by ·Comments Off on Supershorts Sunday: Cartoons

Street Musique (1972 Ryan Larkin)

Intro of street musicians, then a set of short songs illustrated in fluidtoons style, from pens to watercolors, absolutely gonzo and excellent.

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Symphony Hour (1942 Riley Thomson)

Mickey predating the opera-conducting Bugs. Their sponsor Mr. Macaroni puts their orchestra on live radio but Goofy has trashed all the instruments on the way over, so they sound like a cartoon (or PDQ Bach) and to the sponsor’s surprise it’s a huge hit. Newly restored in HD to bring you the only known scene of Mickey threatening Donald with a gun.

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Moving Day (1936)

While the Mickey disc is out, let’s play some from Jerry Beck’s list. Mickey and Donald are deadbeat roommates being evicted by the sheriff and Goofy is an ice delivery man enlisted into helping them. Someone rings their doorbell till it falls off, which I just saw happen to Laurel & Hardy. Largely this one’s about how Goofy should not be hired to help you move, or even deliver your ice, as he duels with a piano possessed by trickster spirits, but also a fair bit of time devoted to Donald getting things stuck on his ass. A Ben Sharpsteen joint, a couple years after his Two-Gun Mickey.

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Thru the Mirror (1936)

Mickey falls asleep reading Lewis Carroll and dreams himself into a sort of Pee Wee’s Playhouse version of Wonderland, bearing no resemblance to the version Disney would make fifteen years later. There is a battalion of playing cards, which is all in good fun until Mickey gets cheeky with the queen. David Hand directed, the year between Who Killed Cock Robin and Snow White.

Why don’t you pass the time by playing a little solitaire?

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Mickey’s Trailer (1938)

Mickey and buddies ride their House of Leaves fully-automated trailer across the country. An early warning against self-driving vehicles. Ben Sharpsteen directed, between Clock Cleaners and Dumbo.

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Lonesome Ghosts (1937)

Mickey shorts weren’t really on TV in the 80s, but I know their Ghostbusters story well because we had the talking-pages storybook. The fully produced version is much less scary for some reason, though it does have Mickey waving guns around again, and more Donald ass-trauma. The ghosts telephone our guys themselves just to mess with them. Burt Gillett directed, the year before Brave Little Tailor.

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Bad Luck Blackie (1949 Tex Avery)

Mean dog torments little kitty until kitty hires the titular Blackie, who crosses the dog’s path causing objects to fall on his head. An exoeriment in all the shapes a dog can be bent into while still being recognizably the dog. Sorry, this is many times better than any of the Disneys. Weird Kitty Foyle reference.

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Porky’s Spring Planting (1938 Frank Tashlin)

We’re planning our own spring planting, let’s see if this is instructive… (1) get a hat with eyeball window wipers, (2) get dog to do the work for you, (3) neighborhood birds end up eating everything. Weird social security joke, and Porky pronounces asparagus “ass-pah-RAH-gus.”

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Hen Hop (1942 Norman McLaren)

Short hand-drawn cameraless chicken dance synched to music – McLaren was the commercial Stan Brakhage.

by ·Comments Off on Vogel 14: Sharits/Breer/Kubelka Part 2

I got hung up on the “Straining Towards the Limits” chapter, also covered in posts 12 and 13, where Vogel discusses the elimination of: reality, the image, the screen, the camera, the artist.

Paul Sharits:

N:O:T:H:I:N:G (1968)

Color fields flicker and fade. Would be a different experience in the front row of a screening, swallowing the colors with your eyes, but if you can see the whole frame on TV your lasting impression is Square, like a flipbook of colored post-it notes. Our only figures among the fields were titles and lightbulb, and I figured this was silent so I put on the new Animal Collective live album, but a chair appeared halfway through with a buzzer noise that was pretty much absorbed by the music.

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T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G (1969)

A guy having his face clawed off in two-frame flicker-motion, the soundtrack repeating the word “destroy” – then he’s cutting off his tongue with scissors Ichi-style. The flicker motion changes speed and intensity, reds and purples prevail, and the single letters appearing on occasion spell out the title. Pretty annoying! I’m missing the point as usual by watching a good video of this at home in 2025 with an IPA instead of at an underground film screening in 1969 out of my mind on hallucinogens.

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Peter Kubelka:

Arnulf Rainer (1960)

Simply square black-or-white flicker patterns with stuttering static noise. I would have proposed swapping the titles of the flicker-film (Arnulf Rainer) with the mini-doc of Arnulf Rainer (Pause!) but that’s why Kubelka had a significant influence on the European and American avant-garde and I did not. Vogel: “This is the first frame-by-frame abstraction that entirely dispenses with the image and consists solely of carefully orchestrated alternations of blank black or white frames.”

Unsere Afrikareise (1966)

Germans on safari, blasting every wild creature they see and staring at nude women, a travel doc with sound, re-edited into more interesting structure than these things usually are, but not interesting enough to make it worth watching these dudes shoot zebras and elephants.

