. Herriman, either consciously or subconsciously, used his “Krazy Kat and Ignatz Mouse” comic strip to express his hidden secrets and desires.
And that’s how I ended up with a huge, spurting boner in the background of my silly little painting.
See a kouple of “Krazy Kat” cartoons on Youtube here:
Thanks to Wikipedia’s biography of George Herriman for the revelation about his ethnicity, which helped to make this little article even more of a deeper examination than I was originally aiming for: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Herriman#Personal_life
Well, for better or worse, the Crazy Squirrel cartoon, “Frank-N-Nazi,” is finished. it was a lot of fun to do, and regardless of the reception, I consider it a rousing success! I plan to do another on sometime in the future, perhaps after my next project, which ill be a super hero animated short.
I didn’t realize it at first, but as I neared the completion of the scenes in the movie, I began to see it as a metaphor for the Holocaust, something that was not my original intent. My early fear was that some might consider it anti-semitic, which it is not. That’s why I put a yamaka on Crazy’s head in the final backstage coda scene. But Nazi scientist Verimi Going is clearly the villian, and at the end he pays for his crimes against his Jewish “neighbors.”
The zombies are not the brain-eating kind, but the classic Haitian Zombie, the only kind that existed in the 1930s and 40s. That’s the reason why I used the jungle drums and the voodoo chant.
Almost all of the artwork is my own, technically. The Doctor Going symbol was originally the “Ted” character symbol purchased from Cartoon Solutions, heavily modified, of course. The castle and forest backgrounds, taken from screnecaps of Warner’s “Hair Raising Hare,” and MGM’s “Happy-Go-Nutty,” were redrawn and colored in Flash.
The background music and some sound effects are from various MGM cartoons, augmented with public domain recordings of “Siegfried’s Rhine Journet ” and “Ride of the Valkyries,” performed by the University of Chicago Orchestra, and Sodero’s Band performing “William Tell Overture,” and Ludwig van Beethoven’s “7th Symphony” by the Columbia University Orchestra. There’s also a little bit of dramatic music from Fleischer’s Superman short, “Jungle Drums,” as well as the voodoo chant by Guy Bevier Williams from the beginning of Lugosi’s 1932 film, “White Zombie.”
This film was a labor of love. I think Tex Avery was one of the top three greatest directors of the Golden Age of cartoons, the other two being Bob Clampett and Chuck Jones. I wanted to do it in the style of the old MGM toons, but with a modern sensibility, as if Tex Avery were making cartoons today. He would surely be influenced by the Looser restrictions on what can be done, as seen with “Ren & Stimpy,” “South Park,” and “Happy Tree Friends.”
I want to thank my voice talent, Stephen Casals, who voiced Crazy Squirrel and did an excellent Peter Lorre imitation as Doctor Going. Also, Fellow Newgrounds contributor Fhuu-Quann Hill, aka ixTOPDAWGxi, provided the dog’s single line of dialogue. Crazy Squirrel’s lines were manipulated in MorphVOX Pro.
This cartoon was created in Flash CS5, converted to individual quicktime clips, and assembled in Premiere.
How to Make Animated Films by Tony White
This book covers the basic animation principles in a textbook-with-exercises format. The second half of the volume shows how to produce an animated film.
Animation Backgrounds
Officaly on hiatus, Rob Richards’ page is a treasure trove of classic cartoon background art.
Cartoon Brew
Cartoon Brew brings the latest news and trends in animation to over 20,000 different artists, entertainment execs and cartoon aficionados.
Classic Cartoons
This page hasn’t been updated in awhile, but still good to browse.
Golden Age Cartoons
GAC is devoted to the study of classic animation from the Golden Age of American cinema.
John K. Stuff
John Kricfalusi, the creator of Ren and Stimpy and Ripping Friends maintains this informative, insiteful and helpful ste for animation fans and animation makers.
Thunderbean Animation
This is my favorite source of classic cartoons. They also have a shop page at Amazon.
thecelwasher.wordpress.com 