Editor's note: the following post is by Odienator, a regular House guest and the proprietor of his own blog, Cinemaniac's Corner.
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Being a kid in the 1970's had its advantages, the least of which was not being responsible for the horrific clothing your parents made you wear. It was a time when cereal companies weren't afraid to use the word "sugar" in their cereal names ("Super Sugar Crisp", "Sugar Smacks", "Sugar Pops") because it accurately depicted what you were eating. Kool-Aid, also full of sugar, would bust through walls to quench your thirst, mentally preparing you to identify later with his fellow wall-buster, the Schlitz Malt Liquor bull. Unless you had a Coleco Telstar, you were happy to go outside and play the games Spike Lee used in the montage that opens "Crooklyn." And cartoons were everywhere.
On the sixth day, God created man, and the three broadcast networks created cartoon junkies. Saturday mornings were filled with cheap-assed Hanna-Barbera cartoons, cheaper assed Filmation 
cartoons and shorts that used to play in theaters. The networks ran Looney Tunes and Tom and Jerry shorts, neither of which were made for kids. The Looney Tunes looked awful by then, yet I wouldn't realize it until I bought those remastered DVD's. Meanwhile, "Schoolhouse Rock" taught me about math, grammar and history, even once saving me on an 11th grade U.S. History test years later.
At the (now landmark) Loews Jersey Theater, St. George slew the dragon in the clock at the top of the building, and every summer, I attended the Disney Summer Hit Parade. The Hit Parade was a way for Disney to get people to see their live action crap by pairing it with a classic Disney cartoon. The Loews Jersey was built in the 30's, 
and looked a lot like Radio City Music Hall on the inside; the sound system was great and the screen and auditorium were huge. Even though the Disney classics looked a little raggedy by this time, I could still experience them as they were meant to be experienced. I fell in love with the animated form, even if I had to also endure Angela Lansbury in the days between her murderous turns in "The Manchurian Candidate" and "Murder She Wrote." (Jessica Fletcher was killing all those people, you know.)
Today, we have entire cable channels devoted to cartoons. One of network TV's longest-running series is a cartoon ("The Simpsons"). And each year, at least one of the top 10 grossers is a cartoon. Yet in terms of critical appreciation, most animation still gets sent to the back of the bus. So today's "5 for the day" is devoted to full-length features that were more than just cartoons to me -- features I return to often, primarily because of their visual style, but also because they offer themes, images and ideas that trump most live-action features, and break out of the ghetto in which animation so often finds itself committed.
1. "Sleeping Beauty." (1959) Unless you were the spawn of classical musicians, cartoons are probably where you were first introduced to Wagner, Liszt and, in the case of this movie, Tchaikovsky. "Sleeping Beauty" is my favorite cartoon and Disney's masterpiece, a film so richly rendered that I notice something new every time I watch it. The attention to detail here is striking, even for Disney films of this period, and it is all hand-drawn. Like Maurice Noble's brilliant background work on the Wagnerian (and much shorter) "What's Opera, Doc?", Eyvind Earle's backgrounds exist in a patently hybrid universe where the real and surreal intermingle. He and the animators contrast a castle where, even at a distance, you can see the bricks in the walls and outside bridges, with the green hellfire of Disney's spookiest villain, Maleficent. The film's "art direction" and "costume design" rival any live action period piece, and look like medieval paintings because, as one character points out, "this is the 14th century." The princess and her rescuer are both drop-dead gorgeous, as they should be; only the beautiful people live happily ever after. Disney has never been this gorgeously crafted before or since. 
2. "Yellow Submarine." (1968) The closest I'll ever get to dropping acid, this compulsively watchable 60's movie based on one of those "This is the Beatles on Drugs" songs is weird, weird, weird. It defies description, save to say that it is a garishly colorful artifact of its time. With its 11 Beatles songs, one could argue "Yellow Submarine" has the greatest of all cartoon soundtracks, but what strikes me is how creatively trippy the animation becomes. It detaches itself from any knowledge of natural laws; one character (if I can call it that) vacuums up everything onscreen before turning on itself and sucking itself to oblivion. (Don't be jealous, guys.) The places the Beatles and the titular object go, and the creatures they meet, bear no resemblance to anything we've seen before. The only recognizable thing to me was the giant "YES" that occupies Pepperland, a place the six-fingered Blue Meanies want to destroy because they can't bring themselves to be happy by saying that giant word. At the end, the real Beatles show up and seem as unreal as the rest of the picture, which is so odd David Lynch probably loves it.
3. "Beauty and the Beast." (1991) A cynic is a romantic whose ass has been shredded by life. I've always had problems with movies where the ugly guy with the good heart gets the girl because she sees into his soul or some shit. She is then rewarded by having the guy turn into a super-hot piece of ass. Why can't she stay beautiful, and the guy stay busted, yet they live happily ever after? Just a thought from this (busted) cynic. This movie made the list for several reasons. First, it's the only animated film to appear with the big boys in the Best Picture category. Second, it cribs from Cocteau—not a bad name to copy. 
And last but not least, it's Disney's most blatantly sexual picture. Our heroine, Belle, has Angelina Jolie-style blowjob lips, and our villain, Gaston, is after her for a purely sexual reason, to breed more "strapping boys" like him. The song his lackeys sing about him must be an in-joke from Howard Ashman. "And every last inch of me's covered in hair," he proudly states before giving us a glimpse; meanwhile, the Beast, the guy whose every last inch really is covered in hair succeeds in wooing Angelina, I mean Belle, with help from the Disney-ubiquitous Angela Lansbury and the late, great Jerry Orbach. This leads to the dance sequence that would be a lift from "Sleeping Beauty" if it didn't have that jaw-dropping, out-of-left-field camera swoop, a move as dramatic as Victor Fleming would have granted Scarlett and Rhett. It was a transcendent moment for me; I forgot I was watching a cartoon.
4. "Spirited Away." (2002) Hayao Miyazaki is called the "Japanese Disney," but that isn't a fair title, because he's more daring and odd than Disney would have been allowed to be. His worlds don't bother to explain themselves to us. We have to just follow along, trusting that he will lead us somewhere worthwhile and awe-inspiring. It sometimes doesn't work ("Howl's Moving Castle"), but when it does, as in this picture, the images are singed into your mind forever. I've always been partial to the little black dust bunnies with eyes (or whatever the hell they are) that show up in all his movies; I've read somewhere that they are supposed to represent the director, though I am not sure how. No matter. This film to me is his best, a road trip filled with images strange, fascinating and horrifying, yet somehow comforting in the end. 
