by ·Comments Off on Some Cartoons watched in late November

Plane Crazy (1928, Ub Iwerks)

The whole barnyard pitches in to build Mickey a rubber-dog-powered airplane, but it explodes immediately, so he sticks a propeller and a turkey tail on a jalopy to get some real power. After terrorizing everyone during takeoff, including some sweet first-person views that might account for this movie being on Jerry Beck’s list, he gets Minnie in the air in order to sexually harass her, but she ditches him mid-flight.

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Balloon Land (1935, Ub Iwerks)

No spoken words in the Mickey, this one’s got singing. In a world where everyone/thing is made out of balloons except for the dreaded Pincushion Man, who threatens to pop our dim heroes who wander into the woods. He follows them into town and goes on a mass murder frenzy until the armed forces fight back with tree sap and knock him off the edge of the world. The young couple gets away with bringing grave peril into town since the only witness who could’ve fingered them was killed.

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Music Land (1935, Wilfred Jackson)

Princess Violin of Symphony island and Prince Alto Sax of Jazz island have a tryst which starts a war, until the opposing sides chill out and hold a wedding instead. Great character design in this one, with the voice of each character “spoken” by the instrument it represents.

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Mother Goose Goes Hollywood (1938, Wilfred Jackson)

Just a string of parodies of movie actors ending in a full-cast dance-off. Gross Katharine Hepburn blackface gag, good Marx Bros and Cab Calloway.

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A Wild Hare (1940, Tex Avery)

The original Elmer vs. Bugs mind-game cartoon. Lost an oscar to The Milky Way.

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Bugs Bunny Gets the Boid (1942, Robert Clampett)

Now a well-established character, Bugs faces off against a dim vulture (condor?), the bird version of Elmer. The buzzard’s voice was a parody of a well-known ventriloquist dummy, created by Edgar “father of Candice” Bergen, whose other well-known ventriloquist dummy was parodied in Mother Goose Goes Hollywood.

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Screwball Squirrel (1944, Tex Avery)

Having co-created Bugs, Daffy and Porky, Tex fell out with the Looney producers and moved to MGM, where he appears to have created new versions of Bugs/Daffy (squirrel) and Elmer/Buzzard (dog) to torment with even wilder gags. Full of fun meta jokes, far beyond Screwy talking to the audience – the action hitches when a turntable playing the music score skips, he pulls back the screen to see what happens in the next scene, he interrupts the iris-out to extend the action. Has the same ending as The Palm Beach Story.

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Baseball Bugs (1946, Friz Freleng)

Bugs in invincible trickster mode plays every position at once, singlehandedly takes on an entire baseball team – some good gags and frantic energy.

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The Big Snooze (1946, Arthur Davis)

Fed up with being tormented, Elmer rips up his contract with the cartoons and goes off to take a peaceful nap under a tree. Bugsy Krueger takes sleeping pills and invades Elmer’s dreams, feminizing him and setting wolves after him, terrifying him into rejoining the chase. One of the shorts Bob Clampett left unfinished when he quit the studio and moved to Screen Gems, where he created Beany and Cecil.

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Tweetie Pie (1947, Friz Freleng)

Another Clampett castoff, redesigned by Freleng. Sylvester (here named Thomas) is chasing an bird outside in the snow, which is then adopted by the cat’s owner. Dig the rube goldberg contraption. Ends with the bird just pummeling the cat with a shovel. The first Warner short to win an oscar (vs. a George Pal puppetoon).

by ·Comments Off on Glass Life Shorts

Glass Life (2021, Sara Cwynar)

Photo-studio collage scroll with extreme digital compositing, music and voiceover tracks reinforcing or canceling each other, choice quotes from every modern philosopher, many objects and alphabets recognized from the gallery exhibit we saw, this 20-minute film itself refactored from a different exhibit. Daniel Gorman gets it.

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Neighbours (1952, Norman McLaren)

Two guys get along until a sweet-smelling flower grows on their property line and they ultimately murder each other’s families and each other to gain possession of it. It’s bad politics, say both Alex and McLaren’s studio boss, but terrific live-action stop-motion, and the source of the Mr. Show knees-levitation effect.

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Oz: The Tin Woodman’s Dream (1967, Harry Smith)

Smith loves transformative destruction, so the woodman whacks a tree with his ax, turning it into a pile of furniture and creatures, which eventually whirl around to form mystical fountain patterns. Psychedelic kaleidoscope setup starts with a Suspiria dance and leads to his most magickal images yet. Hoping to see this again next year with a live John Zorn performance, so instead of being obvious and playing Zorn with it now, I put on the middle third of Prefuse 73 One Word Extinguisher, which worked great during the dance scenes.

