by ·Comments Off on Month of 121 Shorts: Animation

Allegretto (1943, Oskar Fischinger)
All colored diamonds and circles, so lovely. In close sync with the music, where in Motion Painting #1 the music seems an afterthought.
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Motion Painting No. 1 (1947, Oskar Fischinger)
Like it says, a motion painting – oil on glass, all small rectangles and big spirals. In The Mystery of Picasso the tension was in figuring how the painting would be finished, where he was heading, but in this the fun is in getting from one intermediate step to another. The process is the destination. There should be more of these!
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Franz Kafka (1992, Piotr Dumala)
Is the movie supposed to be making that sound of a cat in heat beneath the music, or is my laptop freaking out? Dark and scratchy and slow-moving, nothing actually happening. Oh wait, there’s some sex. Fulfills almost all of the Robyn Hitchcock holy keywords: sex, food and insects (what, no death?). I’m sure it’s very technically accomplished but I found it dreary and ponderous. The filmmaker made a plaster-scratch version of Crime and Punishment eight years later (or more likely he worked on it for all eight years).
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Tales from the Far Side (1994, Marv Newland)
Very inessential, slow-paced animated half-hour of Far Side cartoons. Really the most interesting bit is seeing Marv Newland’s name, 25 years after his seminal Bambi Meets Godzilla. Either he’s no longer a master of timing, or there was too much Gary Larson interference… or maybe you just can’t turn a single-panel comic strip into a 30-minute TV special. Doonesbury worked out, but that was talky and story-driven to begin with.
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Mr. Prokouk Shoots a Movie (1948, Karel Zeman)
Czech short, part of a whole series of Mr. Prokouk adventures.
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Prokouk is pointing at us, telling us to get off our asses and join the workforce!
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The Monkey’s Teeth (1960, Rene Laloux)
Intro is a three-minute doc of a group-therapy institution for depressed people, what follows is an animation of the film they wrote together. Sad man has a toothache, goes to a dentist who steals his teeth to sell to rich people (I wouldn’t think the teeth of the poor would be worth much, but maybe in France everyone practices excellent dental care). When the monkey wizard bicycles by, I figured the dentist would be put in his place and the stolen teeth returned, and that’s just what happens but first the sad man gets chased into a high school by some cops who get turned into children. Hmmm.
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Dimensions of Dialogue (1982, Jan Svankmajer)
It’s been too long since I’ve watched my Svankmajer shorts. This is an all-time fave. Faces made of identifiable objects consume each other, becoming smoother until they resemble human heads. Two clay humans make love, create an unwanted clay baby then destroy each other. And so on. Not one for brevity, J.S. takes everything to its conclusion and explores all permutations of his object manipulations – this is what makes his features seem so tedious, but his shorts seem so excellently complicated.
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Flora (1989, Jan Svankmajer)
A clay person tied to a bed and covered in rotting fruit and veg tries to reach a glass of water. Only a few seconds long, made for MTV (that’s czech for WTF).

Food (1992, Jan Svankmajer)
Oooh I love stop-motion using live actors. Guy enters a room facing a paralysed robot guy, reads instructions hanging on his neck (which are actually an MTV entry form: “Entrant must send a VHS or U-Matic, etc.”), manipulates the guy (puts money in his mouth, receives a sausage and mustard from chest, utensils from ears), then the robot guy leaves and the eater takes his place. Two guys sit at a restaurant, can’t get service so they eat their own clothes and the table. Finally, people are made gourmet meals of their own severed body parts. A classic, obviously.
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I Love To Singa (1936, Tex Avery)
“Enough is too much!” An old favorite. Owl Jolson is of course a parody of The Jazz Singer, which I’ve still never seen. Jazz and owls: a combination you don’t see often enough.
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Point Rationing of Foods (1943, Chuck Jones)
An extra tucked away on a Looney Tunes DVD, explaining the wartime canned food rationing system to the public through cheap quickie animation. Helpful to me, since I never bothered to learn how rationing worked before. Also tucked away is the Tashlin-penned The Bear That Wasn’t, probably not because of its unworthiness but because it was made at a different studio.