5. "The Incredibles." (2004) I didn't want to leave Pixar off this list, because they've batted 1,000 with me. "The Incredibles" has gorgeous candy-colored animation, the last good performance by Samuel L. Jackson, and a script that skewers the superhero genre while being clever enough to include an Edith Head homage. It honors being different and special without the ghoulishness and self-pity of Tim Burton. This is my favorite Pixar movie, and it takes me full circle back to #1 on this list. I saw "The Incredibles" at an old, single-screen movie house in Bethlehem, PA, where they had a curtain across the screen and the popcorn was fresh-popped (and at 1975 prices). Watching the movie, I felt like that kid at the Disney Summer Hit Parade. That it generated such nostalgia disproves the argument that computer animation can't be as effective as hand-drawn work. A great story elevates any type of movie, animated or otherwise.
Tuesday, April 04, 2006
5 for the day: animated
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In no particular order, five great cartoons off the top of my head, to which another five will surely be added:
1. "What Opera, Doc?" The pinnacle of Chuck Jones' grandiosity, it manages to kid opera cliches while satisfying them, no mean feat. And has anybody else noticed that the Wagner World looks weirdly like the planet Vulcan in STAR TREK III: THE SEARCH FOR SPOCK?
2. "Star Blazers, aka Uchû senkan Yamato." Mid-70s Japanese import in which a refurbished battleship with a Death Star-style ion cannon flies into space to find a new home for humankind. More BLADE RUNNER than STAR WARS, this was an unrelentingly dark ensemble piece, and the first animated series I'd ever seen where major characters got killed off.
3. THE INCREDIBLES. Odie's right. This is Pixar's best, an evolutionary leap up a scale I'd mistakenly assumed they'd already topped. But hey, let's not forget...
4. TOY STORY 2. Perfectly cast, directed, written, edited and designed, striking a delicate balance between slapstick, adventure, pop culture parody and sentiment, this is a close to perfect movie.
5. PINOCCHIO. For me, this is the pinnacle of Disney animation. Every frame is a living painting. And it exemplifies the Disney emotional formula -- joy plus dread plus yearning -- better than any other, except maybe DUMBO.
Five more to come soon, I am sure. I loves me some cartoons.
I'll stick to animated features.
In alphabetical order:
1. Bambi: How can you not love it, despite the current Disney's regime's insistence on trying to cheapen it with straight-to-video sequels.
2. Beauty and the Beast (1991): Not only is it the only animated feature to be nominated for the best picture Oscar,it's the only animated feature that I picked as the best of the year. Sure, it'd be better if they didn't cop out and make the Beast pretty in the end, but I still love it.
3. 101 Dalmatians: Just for creating Cruella DeVil alone.
4. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs: The first animated feature of note is still among the best in my book.
5. South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut: The only other time an animated feature finished in my top five -- because it is one of the funniest films I've ever seen -- and it's got a point as well.
As for animated shorts, it's always One Froggy Evening for me.
Mr. Copeland: As for animated shorts, it's always One Froggy Evening for me.
Not to take anything away from What's Opera, Doc?, but I'm with you, EC. No one could milk the bitter comedy of exasperation and need like Chuck Jones and Michael Maltese. Jones once said that he dreamt about being Bugs Bunny, yet woke up to find he was Daffy Duck.
Almost 50 years since its debut, Froggy remains is an effective parable on greed, even if its main character succumbed to said greed and became a shill for the Defuncta-u-B (I mean The WB).
Bambi was like a kick in the gut. For me, it was to cartoons what Chinatown was to movies: the destruction of my childhood innocence at 24 frames a second.
For the first hour or so of South Park: BLU, I was in total agreement with you. After the USO show, however, I thought the movie lost most of its brilliance. Still, as a lover of musicals, I appreciated how clever Parker and Marc Shaiman were in handling those musical numbers. My favorite is still Mr. Mackey's homage to The Music Man.
MZS: You're really going to force me to update my near-defunct, decrepit website, aren't you? :)
I think I subconsciously chose the Disney cartoon that traumatized me the least. When the Lost Boys turned into Corey Feldman and Kiefer Suther...oops, wrong Lost Boys. When Pinocchio's Lost Boys turned into donkeys, I was terrified. The double feature at the Disney Summer Hit Parade the week Pinnochio gave me nightmares was The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes, about which I remember nothing.
Is that Japanese show on DVD anywhere?
Another vote for 101 Dalmations. Modern looking and at times truly witty as well as funny.
Odie: Well, I don't own a DVD myself, having watched the original two series so many times that they're encoded in my DNA. But if you're interested, info is here. BTW, checking that site I was saddened to discover that Hiroshi Miyagawa, who composed the series' truly magnificent orchestral score and incidental music, died March 21. I will nuke an asteroid in his honor.
Great post, Odie!!
My off-the-top-of-my-head Top 5 Cartoons...
1. "DUCK AMUCK." If at one end of Chuck Jones' talents is the grandiosity of "What's Opera, Doc?" then the other end must be this downright Dadaist Daffy Duck vehicle. At first self-reflexive then this short becomes entirely deconstructive. And, come on, Daffy Duck!?!
2. THE INCREDIBLES. I'll jump on the Pixar car-wash here, and echo the sentiment that this is indeed their peak. Brad Bird has the same uncanny ability to address both adults and children on the same level that Hiyao Miyizaki has, which leads me to...
3. MY NEIGHBOR TOTORO. Pure bliss. While "Spiritied Away" stands head-to-head with this one in my book, I'll keep going back to this one. And, as once pointed out to me by Professor Julian Cornell, this is maybe the only childhood-fantasy film where the fantasy remains intact at the movie's end.
(Pointless Trivia: this premiered in Japan as the first-half of a Ghibli double-feature with GRAVE OF THE FIREFLIES, the saddest animated feature ever made.)
4. SLEEPING BEAUTY. One day this film should be recognized as one of the most beautiful-looking films of all time. Odie, again, you're completely right! But, if I had to pick a unique Disney film for my list -- I'd go with the glorious Cinemascoped LADY & THE TRAMP, which I only discovered was in Cinemascope maybe 9 months ago.
5. SOUTH PARK: BIGGER, LONGER, AND UNCUT. Something for the adults. Consistantly hilarious and crowd-pleasing songs (my favorite still being Saddam's "I Can Change"). I'll never forget being in a crowded theater seeing this film and the audience being with every laugh... that is, until The Mole remarked "God? Where is your faggot, cocksucker now?" Dead silence -- except for me and another lone laugh in the dark.
Man, since I wrote this list about a dozen other animated films have come to mind...
Odie, great post! Keep it coming, man!!!