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Ghosts Before Breakfast (1928, Hans Richter)

When Tom Regan said “Nothing more foolish than a man chasing his hat,” he had probably just watched this, a silly movie about flying hats and the men who chase them. Fun to see stop-motion with live actors 24 years before the McLaren short. My version has a new Sosin score since the original sound version was burned by nazis.

Lost hat:

Lost head:

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Cosmic Ray (1962, Bruce Conner)

Nude dancing and fireworks set to a boogie-woogie Ray Charles song, after an excessive amount of countdown leader. It’s Conner, so there are quick shots of nationalism, Mickey Mouse, the atom bomb.

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Walking (1968, Ryan Larkin)

More and less abstractly-rendered people and their walk cycles. Now that I’ve seen the Hubley short and the Disney doc about birds, that’s all the 1969 oscar nominees, and I’m gonna say they are all winners.

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The Man on the Flying Trapeze (1954, Ted Parmelee)

Speaking of Hubley, here’s a UPA short. Talentless loser’s girl Fifi runs away with the circus to be with the handsome and graceful trapezeist Alonzo, turns out she’s a gold digger who leaves every man after they’ve showered her with gifts. Maybe the Popeye or W.C. Fields versions are better.

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The Daughters of Fire (2023, Pedro Costa)

A Costa musical: after six minutes of split-screen, three women singing about their suffering, the last two minutes is landscapes. Paired at Cannes with Wang Bing’s Man in Black.

Giovanni Marchini Camia:

Continuing in the ever-darker visual trajectory of his previous films, in Daughters of Fire Costa pushes even further towards an obsidian palette … Over a string quartet rendition of 17th-century violinist and composer Biagio Marini’s Passacaglia (Op. 22), the three women, all professional singers, intone a hymn-like song whose lyrics speak of solitude and suffering, toil and exhaustion, and fortitude in the face of neglect. Given that the women are Black and singing in Creole, and that the themes they invoke are familiar from Costa’s films about Cape Verdean immigrants, it’s a surprise to learn from the end credits that the lyrics belong to a traditional Ukrainian lullaby.

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Bleu Shut (1971, Robert Nelson)

Goofy prank film with structuralist tendencies – a no-stakes boat-name guessing game punctuated by half-minutes of weirdness (naked man in mirror chamber, dog gets Martin Arnolded, scenes from classic films, porn with intertitles). After minute three, a woman explains the rules of the movie and gives some coming attractions. I once saw about a third of this from one room away at an art gallery, maybe the same day we watched The Clock, and have wondered about it ever since.

It’s 19 minutes before either guy gets a single name right. The game show is abandoned towards the end for three minutes of people sticking their tongues out, then Nelson explains what the movie has been about, or he starts to before he’s interrupted by technical difficulties. Chuck Stephens did a Cinema Scope writeup, but I feel I’ve covered things pretty well.

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The Garage (1920, Roscoe Arbuckle)

Our guys work at a garage, managing to get every thing and everyone covered in black oil without making any racist jokes, nice. The boss (a White Zombie witch doctor) has a cute daughter whose annoying beau manages to burn the place down, and it becomes a rescue operation. I got a good laugh from the ending of the Buster-has-no-pants segment.

by ·Comments Off on 1975 Shorts

Firing Range aka Polygon (Anatoliy Petrov)

Professor’s son died in colonial wars, the prof invents an autonomous tank that can detect fear and sets it loose on his own army in revenge. Nice little sci-fi war drama, too bad about the grotesque rotoscoping. Not the Old Man and the Sea guy, this is a different Petrov, and okay it’s from 1977 not ’75, sometimes my dates are off.

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Great (Bob Godfrey)

Comic attack on the British empire, very good illustrations with Monty Python-style motion gives way to slightly more traditional animation full of newspaper-caricature characters, and settles into focus on Brunel, a builder of very large bridges and ships, with photographed segments and musical numbers. Not one of my favorite things, but I also believe there should be more farcical musical bio-pics of obscure historical figures. Won the oscar over Sisyphus and a Bafta over Caroline Leaf. A very naughty Brit, Bob is also known for Instant Sex and Kama Sutra Rides Again.

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Perspectives (Georges Schwizgebel)

Roughly drawn figures keep changing form and direction over nice colored backgrounds and oppressive piano music.

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Ventana (Claudio Caldini)

Thin rectangles flit past over some ambient music. Made me sleepy.