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Robert Breer:

Inner and Outer Space (1960)

I think he’s animating airplanes (over Germany) in a very abstract way, all dots and lines, bombers and skywriting. Explodes into new subjects: red ball in obstacle course, brief sketch of people on the subway. Cool one.

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Horse Over Tea Kettle (1962)

Opens with a frog then introduces a whole range of objects and creatures (no horses or tea kettles that I noticed). These things will eventually fall down on the scene like rain, then fly back up into the sky. In between, everything transforms into something else, because why even work in animation unless you’re gonna transform things into something else?

Sitney:

he directly attacked the conventions of the cartoon while working within it … he transforms and moves these conventional figures within an intricate orchestration of expectations and surprises involving changes of scale, direction, virtual depth, and above all movement off the screen at all four edges

PBL 2 (1968)

The year 1968 got to Breer, who turned away from abstraction to make a one-minute two-part social issues parable, craving the oscar nomination that Windy Day got instead.

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Rubber Cement (1976)

Captioned scenes of the dog playing in the yard, animated in different styles, becoming more complex and intense, with periods of strobing. Focus turns to the means of production (xerox machine and rubber cement), aircraft are introduced, the whole scene melts into pure shape and color.

by ·Comments Off on Shorts watched December 2024

L’emission a deja commence (2023, Bertrand Mandico)

Puppet people talk about truth in media and introduce a series of pissing-fruit cartoons. How do you explain this sort of thing to potential investors?

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The Last Cartoon (2022, Bertrand Mandico)

Kind of partly a cartoon – some abstract brightly-colored patterns – but the performance-art people take over, narrating in French and English about conflicting futures of cinema.

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Four Unloved Women Adrift… (2023, David Cronenberg)

The autopsy mannequins make heated moaning sounds.
Mostly close-ups, only showing the full scene at the end.

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The Menacing Eye (1960, Jerzy Skolimowski)

If my first short had been a stylish silent 2-minute backstage knife-throwing drama, I would also have grown up to become Jerzy Skolimowski.

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Little Hamlet (1960, Jerzy Skolimowski)

A small group hanging around a half-demolished building plays out a silent slapstick story with musical narration which is sort-of a loose version of Hamlet.

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The Miu Miu Affair (2024, Laura Citarella)

Meant to be another fashion ad like the Luca and the Lynch, but LC makes a Trenque Lauquen spinoff, a mystery about a missing fashion model that gets increasingly hazy and vague. it’s not great exactly, but it’s great for one of these.

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Let Your Heart Be Light (2016, Romvari & Campbell)

She trims the tree while half-watching Meet Me in St. Louis on a laptop and drinking from her Chantal Akerman mug, then switches to a mix of trad-xmas songs before Sophy comes over to hang out.

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I’m Hungry, I’m Cold (1984, Chantal Akerman)

The one who looks familiar is Maria de Medeiros (The Saddest Music in the World), the less hungry one is Pascale Salkin of Gang of Four. The most charming and fast-paced Akerman movie since Saute me ville?

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and some auteur music videos…

PJ Harvey – I Inside The Old I Dying (Cocina & Leon)

The Wolf House team creates the illusion of a days-long journey within a single room, so cool. Man gets chomped to death by a beast, man’s dog grabs one of his bones and buries it, it grows into a tree.

New Order – Blue Monday (Breer & Wegman)

The main things happening here are (1) Breer animation, (2) a dog balancing on furniture, (3) the band members being bothered by floating tennis balls. These things get integrated in fun ways (e.g. the band members watch a flipbook of Breer’s drawings of the dog).

The Breeders – Divine Hammer (Richard Kern)

The focus is on Kim pulling poses indoors, and the other three have a minor thread going on a tour of strip clubs. They should’ve cut out the shots of Kim as the Flying Nun.

The Roches – Hammond Song (Lewis Klahr)

Lewis does his clip-art mashup thing. Lucky me to find this right after discovering the group – I’ve been playing their debut album this week. He made this forty years after the song came out.

Mystical Weapons – Colony Collapse Disorder (Martha Colburn)

Instrumental guitar rock by Sean Lennon and Greg Saunier, the only song here I didn’t already know. More clip-art, the religious and planetary icons giving flashbacks to the Harry Smith shorts. Faster cut than Klahr and with added digital glitch edits (or else my copy was defective).

by ·Comments Off on The Wild Robot (2024, Chris Sanders)

Iron Giant and Wall-E-inspired, starts out full of thrilling possibility and ends up more of a talking-animals movie for children. But along the way there’s some wildly great animation. I love their approach to fur, bucking against the “billion individual hairs” approach in vogue since Monsters Inc., and the action scenes are the best.

by ·Comments Off on Junk Head (2017, Takahide Hori)