My top 5:
1. "Duck Amok" - partly for nostalgic reasons (I learned all the dialogue phonetically long before I learned how to speak English), partly because it's f-ing brilliant, partly because Daffy Duck is my soul mate
2. "What's Opera, Doc?" - for the reasons Matt Zoller Seitz brought up
3. (tie) "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs/Pinocchio/Dumbo/Bambi"
I'm getting more and more worried that Walt Disney's only actual 'classics' aren't getting due recognition (I don't know that animation ever has been or ever will be more detailed and beautiful to look at than in Bambi)
Jason M. Jackowski writes, "But, if I had to pick a unique Disney film for my list -- I'd go with the glorious Cinemascoped LADY & THE TRAMP, which I only discovered was in Cinemascope maybe 9 months ago. " I made the same discovery a few years ago, the first time that my daughter, then 4, watched the movie on DVD. I was stunned; when I saw it on the big screen as a kid, i wasn't aware of aspect ratios, and when i saw it on VHS again as an adult, I just assumed it was poorly composed. Interestingly, THE INCREDIBLES is also 2:35 to 1, and puts the wide frame to superb use.
PS -- One small correction to my "Star Blazers" description. The battleship isn't trying to find a new home for humankind, it's trying to reverse the irradiation of Earth caused by the intergalactic bombardment by the Gamilons. The space battleship Yamamoto travels to planet iscandar to meet Queen Starsha, who has offered to give them Cosmo-DNA to reverse the Earth's radiation, and...
Wait a minute. Hold on.
Just checking something...
Wow. I didn't know this was possible, but I've gone through reverse puberty. Suddenly I am hairless, 3 feet tall and my feet don't even touch the floor beneath my office chair. This is nuts.
Oh well, no more blog. I'm off to elementary school!
Geez, picking five:
1) Dumbo. "Baby Mine" slays me every time. This movie is beautiful and perfect.
2) "Beauty and the Beast"-- The best of the great period Disney had in the 90s-- actually, it started in 1989 with "The Little Mermaid"-- but this one has it all. I saw this 10 times in the theatre when I was in college. It was kind of a cult with us.
3) "Toy Story 2" the beginning of the meditations which would become Pixar's collective obsessions-- mortality... famiy... parenting. I love the beautiful "When She Loved Me" sequence where Jessie remembers her owner Emily, and Jessie eventual displacement from Emily's life as Emily puts away her childish things. It strikes deep in the heart of this parent who fears her children growing up and slipping away.
4) "The Incredibles"-- this one has received lots of deserved votes already but I must include mine-- maybe the best superhero movie ever, animated or not. Amazing animation; adult themes. Nice voice performaces by Craig T. Nelson and Holly Hunter. And who'd of thunk one of the best movies to deal with the mid-life crisis of the American Dad would be an animated one?
5) I'm going to go with "Spirited Away" because I watched it tiwce last week and am newly enamored(another new obsession of my 8 year old daughter's, although she saw it at age 5 and was completely traumatized; spent much of the first half huddled in my arms, face buried.) I always get inexplicably choked up when Sen (Chohiro) gets on the train to see Zeniba with her entourage and asks No-Face to join them.
But I must add to this list: for shorts, I can't deny the greatness of 'What's Opera Doc" and "One Froggy Evening," but I have to throw support to another great Chuck Jones short, "Feed the Kitty," in which the bulldog Marc Antony becomes the besotted protector or a ridiculously tiny and adorable kitten. Best performance by a bulldog.
And I want to give props to a couple more 90s Disney--- Little Mermaid and Aladdin usually get their just rewards, especially with their crowd pleasing Ashman and Menken music (Although Rice came in for part of Aladdin) and these are great, deserving films. But I have a soft spot for a couple less-loved from the middle 90s... Pocahantas, which is gorgeous and impossibly ambitious.. it's lush, moving and I think pretty underrated. Mulan is another great one, with some heart-stopping battle sequences and finally a heroine and role model from Disney that this Mom can get behind.
Jason, I was happy to see "My Neighbor Totoro" on your list. We saw it just this weekend at the IFC Center--- John Lassiter has put together an Engligh language version with Dakota and Elle Fanning doing the voices of of the sisters. It really is a beautiful film, I still have a little bit of a rush from seeing it.
You're right about "Feed the Kitty." When that traumatized, red-eyed bulldog puts that tiny little kitten cookie on his back, it's as hilarious as it is piercing. Never has a dog shown a cat such love. Marc Antony is the Brando of canines.
I'm always embarrassed to admit this, but I'm not a huge fan of animation. It's not that there's anything wrong with it as an artform or as a way to tell a story, it's just that I so rarely see something that hits me the way I like being hit.
All that said...
1) Pretty much any old BETTY BOOP cartoon, but I'm quite fond of BETTY IN BLUNDERLAND, MINNIE THE MOOCHER & SNOW WHITE. I've never felt anybody's ever topped what was done in these cartoons. The great thing about BOOP shorts is that they don't play by any rules, and they morph in and out of wherever the animator decides to go in a particular moment. PORKY IN WACKYLAND is clearly inspired by this work.
2) AEON FLUX. Wasn't a fan until the DVD came out this past X-Mas and I bought it for my 12-year old. Boy was I missing out!
3) The animated bits from PINK FLOYD: THE WALL. This stuff just floors me.
4) ALICE IN WONDERLAND. Why more people don't love this like I do, I'll never understand.
5) LOONEY TUNES & MERRIE MELODIES. I wish I had the discipline to pick just one or two or even three, but I feel like I'd be doing a disservice to dozens of others.
I'll give an honorable mention to YELLOW SUB, however I've never liked that film quite as much as I feel I should being the huge Beatles fan that I am.
I can't believe no one mentioned
THE TRIPLETS OF BELLEVILLE. It has been my favorite animated film in the past few years.
So you guys have no love for Ralph Bakshi, huh? "Fritz The Cat", anybody? How about "Heavy Metal"? Yes, my consciousness had been seriously altered by certain, shall we say, pre-movie preparations, but, damn, those flicks rocked. Ah, those bygone days of irresponsible recklessness...
More recently the fiendish exploits of "Vampire Hunter D" satisfied that nostalgic craving for the outre, animation style.
"The Snow Queen", the original from 1957. Saw it a a child, it haunted me for some time after.
I'm a late-comer to Miyazaki. I Saw "Spirited Away" for the first time last Saturday. About mid-way through I hit "pause" and asked my girlfriend if she had any idea what was going on. She said no, I agreed, and hit "play". It was fantastic. Next up "Howl's Moving Castle".
Anything by Chuck Jones. Delirious, off-the-chain goodness. A tip for you music heads: Mike Patton's Fantomas disc "Suspended Animation", inspired by Chuck Jones. Avant, experimental speed rock. You have to hear it at least once.
While we're giving early-90s Disney love, let me add that, while The Little Mermaid, Beauty & the Beast, and Alladin form a tri-fecta that only Pixar could duplicate, for my money the title for least-appreciated film from that general 90s run goes to The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Sure, it lost its courage in a few spots, but it was gorgeously done and, most importantly, featured Menken's best Disney score period. Gorgeous, gorgeous songs in that one, as well as thrilling and thematically approprioate choral writing.
Ah, only Odie could reference "blow-job lips" in a discussion of a Disney movie. You are a special man, sir.