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Sincerity II (Stan Brakhage)

Playing with the dog in the yard, playing with the wife in bed. I thought my copy was faded and orange with exposure problems, but sometimes you’ll get a clear, balanced shot or a strong blue-green, so who knows. Sincerity was Stan’s multi-part “autobiography” composed of footage shot by himself and friends. With ten minutes left we start seeing Stan himself, and the editing goes haywire. Naked children, a family train vacation, some trick photography play with the kids, a visit to Canyon Cinema. Silent; I listened to the latest Mary Halvorson album since her group is playing Roulette tonight.

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The Seasons (Artavazd Peleshian)

Opens alarmingly with a man and a sheep going over a waterfall. Then the frame is taken over by clouds, then a mountain – maybe the title was mistranslated from The Elements. Cattle and sheep drive, men and horses getting a truck unstuck from rainy mud, a hay-sledding party, a sheep-sledding party. After all the hard work, everyone (even the sheep) get fancied up for the wedding of the man from the waterfall scene. No narration, but a couple of intertitles – postsync sound and nice orchestral score. Ah, this is Armenia, the title refers to the Vivaldi music, and it’s shot by The Color of Armenian Land director Vartanov.

by ·Comments Off on Puma shorts watched Sept 2025

Could See a Puma (2011, Eduardo Williams)

Youths live in the ruins, someone falls and gets hurt. Camera likes to rove around, not getting too close to the action. It’s nice to see that the Human Surge guy’s stylistic weirdness was already in place at this point. A few kids go looking for a medicinal herb, do not see a puma but they do slip into another dimension.

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Schody/Stairs (1969, Stefan Schabenbeck)

Clay guy comes across a sea of stairs, wanders through, up and up, until he reaches the summit of a long staircase then lies down and becomes another step in the stairs. Polish, of course. Whatever point they’re making about the futility of life, they sure spent a lot of time on stair fabrication and walking animation to make it.

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The Heart of the World (2000, Guy Maddin)

This should probably play monthly in every movie theater.

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Creature Comforts (1989, Nick Park)

Always assumed I’d seen this before but maybe not. Interviews with zoo patrons restaged as interviews with the clay-mated animals, started a whole trend of these things.

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Inspirace (1949, Karel Zeman)

What madman would make a stop-motion film out of glass? Artist in need of inspirado spaces out on a rainy window, dreams a glass fantasy ice skater and the dandelion clown in her pursuit.

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Man Without a Shadow (2004, Georges Schwizgebel)

Swirling dizzy blobby animation. The man has a shadow from the start, so I wasn’t surprised when he sells it to a devil in exchange for the promise of riches and women. But I was surprised when, after women want nothing to do with a shadowless man, he gets a pair of red boots that enable him to leap across the earth, checks out different gatherings, and settles on a shadow theater where he can manipulate the puppets shadowlessly without using rods or strings.

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Passing Time (2023, Terence Davies)

Terence reads a poem with that voice of his – rougher than it was in Of Time and the City – the music piece swelling in the background – over a nice shot of some trees.

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But Why? (2021, Terence Davies)

I never wrote up this Benediction-era Davies poem, in which two of his stars from that movie swap places/timelines, but I’ve watched it many times and like to quote it when I ascend the stairs, I descend the stairs… but why?

by ·Comments Off on The Day The Earth Blew Up (2024, Peter Browngardt)

Palate cleanser after all this week’s zombie movies (28 Years Later, The Sadness, Weapons) and antisocial behavior (Golem, The Beast To Die). I mean sure, this is also a zombie movie (the population gets possessed by alien chewing gum) full of antisocial behavior (Daffy), but with a different tone, and animated. Zippy and funny, the 74 credited writers should be proud (their other works include Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends, Samurai Jack, SpongeBob, Camp Lazlo, She-Ra, and Brigsby Bear).

by ·Comments Off on Cat Soup shorts

Cat Soup (2001, Tatsuo Sato)

I don’t know Sato’s work, but I know animation producer Masaaki Yuasa, and this has got the wavy woozy quality of Yuasa’s features. A cat hits the town with his catatonic sister, whose soul was half-ripped by an evil shaman, and they experience all the major elements (desert, sea, time-freeze, soup) before landing back home. Incredible. One scene is set at the “Big Whale Circus,” making this part of the Werckmeister Harmonies universe. Sato is known for a series called Martian Successor, also did animated sequel series to both Ninja Scroll and Tokyo Tribe. There’s a separate Cat Soup series from the director of a Battle Angel Alita series.

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Little Pancho Vanilla (1938, Frank Tashlin)

Kid claims he’s a bullfighter, gets catapulted into the arena, lands on the bull and is awarded first prize. Not top-tier Tash, it passed the time.