I Haven’t Got a Hat (1935, Friz Freling)
A variety show of children performers, with hijinks. Porky’s first appearance – the studio intended for a more generic troublemaker character (below, right) to take over, but the public demanded a shy stutterer instead. The title song is catchy, anyway.
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Roof Sex (2003, PES)
Stop-motion of chairs having sex. The cat is blamed.
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by ·Comments Off on Bizarro Saturday Morning: Halloween edition

More 16mm screenings from Clay, Halloween-themed this time. Clay showing seasonal shorts reminds me of Robyn Hitchcock’s halloween show where he joked that since he’s only playing songs about ghosts and death, nearly half his catalog is disqualified.

The Skeleton Dance (1929, Walt Disney) was the first in the Silly Symphonies series, with good music-visual sync, but too much repeated animation. No spoken/sung dialogue, wordless skeletons playing in a cemetery until the sun comes up.

Runaway Brain (1995, Chris Bailey) is an excellent, fast-paced Mickey Mouse short with a mad scientist voiced by Kelsey Grammer, beaten for an academy award by Wallace and Gromit. Seems like nobody around me had heard of this before.

The Tell-Tale Heart (1953, Ted Parmelee), animated with some abstract imagery, overlapping shots and sharply-drawn characters. Has a deservedly high reputation, but beaten for an oscar by Disney’s Toot Whistle Plunk and Boom.

Betty Boop’s Hallowe’en Party (1933, Dave Fleischer) – always great to see a Betty short. Her party is pretty tame – kids bobbing for apples and singing like the birdies sing (tweet, tweet tweet) – until a bully shows up and she attacks him with her secret cache of ghostly evils. Full of amazing animation and visual ideas, beautifully synched to the music. I gotta get me a whole pile of these cartoons someday. I asked Wikipedia when the apostrophe disappeared from “hallowe’en” but it didn’t know.

Naturally the show was also full of TV episodes and classic commercials – Count Chocula vs. Franken Berry, of course, also a kids vehicle that looks suspiciously like the Wacky Wheel Action Bike (“you can’t ride it! you can’t ride it!”) and an awesome PSA warning kids to stay away from blasting caps.

Of the TV shows, we’ve got a Popeye the Sailor episode where an evil robot-popeye robs banks, the adventures of Goodie the Gremlin, who helps people invent the steam engine, airplanes etc. instead of tormenting people like the other gremlins want, a Spider-man episode where Green Goblin gets his hands on a book of voodoo spells, and a hilarious, surreal episode of Ultraman (featuring benign fluffy chattering Pigmon monster in a recording studio, giant plumed lizard monster with heat-seeking feather missiles, and the usual bonkers dialogue). Then the lower-tier corny garbage shows: a cartoon Sinbad the sailor, some dimwit monster who shoots smoke out of his head, Beany and Cecil meet the invisible man (1962, produced by a post-Warners Bob Clampett) and a Hal Seeger-created short called Batfink, in which BF and his dim pal Karate fight a magician.

by ·Comments Off on Toy Story double-feature

Time out from Shocktober to watch some Pixar films in 3D – coincidentally the only two Pixar films I’d not seen in theaters. The 3D effect works nicely, but I didn’t find it especially amazing or engrossing here, not as much as with Coraline. Seems like a plain ol’ 2D double-feature would’ve been equally effective.

I was hoping Katy would be wowed by the sequel, but it was late and she was tired. In fact, it was too late… after the tenth time the toy dinosaur told us to go buy snacks during the intermission segment, I went to buy snacks only to find that the snack bar had closed.

The barbies in part 2 are awesome, but the ones in Small Soldiers have got ’em beat.

I still think the “When She Loved Me” song is pretty.

by ·Comments Off on Bizarro Saturday Morning

Another great set of Clay’s 16mm cartoons, and it’s been too long since the last one.