My favorite cartoon experience is a short I saw at a Spike & Mike collection back in college, called THE DIRDY BIRDY.
This is the story of a bird who obsessively moons and annoys a cat. The cat retaliates with all sorts of firepower (including nuclear weapons) until one day the bird takes ill...
And suddenly the cat finds herself sad - she realizes that misses her tormentor and even nurses him back to health... so their cycle of mooning and abuse can then begin again.
This reminded me so much of a relationship I was in at the time that I cried.
Disney's "Beauty and the Beast" over Miyazaki??
Hahahaha. Don't make me LOL.
Can't resist responding even though I'm swamped.
And there's no way I can do shorts and features on the same list, so these are all features. I'll come by and do a shorts list later:
Features (chronological order)
1. THE ADVENTURES OF PRINCE ACHMED (1926)
I've heard a claim that the first feature-length animated film is an Argentinian production that predates this beautiful silhouette fantasy from Germany's Lotte Reiniger, but this is the earliest one I've seen, and it's great.
2. FANTASIA (1940)
Seeing this as a kid ignited my appreciation of classical music, which was precisely Walt Disney's intention in making it. I love it for its unified diversity of tone, technique and style. And it contains Mickey Mouse's greatest appearance on film, no mean feat.
3. MY NEIGHBOR TOTORO (1988)
I love SPIRITED AWAY, PRINCESS MONONOKE, HOWL'S MOVING CASTLE, and the rest of Miyazaki's output (and I'm excited to start delving into the other Ghibli Studio directors' films now that most are available on R1 DVDs), but for me the best one is still this child's-eye view of animism and the world's mysteries
4. ALICE (1988)
Jan Svankmajer's bizarre aesthetic is strangely well-matched to the Lewis Carroll tale. He's like a caretaker of a mildewed storeroom for an obsolete University science laboratory.
5. THE NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS (1993)
The melding of Starewicz and Rankin-Bass stop-motion into something more exquisitely charming than either. The warmed-over CORPSE BRIDE, with its derivative songs and articulated-past-the-point-of-usefulness charicter design only makes its template's magic appear stronger. I'm sorry to hear that Mr. Burton reaps no financial benefit from the explosion of merchandising that's been lately unleashed for this film, but I suspect it will continue to outlast pretty much anything he's had a hand in since. (and I say this as a fan of his CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY)
Back when "Yellow Submarine" first came out, those days of experiment, I was in college. I had just taken something purporting to be mescaline (but who knows?) and was walking down the street where there was a theater playing the film. What the heck. I went in.
Oh man, was that a great film. Unbelievable. The filmmakers may have been high or at least knew what that was. And it certainly helped to meet them in their own state of mind.
If we're including shorts and claymation, I've got to go with Wallace & Grommit's The Wrong Trousers. A better Hitchcock homage than DePalma has ever done.
tosy and cosh, I have to agree with you on the "Hunchback" love, although it is deeply flawed, and I wish they had just skipped the wacky gargoyles, or not made them quite so Borcht Belt. But the score and the animation were absolutely gorgeous.
I'm glad to see someone mentioned PRINCESS MONONOKE, though it was under a listing for SPIRITED AWAY. I can't argue with anyone who considers SPIRITED AWAY the best of Miyazaki's impressive body of work. I would, in fact, agree. But something keeps bringing me back to both PRINCESS MONONOKE and NAUSSICA. Beautifully animated, rousing adventures...and despite their fantastic elements, both have something to say about the world we inhabit today.
And what, no love for Brad Bird's THE IRON GIANT? Just as effective as THE INCREDIBLES in appealing to audiences young and old alike, I thought.
Matt: stumbled across this blog via your exchange with Dave Kehr in his comments section concerning THE NEW WORLD. This has quickly become one of my daily visits. Great work, and I love the vibrant comments section. As a budding cinephile, I've felt a bit intimidated about posting here. You get more than a few heavyweights here.
Since the discussion is already so fun I'll try to expand it by limiting myself to previously unmentioned features. No particular order other than how they popped into my head. Which I suppose indicates some sort of preference at that.
1. The Iron Giant. I had to do a word search on this page twice before I believed this charmer hadn't been mentioned yet (at least when I started this post, Jay). The metallic rumble of the Giant's whispered "Superman" is one of the all-time great "just-something-in-my-eye" moments for would-be macho men.
2. Porco Rosso. My favorite Miyazaki, both for the transcendent grace of the flying scenes (the director's best, which is saying something) and the matter of factness with which the film handles its fantasy elements.
3. The Plague Dogs. I haven’t seen this since it came out so maybe it doesn’t hold up well at all, but I remember parts of it as if I’d seen it last week. And even after Alien, The Elephant Man, and History of the World, Part I, this is the film that made me love John Hurt.
4. The Emperor’s New Groove. Disney does Looney Tunes, to hilarious results. Is Patrick Warburton the greatest comedic voice actor of his generation? Yes, yes he is.
5. Titan A.E. OK, we’re dipping below top tier for this one, but damn it, it wasn’t that bad at all. The visuals are lovely (the ice rings cat-and-mouse is breathtaking, and thrilling to boot), the story and dialogue are above par for this kind of outing, and Bill Pullman can make the dreariest technobabble sound cool.
Star Blazers was indeed awesome. Paired up with Speed Racer by my local station, it was partly responsible for my being late to school every day in the sixth grade. See kids, cartoons can help rot your brain.
And I wouldn’t drain a drop from the Chuck Jones love, but for shorts I’m gonna hafta go with Tex Avery’s Porky’s Preview, for the groundbreaking animation, avant-garde score, and marvelous sight gag of the ticket taker ripping off attendee’s hands.
I've never seen IRON GIANT-- thanks, jay and anon, for reminding me that I need to.
Two cheers for the above-mentioned FANTASIA and THE NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS, one as radical of an experiment in animation form as anything since, the other probably the pinnacle of the Tim Burton style and sensibility.
I also want to mention the 1970s French movie FANTASTIC PLANET, which anyone who's seen it will remember for its tripped-out visuals and surreal storyline, about humans used as pets in a world of giant blue children.
Wow, where to begin. How about this: I'm not at all surprised that some great movies haven't been mentioned yet, because this is a huge, huge field, arguably as diverse as live action comedy or drama or even documentary, albiet with fewer titles to argue about.
So what the hell, here's five more great features?
1. THE IRON GIANT. For all the reasons mentioned above. If, as I've written, Pixar is The Beatles of animation, and THE INCREDIBLES is their "Sgt. Pepper," then what would this be? Probably "Rubber Soul." Spare, heartfelt and close to perfect.
2. PRINCESS MONONOKE. A terrifying and beautiful avalanche of a movie, probably the closest Miyazaki has gotten to answering Kurosawa in cartoon form.