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King-Size Canary (1947, Tex Avery)

Oh yeah, what if the cartoon had actual gags in it, wouldn’t that be better?

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The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore (2011)

After a major storm, books become birdies and Morris becomes a bookseller where reading turns the enchanted town residents from b/w to color. It’s all too precious for me, but wonderfully assembled – no surprise it won the oscar (over the Brave-era short La Luna). The directors are suspiciously named Brandon and William Joyce – also suspicious that each one co-directed a different 2014 11-minute Edgar Allen Poe short.

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Seventh Master of the House (1966, Ivo Caprino)

Traveler asks a guy for a bed for the night, and gets sent to the guy’s father, and so on… then he gets the bed. It’s not much of a story, but it’s always good when our refined puppet animation devolves into increasingly bizarre characters until the final guy is shrunken to a quarter the height of his beard and resting in a horn hung on the wall. Some festival must’ve had a 12-minute minimum length so they added a framing story of a whitebeard man sitting in the snow writing this story (women do not exist in Norway).

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Three Inventors (1980, Michel Ocelot)

2D doily-paper cutout stop-motion, oooh. Family of inventors keep creating wonderful things. The town “notables,” having no vision or creativity themselves, conclude that the inventors must be criminal philistines, and a mob burns their house down, destroying everything that is beautiful.

Mouseover to operate the magic lace pipe-organ sewing-machine:
image

Aftermath tells us it was only a movie:

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George and Rosemary (1987, Snowden & Fine)

Guy is obsessed with gal across the street, when he finally builds up the nerve to march over there he learns she’s been obsessed with him too. Oscar-nominated, but against two of the greats: Your Face and The Man Who Planted Trees.

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There Once Was a Dog (1982, Eduard Nazarov)

Guard dog is old and busted so he gets kicked out of the house, makes a deal with a wolf to get back into the family’s graces then repays the wolf with stolen food. Cute story and animation, and the would-be sentimental ending provided the biggest laugh of the night.

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Glens Falls Sequence (1937, Douglass Crockwell)

The kind of paint-meets-clay blending that I love in The Wolf House. In standard-def I can’t even tell the difference between the 2D and 3D layers sometimes, or maybe it’s all 2D, but it’s wonderful. Feels freeform, making up new patterns according to whim, but returning to some (sexual/creature/religious) themes, like McLaren meets Bickford. I was gonna say the music is sometimes overwhelming, but I got caught up in the visuals and forgot that it’s a silent film and I’d hit play on Matmos A Chance to Cut.

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Simple Destiny Abstractions (1938, Douglass Crockwell)

A later film, but feels like the early demos that became Glens Falls. We’ll call it the bonus tracks. An advertisement painter, Doug made crazy motion experiments at his home in eastern New York state.

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Mind the Steps! (1989, Istvan Orosz)

B/W Escher-sketch of a perspective-defying apartment building, sometimes telling little stories of residents or political oppression and sometimes just transforming things into other things. Scraps of warped sound effects and harmonica made me forget I wasn’t still playing the Matmos.

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Syrinx (1966, Ryan Larkin)

Sexy forest gods keep materializing then dissolving into abstraction. Music video for a flutey Debussy piece.

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America is Waiting (1981, Bruce Conner)

Also a music video, for a good Byrne/Eno song. Not just a montage of fun stock footage, he warps the meaning of some shots by running them in forward and reverse. Lotta fun. I should’ve read that giant Conner book in the Ross library when I had the chance. At least there’s Screen Slate:

The success of [Mongoloid] led to an invitation from Brian Eno and David Byrne to make America is Waiting, a parody of paranoia that remains depressingly relevant. Using sourced material from the 1950s, he criticized reactionary politics, Western individualism, the Reagan administration, and military violence. When MTV rejected the video as part of their early programming that same year, it proved that corporate media always sanitizes rebellion.

by ·Comments Off on Circumstantial Pleasures (2020, Lewis Klahr)

Often I have no idea what he’s going for, or what any of the objects are supposed to represent, but it’s always pleasing to watch the patterns shift, the items shuffle about and disappear. Section 2 features assorted world leaders and other shitheads, more rapid color shifts and wackier sounds.

3. some of the envelopes and mattresses and money rolls recur across sections. In this one the music is more concrete. I got nothing on theme or visuals, just lost myself in the images.
4. a very dreamy section, I fell right asleep and had to pick up the next day

5. live footage out the window of a Chinese train in Sept 2016, looking exactly like the footage I shot out the window of a Chinese train in June 2019
6. The most varied and coolest section visually, or do I think that because it’s synced to a Scott Walker Bish Bosch song?

by ·Comments Off on Uncle Kent (2011, Joe Swanberg)

Okay, there was a blu-ray sale and I’ve been itching to revisit Todd Rohal so I bought Uncle Kent 2, and I know I probably do not need to watch Uncle Kent first, and I’m currently feeling end-of-world vibes from the news and am certainly not watching bad/average/filler movies on purpose, but I convinced myself that Uncle Kent 1 could be better than average, it could be a real good time, a valuable way to spend a tuesday night – and I was right.