I can’t believe another sci-fi stop-motion feature exists with the same plot as Mad God – Phil Tippett must’ve been so steamed when he saw this. Both movies’ worlds are packed with lore and backstory, which they mostly don’t bother us with, as we follow a little guy who descends into lovingly-detailed hellish depths on some doomed mission. This guy’s human body has been mangled so he’s been robocopped into a doll head and roboticized. Early in his trip he’s ripped apart by worms and takes a mission-endangering head knock, then is re-roboticized into a science lab servant, and fails (but with great effort) to complete a quest to retrieve some mushrooms. The little guy kills a monster and rescues one of his mole-man friends – he does not save humanity or return to the surface, but a sequel is due next year.

by ·Comments Off on Vogel 13: The Secret Cinema

The Secret Cinema (1967, Paul Bartel)

Jane’s bf Dick dumps her for not caring enough about the cinema, she runs home crying and tears down her Jacques Tati poster, then the next day she overhears her sexual-harasser boss complaining at the bf over the phone that he went off-script during the breakup. Turns out a cinema society is ruining Jane’s life while covertly filming it, and all the cool cinephiles in town are laughing at her in nightly screenings. Are they bowfingering Jane (I haven’t seen Bowfinger)? Jane is killed off as conspirator Helen is chosen as the next subject. Why has it taken me so long to catch up with Bartel’s films?

Jane accepts the boss’s invitation to a club:

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Black TV (1968, Aldo Tambellini)

Shakily filming a flickering TV set, sometimes zooming rapidly in and out, then the image edited and split-screened to a different edit so they never match up. The sound is harsh noise then a loop of the aftermath of Senator Kennedy getting shot, then (blessedly) back to the harsh noise. Pretty intense – “TVs screaming at you” summarized one lboxd viewer. Once again I didn’t have the patience or viewing conditions for The Flicker, this was a good substitute.

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Damon the Mower (1972, George Dunning)

Poetry and animation, with the full page and frame numbers visible, then two animations side by side. The right half is usually the mower (old-school sickle-style) and the left is anything from dancing creatures to exploding mills. Cool at the end when the swish of the sickle starts to reposition the animation paper within the frame. Looks like Dunning made a ton more shorts and also Yellow Submarine.

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UFOs (1971, Lillian Schwartz)

Super trippy video animation with equally trippy electronic music. This might have spawned both Pac-Man and the phrase “liquid television.” I’ve seen her Pixillation, and I guess she made lots more movies if you can find ’em.

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H2O (1929, Ralph Steiner)

Steiner gets just the kinds of wild patterns that Schwartz would painstakingly produce with her video equipment, by aiming his camera at the surfaces of water in motion. Reproduces pretty poorly as stills, the movement is the point.

by ·Comments Off on Me & Shocktober Shorts 2024

Me (2024, Don Hertzfeldt)

A Don Hertzfeldt dystopian jukebox musical? This made my heartbeat shift in a weird way. I’m going to try to stop thinking about it for the rest of the night, will revisit at a later date.

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GUO4 (2019, Peter Strickland)

Montage of still photographs set to (good) pounding noise music. Nude male locker room wrestling? Filmed after In Fabric, a time when he was clearly going through some things.

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Notes on Monstropedia (2017, Koji Yamamura)

I think it’s Edward Gorey with some Adult Swim thrown in, and inexplicable harpsichord music – either the combo isn’t working or the translation is off or it’s just not clever enough. A lesser work from the Mt. Head / Country Doctor animator.

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The Curse of Dracular (2023, Jack Paterson)

Cute claymation retelling of the British Dracula movies as written by the director’s dad when he was nine. Worth it for the ending, when a five year-old says “don’t like you” and kills Dracular easily.

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The Tell-Tale Heart (2008, Robert Eggers)

Ornate live-action movie with stop-motion tendencies, maybe Quay-inspired, and the rich old man played by a muppet. This movie loves clocks, and it’s right, clocks are cool. Shocking to hear spoken dialogue for the first time three-quarters through the film. The actual heartbeat part is very short, this guy is driven mad pretty easily. What is this “inspired by” credit when it’s a straight adaptation?

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The Events at Mr. Yamamoto’s Alpine Residence (2015, Tilman Singer)

In a similar secluded fancy euro-house to the Cuckoo home, tennis girl opens a package unleashing a self-expanding white balloon that consumes everything. Everything I watch this weekend reminds me of The Prisoner. I don’t know that this was “any good” or “made sense” but it is fun to make and watch movies.

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The House of the Plague (1979, Zlatko Pavlinic)

The plague is personified as a purple-eyed woman in mummy bandages. This is animation in a loose sense, drawings cross-faded. A woman coming home into town gets blackmailed into bringing the plague along. The plague-process images are cool but the movie’s main stylistic triumph is the rhyming (in Croatian) roboticized narrator.

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Light, Noise, Smoke, and Light, Noise, Smoke (2023, Tomonari Nishikawa)

I’m glad this rhythmically edited montage of fireworks with a garbage soundtrack brought joy to the avant-garde cinephiles last year. Fireworks are cool, it’s true.