3. WATERSHIP DOWN. Anonymous, above, mentioned PLAGUE DOGS, also from a Richard Adams novel, but although I can't say for sure because it's been so long, I seem to remember liking this one better, maybe because it was as mournful and violent as the novel. (My fifth grade class read it as a special project, then we had a conference call to England with Richard Adams were all the kids in the reading group got to ask him questions. A highlight of my young life as a reader. It was only later that I learned that my English teacher paid for the call himself. What a guy.)
4. AKIRA. Apocalypse now. Just when you think it can't get any darker or more spectacular, it does.
5. THE JUNGLE BOOK. The last Disney feature that Walt personally oversaw, it's definitely thinner (visually and in terms of story) than almost anything else made during his tenure, but there's still a lot to recommend it -- elegantly gliding multi-plane jungle backgrounds, sharply observed body language from both man-cub and animal characters, and of course, the catchiest soundtrack of any Disney film. It's all classic tunes!
"Oh, I'm the king of the swingers, ooo,
The jungle VIP,
I reached the top and had to stop and that's what's a botherin' me.
I wanna be a man, man-cub,
And stroll right into town,
And be just like the other men,
I'm tiiiiiired of monkeyin' round..."
Take it home.
Jen - I thought Hunchback could have been greatly bettered with two relatively minor changes. 1) Make the gargoyles explicitly real only in Quasimodo's imagination. They couldn't resist the Disney thing of having the anthropomorphic sidekicks made explicitly real, and the film suffers for it. The gargoyles help in the final battle, for criminy's sake! One throwaway shot from Esmeralda's point of view of Quasimodo interacting with stone would have had a huge impact. 2) Let Quasimodo be bitter at not getting the girl. That a Disney film ended with the hero losing the girl was, I thought, a big step. But to have him endores the pairing, to actually have him take Esmeralda's hand and put it in Phoebos' was, I thought, just silly. Give him his heartbreak.
There was a stage version in Berlin, that was intended to come to Broadway and never did. I have the cast recording, but it's not clear if they made the show any darker than the film. There's periodic talk about a live-action TV movie making use of the new music written for the stage show, that would be presumably a bit darker, but that hasn't moved forward either. Pity.
Matt: "If, as I've written, Pixar is The Beatles of animation, and THE INCREDIBLES is their "Sgt. Pepper," then what would this be?"
Their "Glad All Over"? Sorry, cheap shot, especially considering the aptness of your "Rubber Soul" comparison, but this is a WB feature.
And you know, I'd forgotten completely about Watership Down when I mentioned The Plague Dogs. Paradoxically, I remember it as being better myself.
And that phone call sounds remarkable, Matt. Congratulations on having such an engaging teacher at the age when it's possibly most crucial.
Our fifth grade teacher had us write letters to the cast of M*A*S*H*. However nice it was of Mike Farrell to send along a signed script for the class, I can't say I wouldn't have traded in a heartbeat.
tosy and cosh, thanks for your thoughts on HUNCHBACK. I had heard the rumors of a live action HUNCHBACK but didn't realize one had been staged.
anonymous said:
5. Titan A.E. OK, we’re dipping below top tier for this one, but damn it, it wasn’t that bad at all.
Some love for TITAN A.E.! You're right. That movie, at least from a visual standpoint, is cracking. Good call. There aren't nearly enough outer-spacey sci-fi animated features of this ilk. As good as THE CLONE WARS stuff is, STAR WARS, as a universe, begs to be taken to the big screen in an animated form. (Granted, some would argue the prequel trilogy were cartoons.)
Matt mentioned AKIRA, which got to me to wondering if anybody's got an opinion on STEAMBOY, which I thought was all sorts of charming and unexpected given Otomo's AKIRA.
Any other FARSCAPE fans here? The half-animated episode "Revenging Angel" with D'Argo & John as Wile E. Coyote & Roadrunner? OK, maybe not the most successful experiment, but a brave effort to be sure.
"WB feature."
D'oh! Can I come up with a Brad Bird-specific comparison and try again?
No love for Ralph Bakshi on here? HEAVY TRAFFIC is one of my favorite films, animated or otherwise. (He also made a few other groundbreaking adult-themed animated films, a few good mainstream movies and some pretty bad ones!)
More about Bakshi's importance and influence here:
http://www.animationarchive.org/2006/03/media-ralph-bakshis-phone-doodles.html
Rene Laloux trippy and visionary FANTASTIC PLANET is also one of my favorites, a rare film that really conjures up an alien world and is good science-fiction.
Not that it's germaine to the discussion, but during voting for the 1999 New York Film Critics Circle awards, which is conducted via anonymous ballot, when the time came to fill out ballots for Best Animated Feature, somebody kept putting "The Phantom Menace" as #1.
1. DUCK AMUCK. The film that first made me realize, as a kid, that I instinctively loved self-reflexivity even though I couldn't put what it was into words.
2. 101 DALMATIANS. Watching this film for the first time made me go out and adopt my first dog (in my late twenties!).
3. GHOST IN THE SHELL 2. I never knew that an animated film could be this densely cerebral and philosophical.
4. SNOW WHITE. First animated film I saw as a kid; have been afraid to go back and see it again because I loved it so much as a child.
5. PRINCESS MONONOKE. I love that for his huge popularity in Japan, Miyazaki is so damn wonderfully weird. I like this movie's allegory, its unrelenting grimness and idiosyncrasy, and for a genre more than any other that intimates quietly that everything in the end will be all right, with Miyazaki you're not sure about that at all.
And I need to see BAMBI.
All right, people. I was gonna wait to bust this out until further down the road, but since BAMBI keeps coming up, might as well do it now. Jeffrey Wells of Hollywood Elsewhere dropped this bombshell a few days back, posted in the running blog box in the middle of the page (click here and scroll down to read it on on his site).
Steel yourself as you read this. It's powerful stuff. And don't fill out that comment box until you've read all the way to the bottom.