Kent hand-draws cartoons at home, gets high, uses dating sites. Kate comes over to stay for a few days but claims to have a boyfriend, and sleeps in another room – then they meet Josephine (Decker!) on craigslist and all make out together on the couch. The most dramatic thing that happens is when Kent messes up trying to copy a nude photo from Kate’s phone and destructively covers his tracks.

by ·Comments Off on Vogel 17: The Joke and shorts

The Joke (1969, Jaromil Jires)

The joke was a cynical line he wrote to a girl he liked in a piece of intercepted mail which got him sent to a tribunal and kicked out of college – I didn’t mean to program a monthly theme of getting kicked out of school along with Education and Downhill. The flashbacks are wonderful, nobody plays the lead character as a young man, the camera is his stand-in, and his memories overlap the present, so the words of his expulsion tribunal are dubbed into a church ceremony he’s wandered into.

In present day our guy (Josef Somr of Morgiana) meets up with Helena (of the 1984 AI horror-comedy Grandmothers Recharge Well!) with a revenge scheme, meaning to seduce the wife of one of his accusers. All goes smoothly, except that the married couple are separated so the husband is happy that she’s found a new man, and Helena’s assistant is in love with her, and when our guy tries to ditch her she attempts suicide (Canby found this part “very funny”).

when your girl Marketa says she will stand by you:

when your revenge plot has fallen apart:

It was banned for decades, of course… based on a novel from the writer of The Unbearable Lightness of Being… Jires’s followup would be Valeria and Her WOW.

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Zid / The Wall (1966, Ante Zaninovic)

Decent little animation with hot music. Man in bowler hat sits patiently by a giant wall, until aggrieved naked man comes along and tries everything in his power to get through it, finally headbutting it and himself to death. Bowler man walks calmly through the new hole and waits at the next wall.

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The Fly (1967, Marks & Jutrisa)

Yugoslavian animation. Impassive guy tries to squish a fly but it escapes and doubles in size every quarter minute until it’s large enough to annihilate the man’s world and send him hurtling through space. Aware of their power over each other, they decide to be friends? Someone had fun with the all-buzzing sound design. Not to be confused with The Fly or The Fly.

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Be Sure to Behave (1968, Peter Solan)

Girl in prison solitary washes up, pees, paces, watched always by an eye in the door. She imagines scenes suggested by crack patterns in the wall. Then she’s dressed up all nice, blindfolded, escorted to a park and released. She narrates all this too – unsubtitled, whoops, but it’s a soviet psychodrama of some kind. Czech, Vogel had the subtitles:

In this film a woman prisoner, harshly incarcerated, is suddenly released as unpredictably as she had been imprisoned; “Stalin is dead,” she is told, and then, significantly, “Be sure to behave.”

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Jan 69 (1969, Stanislav Milota)

Czech funeral doc, aka Funeral of Jan Palach. Jan has died young, burning himself in protest of Soviet occupation, and the people are all turning out. Silent, set to doomy choir music.

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Don Kihot (1961, Vlado Kristl)

Not what I was expecting given the title. Confusing flying machines, a cross between WWII planes and faces with bristly mustaches, bustle about. This tall robot must be the Don, taking on all the mustache pilots at once, going rogue in a police state. Big showdown arrives and the Don pauses to make out with a magazine, then either wins or loses, I couldn’t follow the abstract character design. Some pointedly handdrawn backgrounds (no straight lines) and inventive prop stuff. Unreleased in its native Yugoslavia, Vogel: “Don Quixote has become mechanized and is threatened by a technological society bent on destroying his individuality. He defeats it by exposing it to the power of art and poetry; but the art work is itself ironically distorted, raising a question mark.”

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Among Men (1960, Wladyslaw Slesicki)

Stray dog draws the attention of some kids playing war and they attack it. It’s sold to a medical research place but escapes. Rounded up and leashed by animal control, rescued and taken to a friendly animal farm, but flees again, hungry on the streets. This city is portrayed as a shithole, with nice photography at least. This predates Balthazar and some other stories of innocent animals in a selfish human world. Vogel: “The most important of the famed Polish Black Series documentaries which dared to touch on negative aspects of socialist society.”