Quoth Wells:
"...A fellow movie columnist (reputable, "name" guy, works for big-city newspaper) wasn't permitted to post this, so he sent it to me: "Just about every movie now gets a 'director's cut' DVD, but I must admit I still almost sprung out of my seat when I received a package containing Bambi: The Director's Cut. What really got me was the sticker: 'Contains never-before-seen footage of the death of Bambi's mother.' Holy moley! The original Walt Disney film never showed this traumatic event (it was signaled by the sound of a gunshot) and yet this sequence is credited with sending generations of children into therapy. I was neither here nor there when I saw it as a kid, but when I re-saw the film as an adult in a crowded theater in Boston, I could hear high-pitched voices in the audience whimpering, 'Where's Bambi's mommy?', 'What happened?', 'Did Bambi's mother die?' and 'Will you ever die, Mommy?'. And yet it turns out that the first cut of Bambi included an entire extra minute involving the death of Bambi's mom, and the reaction to it wasn't conclusively negative. There were some who thought -- and some modern-day psychiatrists on the featurette agree -- that the scene was quite moving and poetic. As Dr. Robert Bleb of the University of Pennsylvania states: 'Children who see this [version] now are likely to become less troubled than audiences of the past because what they see is so much less horrific than what those other children had only to imagine.' I've seen it and I think he's right. Here's how it goes: As in the released version, Bambi and his mom are happily frolicking to celebrate the new spring when the mom senses the approach of Man and tells Bambi to run. The two of them sprint across a field, and as the camera stays on Bambi, a shot rings out. But this time there's a quick cut back to Bambi's mother, whose head jerks back as her body hits the ground, sending up a thin cloud of snow dust. (A faint trickle of blood is visible behind her.) She lies on the snow, her breath vaporizing in the air, and she whispers with her last breath, 'Bambi.' After the vapor of the mother's last words dissipates and her eyes become shrouded with what look like white drapes, her deer spirit levitates out of her body with newly-sprouted wings slowly flapping her heavenward while Edward H. Plumb's lush score swells to a crescendo. A trio of sweetly chirping bluebirds escorts her up to a thick layer of white puffy clouds, which the mom's deer spirit passes through alone. On the other side, she is greeted by a large gathering of similar deer spirits, including one who maternally licks her on the head and says in a soft voice, 'Welcome home.' (Gulp...talk about the cycle of life.) Then the action returns to Bambi alone in the forest as seen in the original release, with him calling for his mommy until he is greeted by his father, the Great Prince. At the end, when Bambi has triumph- antly taken his father's place, a superimposed picture of the mother appears in the upper-left corner of the frame, in the sky. She's smiling down at Bambi, though if you look closely her head appears to be mounted on a wall. That Walt Disney was a cruel ironist. By the way, Happy April 1st."
That BAMBI: DIRECTOR'S CUT review was actually closer to reality than the writer thought. Apparently, as the extras on the BAMBI DVD make clear, Disney >wanted< to show the mother's body (how's that for people who accuse Disney of 'sanitizing' children's films!? He was a maverick with a definite edge!) but his story men talked him out of it.
Okay, here's my animated short selections as promised earlier, in chronological order:
1. BIMBO'S INITIATION (1931)
The most surreal of the Fleischer Bros. 'toons
2. SCREWBALL SQUIRREL (1944)
I love DUCK AMUCK to death but felt like giving props to the incredible Tex Avery for creating a film just as manic and meta-aware nearly a decade earlier. It's just as hilarious too.
3. BEGONE DULL CARE (1949)
Norman McLaren's visual music is the greatest thing this side of FANTASIA and less highfalootin' too with its Oscar Peterson soundtrack
4. HIGH DIVING HARE (1949)
Friz Freleng's masterful pinnacle of the one-gag cartoon. Probably the 'toon I'll write about in the upcoming Friz Freleng Blog-a-Thon (date to be announced on my site in the next week or so, I hope)
5. LA COURSE A L'ABIME (1992)
Gorgeous painted animation with an Opera soundtrack.
I could do a top fifty. And perhaps one of these days I will.
Here are three that don't get mentioned often, but which I remember being good, or at least visually dazzing least in spots. All from the late 70s.
1. Lord of the Rings. No, not those movies. Ralph Bakshi's one-shot. This is thought of as his most mainstream effort, and in trying to pack bits of two volumes into a couple of hours it definitely skimps on characterization. But those red eyed orcs were much more frightening to me than the ones in the Peter Jackson version, the designs more fantastic, and the battle scenes more horrifying. Am I remembering wrong or did every sword slash unleash Kill Bill style jets of blood?
2. The Mouse and his Child. Baaed on Russell Hoban's book, the film version of this is available on video but I don't know anyone who has seen it except me. It's about two clockwork mice, a father and son with winding keys in their backs, who are purchased for Christmas by a family. The son longs to merge with a surrogate family of toys -- a matriarch elephant and a young seal who live in a lovely doll house up on a counter. Through a series of Dickensian contrivance, they end up separated from this household, thrown in a dumpter, and hen they wander the countryside in the company of various lovable and menacing characters, including Manny Rat. a slavedriver of toys, and fortune telling frog, a learned muskrat, a snapping turtle who is a playwright and philospher, and a theater company called The Caws of Art whose membership includes two crows, a parrot and a rabbit. A very strange film, sweet but also sad and scary, with a lot of jokes clearly aimed at parents rather than kids. Has anyone else seen this movie? If so was it as good as I remember or am I remembering wrong?
3. The Winds of Change. A 1978 animated film, directed by Takashi, that I couldn't make heads or tales of as a child because it was an anthology told by a Dreammaker (basically an elf character) loosely based on Ovid, and scored with synth-pop-disco music. Real proto-grindhouse stuff. Cartoon nudity, too, as I recall. In other words 180 degrees removed from Disney or Hanna Barbera or almost anything else being made in America, except Bakshi, which i was too young to see except for the Lord of the Rings adaptation. I was somewhat terrified by it, to be honest, because it was so unlike anything I had seen up until then. Again, anyone seen it, and is it worth seeing again?
Wow! so much here I hardly have time to comment. At the risk of being repetitive or coping out, I'll have to nominate that whole Disney run of Snow White thru Bambi. That's one of America's major contributions to world art if you ask me. An animator working for Mr. Disney during this period must have felt like a scientist working on the Manhattan Project. Hard work for a tough, hands-on boss, but would you want to be anywhere else? You knew you were working alongside the best of the best. I think the gang at Pixar is reaching those levels today. They just keep getting better and better. Finding Nemo is about as formally perfect and emotionally effective as anything I've ever seen. And if you're a parent, they know how to push all your buttons. The Incredibles is more conventional, but it's the best superhero movie ever made. Hell, I'd call it the best James Bond movie that was never made.
All those great Warner's shorts, but I'll throw in with camp Feed the Kitty. That's a short emotional rollercoaster with tour de force acting. We know perfectly well that kitty is in no danger, but it's hilarious and heartrending to watch Marc Antony who doesn't.
As a kid in Japan, I was suckled on cartoons and tv like Starblazers, but since then I have little use for it. I've seen Mononoke and it has a lot of imagination and creativity (I won't forget those little creature Odie spoke of) but I still have trouble working up an interest. I have an animator friend who loves that stuff, but hates Disney, so what do I know?
Does anyone remember the great car racing claymation movie Pinchcliffe Grand Prix. I think it was from Norway. It had thrilling action and great engine sound effects, but I can't find it now. Another movie that's dropped off the face of the earth and maybe isn't very good is Hugo the Hippo. I saw it when I was 6 or 7, and I'm curious to find it someday.
Well, there should be five in there somewhere. If not, I'll be back later. Oh yeah--Prince Achmed is amazing!
Sorry for the late responses, everyone.
You know, I originally was going to do this post on Looney Tunes cartoons, but I didn't think people would remember the names of the cartoons like I did. Oh ye (or should I say Odie) of little faith!
Duck Amuck is Amuckin' brilliant!
Jen: "Feed the Kitty," in which the bulldog Marc Antony becomes the besotted protector or a ridiculously tiny and adorable kitten. Best performance by a bulldog.
This would be in my top five, and as MZS said, the scene with Marc Antony and the cookie just breaks my heart. Oscar for Marc Antony, dammit!
Ross: ALICE IN WONDERLAND. Why more people don't love this like I do, I'll never understand.
I can't jump on this bandwagon. I didn't like it, nor did I care for the book. Wait a second...I did like the Cheshire cat.
You're a Beatles fan and you don't like Yellow Submarine? You Blue Meanie you! You Fool On the Hill! :)
KJ: Mike Patton's Fantomas disc "Suspended Animation", inspired by Chuck Jones. Avant, experimental speed rock. You have to hear it at least once.
If he has a speed rock version of "The Powerhouse," I'm in!
Fritz the Cat put me to sleep. But Bashki's Street Fight is some sort of offensive classic. I thought its take on Song of the South was frightening and hilarious.
Mr. Burns: Ah, only Odie could reference "blow-job lips" in a discussion of a Disney movie. You are a special man, sir.
I knew you'd appreciate that. I did it for you. And I hope you weren't the mooning bird in that relationship...
The Plan: Disney's "Beauty and the Beast" over Miyazaki?? Hahahaha. Don't make me LOL.
Repeat after me: Nineteen Ninety One comes BEFORE Two Thousand and Two.
Brian: Seeing [Fantasia] as a kid ignited my appreciation of classical music, which was precisely Walt Disney's intention in making it.
I hated Fantasia, Brian, and if you search this site, you'll find out why. And thanks for mentioning THE ADVENTURES OF PRINCE ACHMED. I'm going to seek that one out.
Mr. Muckle: The filmmakers may have been high or at least knew what that was. And it certainly helped to meet them in their own state of mind.
Quick question, Mr. M: Did the movie make sense under the influence?
Jay: And what, no love for Brad Bird's THE IRON GIANT? Just as effective as THE INCREDIBLES in appealing to audiences young and old alike, I thought.
Thanks for giving a shout out to Vin Diesel's best performance! And don't be afraid to post here. We only bite if you want us to.
MZS: [The Jungle Book] and of course, the catchiest soundtrack of any Disney film. It's all classic tunes!
Look for the bear necessities
The simple bear necessities
Forget about your worry...
And when the time came to fill out ballots for Best Animated Feature, somebody kept putting "The Phantom Menace" as #1.
Let me guess: Rex Reed? :)
Dave H: Disney wanted to show the mother's body (how's that for people who accuse Disney of 'sanitizing' children's films!? He was a maverick with a definite edge!)
If they can show Bambi getting stomped by Godzilla...
Oh, and one final thing, Matt: Remember when I said I was trying to remember what the double feature I saw at the drive-in with Days of Heaven was? I remember now. It was Watership Down. We didn't stay to see it all the way through either, though I did eventually see it. We left after my Mom said "Is that a fucking smashed rabbit in the middle of the road on the screen?"
Jason: (Pointless Trivia: this premiered in Japan as the first-half of a Ghibli double-feature with GRAVE OF THE FIREFLIES, the saddest animated feature ever made.)
This is what made me remember the Days of Heaven double feature! Nice going, JMJ!
henryfive: Has anyone else seen [The Mouse and His Child]? If so was it as good as I remember or am I remembering wrong?
Yes, henryfive, I've seen this movie. Peter Ustinov was the rat villain. I remember them smashing the mouse up, and all his springs and gears and shit came out, and I was TRAUMATIZED FOR DAYS. I saw Dawn of the Dead the same year (1978), and that didn't bother me at all. Funny how cartoons can be more realistic than live action to a kid.
I saw THE MOUSE AND HIS CHILD at a theater in Kansas City with my younger brother -- I think it might have been the Oak Park Mall -- and it really freaked me out. The tone was so innocent, the material so dark. I seem to remember that in the end, a train destroys the dollhouse or something.
Odie and Matt: You've both seen "The Mouse and his Child" and you were both traumatized by it? That's stunning, and yet somehow not surprising at all.
Wow, so many good choices, so many memories... Watership Down, The Mouse & His Child (which has a scene that explains the concept of infinity...blew my eight year old mind), and the for my money, the best animated movie of all time, My Neighbor Totoro. I'm going to try and think of 5 shorts that are near and dear to me that haven't been mentioned yet (in no particular order):
1. The Smurfs, The Purple Smurfs. One of the most casually horrifying cartoons I was ever fortunate enough to see as a kid. Basically, it's a Smurfy version of Night of the Living Dead, with an incredibly bleak ending that the deus ex machina can't alleviate.
2. Robin Hood Daffy. "Yoiks, and away!" The first "rake joke", far as I can tell.
3. Futurama, Parasites Lost. The one where Fry goes into his own body to confront the worms that have taken up residence there. The level of narrative invention in this episode still astounds me.
4. Samurai Jack, Jack Tales. This show never really got the acclaim it deserved -- beautifully drawn and probably the quietest cartoon ever made in the U.S. Any episode is worth mentioning, but I liked this one -- three short stories instead of one long one, allowing the writers and animators to try stuff they wouldn't have in a regular episode.
5. Ren & Stimpy, Space Madness. History Eraser Button. 'Nuff said.
Odie, Matt, a contrary view on THE INCREDIBLES. I thought the first half-hour or so was indeed incredible, especially the set-up of the characters and the anti-PC subplot of how schools make all children special and therefore specialness is robbed of its meaning. Then, it just basically turned into an action adventure movie, and a pretty standard one at that. What happened? Still, I can't throw much hate at a movie smart enough to use Sarah Vowell as a voice.
Otherwise, MONONOKE over SPIRITED AWAY.
Ditto on TOY STORY 2 and TITAN AE.
And I have to give it up for BEAVIS AND BUTTHEAD DO AMERICA. Englebert Humperdinck singing "Lesbian Seagull," Demi Moore in her finest dramatic role! What else do you want?
I love the title sequence in MONSTERS, INC., very Pink Panther-ish.
And they don't qualify as movies, per se, but Smigel's FUNHOUSE cartoons on SNL are still the funniest thing on that show. Especially when he does Fun With Real Audio. And The Ex-Presidents is the animated movie I'd most love to see.
Recently, CURIOUS GEORGE impressed me (and my three-year-old) with its sweet nature. Why do all animated movies have to have some horrible death or scary monster? GEORGE proved that they don't; that sweetness has its place. That movie is going to last on home video, trust me.
And the TV cartoon that still is funnier than any movie, short of some of the Looney Tunes masterpieces: BULLWINKLE. Never bettered. Keel moose and squirrel!
We have to do a 5 for the day Looney Tunes next time. People are just coming up with great ones.
"it's really a buck and a quarter quarter staff..."
Time to drag out all three sets of my Golden Collection Looney Tunes DVDs!
TLRHB: BULLWINKLE. Never bettered. Keel moose and squirrel!
Turnabout is fair play: I could never stand Bullwinkle, though I did pose for a picture with him at Universal in Florida. I think one needs to catch Bullwinkle at a certain age, the age where one can get all the jokes and not think they are absolutely corny. I found them too late.
My Russian programmer pals taught me how to say "moose and squirrel" in Russian, and besides profanity, it's the only thing I can say in Russian.
"Aha...Pronoun trouble."
THLR-HB: I hear that complaint about THE INCREDIBLES a lot -- that the second half is all fighting and action -- but I disagree. As in SEVEN SAMURAI, HERO, ENTER THE DRAGON, RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK, GUNGA DIN and almost any other really great adventure or action picture, it's practically a dance film. Everybody fights a different way, expressing their character, and that character isn't fixed, it evolves, and you can see it evolve as the story unfolds. Not to belabor the point -- this is probably a subject for some other post, perhaps on what constitutes a great action picture -- but notice how in the final section, it's all about individual personalities, the family, learning how to work together as a single unit, and realizing not only that they're stronger together than they were as separate entities, but that fighting as a unit actually uncovers new powers, or new aspects of powers, that they were not previously aware of. Some of those high speed chase-and=fight sequences with the kids remind me of Jackie Chan movies, or even Stanley Donen/Gene Kelly musical numbers. They're that stylish.
Anyway, my two cents.
Ha ha, very funny, odienator ;-)
"Quick question, Mr. M: Did the movie ("Yellow Submarine") make sense under the influence?"
Oh hell, making sense was the least concern. It was beyond sense -- all marvel and flash and glorious tunes.
"1 2 3 4 Can I have a little more?
5 6 7 8 9 10 I love you.
All together now.
All together now.
All together now.
All together now."
I can personally attest that the creature that sucks the world and then himself out of existence in Yellow Submarine is very, very disturbing to a child of four or five.
TLRHB: Why do all animated movies have to have some horrible death or scary monster?
That's a great question! 4-year old Wagstaff probably wondered the same thing while watching Yellow Submarine's Dustbuster to Oblivion.
I read some study once that G-rated movies had more violence in them than R-rated movies, but I questioned the method of obtaining this information. Of course, a Road Runner cartoon is going to have more violence than, say, Eddie Murphy: Raw.
I wonder if we, as kids or even as adults, are lulled into a false sense of security because we are watching a cartoon, and therefore the actions onscreen seem a lot worse than they are. With that said, I thought The Lion King was preternaturally cruel in its depiction of the death of Simba's dad. I should have been used to Disney's penchant for patricide by that time, yet something about it struck me as a tad too sadistic for a G-rated movie.
I guess I don't have an answer to TLRHB's very relevant question. Maybe the content is there because scaring the shit out of kids is an easy avenue to getting their attention. Any ideas?
I don't know if there's more violence in cartoons or live action, but maybe the question is why do kids respond more to cartoon violence. If we could answer that, then we could answer why kids respond so strongly to cartoons in the first place. I don't know the answer to that one, but I do know it goes way beyond the "jolly, candy-like" colors. A cartoon, any cartoon, will always command my son's attention. I've seen him engrossed with some of the most primitive toons I can imagine. I'm talkin' about Felix the Cat, Simpsons-Happy Kat-walking-down-the-street-type stuff.
Most live action, though, goes right by him, unless it's got talking animals, pirates, or something really far out. There's been plenty of times in the evening when the tv was on, and I looked up and thought "Oh shit, turn the channel, quick!" because some CSI commercial is on with a mangled corpse or a bloody autopsy, but he doesn't seem to notice or care.
There is just something about cartoons and drawings. Somewhere I heard that babies can see a human face in almost anything. Not hard to believe. I'll hardly be the first or last to note how nifty a kid's imagination can be. Everything is in metamorphosis. Anything can be anything. The other day my son propped a slice of pizza up on his plate and called it a christmas tree with pepperoni ornaments. He follows me around with a pen and paper and always is telling me to draw something. When my rendering is so crude that even I can barely see it, he sees it fine and is happy. I'm finally getting him to "do it, self". The game is he'll make a doodle, then tell me what it is. So far, if it's a horizontal line he says it's a snake, if it's a vertical line he calls it smoke. OK, that's sort of about cartoons, sorry if it turned into the commenter equivalent of forcing you to watch my home movies.
Top Animation movies ever:
Nausicaa
Princess Mononoke
Spirited Away
Watership Down
Number five would go to one of the older Disney movies, pre-1990s.
Justice League Unlimited is one of televisions best kept secrets and, for my money, it's fourth and fifth seasons blow The Incredibles out of the water.
Heavy Traffic is great. Bakshi is very hit or miss but Heavy Traffic is probably his masterpiece (imagine R. Crumb by way of Hubert Selby jr.). The slow-motion bullet death of Michael is one of the most intense, hallucinatory death scenes ever put on film (even in Bakshi's bad movies there are usually one or two amazing sequences). Sin City, to me, felt heavily inspired by Bakshi.
Transformers: The Movie...this had a bizarre effect on my entire fourth grade class. Here's this cartoon show that we watched religously everyday after school, it's characters populated our imaginations, we went to see the movie and suddenly they started to get killed, sometimes viscously. Of course, we all loved it. The death of Optimus Prime probably had a stronger emotional effect on the boys in my fourth grade class than the death of Bambi's mother...Bambi was lame; robots were awesome.
Disney Movies...it's funny that people who accuse Spielberg of manipulation (a claim I've never bought) will give a pass to the blatant psychological manipulation of Walt Disney...watching one of these things is like having your emotions needled by a brilliant but creepy psychoanalyst, a Hannibal Lecter type; and, I seriously doubt that all that psychological jiggering is healthy for children (see Pauline Kael's review of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom). It's all so smoothed out, sanded down - so processed! If a group of social scientists, CIA propagandists, and child psychologists got together and decided to make a movie to appeal to the largest audience possible, they'd probably turn out The Lion King.
The first six or seven seasons of The Simpson's (back when the show managed the neat trick of being ironic without being cynical) are some of the finest pop art America has ever produced.
Gordon: Transformers: The Movie...this had a bizarre effect on my entire fourth grade class. Here's this cartoon show that we watched religously everyday after school, it's characters populated our imaginations, we went to see the movie and suddenly they started to get killed, sometimes viscously.
And they started cursing too, if I remember correctly.
I think I was in college when this movie came out. Thanks for making me feel old, Gordon! :)
I've never watched Justice League. I think I'm still recovering from the prior incarnation of that show, the one where Casey Kasem was Robin...
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