Mysterious Mose (1930, Dave Fleischer) is a proto-Betty Boop (she looks like a dog; a sexy dog) cartoon in which she is haunted by a sorta ghost casanova. The Great Piggy Bank Robbery (1946, Robert Clampett) is a weirdly violent Daffy Duck gangster parody. Since his “Duck Twacy” fantasy is spurred by a knock on the head while reading comic books, it’d be a good short to play before Artists & Models. It’s Tough to Be a Bird (1969, Ward Kimball) is a Disney doc about birds and watchers with musical cartoon segments. And We Have Met the Enemy, and He Is Us (1973, Walt Kelly) is an unfinished Pogo cartoon with a harsh environmental message. I think all the voices were done by one guy.

Bunch of TV stuff. Spiderman fights a bank robber in a mole-man costume. There’s a Casper cartoon (in which Casper does not appear) about a watch repairman who gets attacked by an eagle at the end. Ralph Bakshi contributes an episode of Captain America. A horrible show called Hoppity Hooper (set in Wisconsin) with a Rocky-and-Bullwinkle-repetitive bit about “the traffic zone” was the low point. The high point was the hilarious 60’s-70’s commercials for Mr. Wizard, Hot Wheels, Cheerios and the like. Real fun program… too bad the next one is scheduled for the same night Art Brut is playing.

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by ·Comments Off on More Shorts watched August 2009

I’d considered declaring August to be Shorts Month and watching hundreds of those, so I stocked up, but the inspiration had fled by the time the month rolled around. But we can’t let all these shorts go to waste, so I still watched more than usual.

73 Suspect Words and Heaven’s Gate (2000, Peggy Ahwesh)
Fun gimmick videos, one displaying the “suspect words” found by running the Unabomber manifesto through a spell checker, and the other listing off the search keywords of the Heaven’s Gate cult’s website. In the first the text appears quickly and fades out, and in the second the words flicker constantly.
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Apocalypse Pooh (1987, T. Graham)
scenes from Apocalypse Now and Winnie The Pooh inexpertly combined. Actually the lipsync and some of the shot selections were pretty wonderful. I’m pretty sure nobody will ever care about this movie again now that a hundred thousand video mashups are clogging youtube, but it’s a cute piece of cult history. The poor video quality would turn on the guy who made Out of Print.

Thanksgiving Prayer (1991, Gus Van Sant)
William S. Burroughs hatin’ on America, being a general bummer, as is the fashion among leftists around Thanksgiving time. Decent video but I far prefer Ballad of the Skeletons with Allen Ginsberg.
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Szalontudo (2006, Szirmai Marton)
That joke where guy 1 thinks guy 2 has stolen his food, so he starts eating from the other side, and they glare at each other eating the same food, then guy 2 walks off and guy 1 sees his food still untouched… he was eating guy 2’s food! Ah! This was terrible, with gross squishy chewing sound effects. Won an audience award in north-central Spain where they’ve never heard that joke before.
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Le Vol d’Icare (1974, Georges Schwitzgebel)
I think it’s primitive animation made on a lite-brite. Or maybe it’s HyperStudio version 0.1. Story of icarus, I suppose. I liked the flocks of birds. What is that, a harpsichord?
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Instructions for a Light and Sound Machine (2005, Peter Tscherkassky)
Pumping stutter-motion! Variable-speed lock-groove dude in a Leone western having a death-dream. Ends with words “Start,” “End” and “Finish” overlapping as the guy, appearing to be on fire, runs with mirrored graveyards above and below him.
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The Adventurer (1917, Charles Chaplin)
Weird to see Charlie as an escaped convict threatening cops with a shotgun. But there’s plenty of ass-kickin and cliff-jumpin so it’s alright. I forgot the encoding quality is garbage on my copy of these… must buy a better one.
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Inflation (1927, Hans Richter)
Rich people, money, poor people, more money, stock traders, more and more and more money, digits rushing at the screen whilst speed-adjusted carnival nightmare music plays until the whole damn thing comes crashing down. Only two minutes long! An achievement.
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Yellow Tag (2004, Jan Troell)
In the old days we were close to our farm animals but today governments require tracking ear-tags. Fun movie… maybe didn’t need the classroom and religious art scenes, but it makes up for that in the end by going all wacky with shooting galleries and suited men raining down outside some kinda UN building.
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Crac! (1981, Frédéric Back)
Animated story of the creation and long life of a rocking chair, accompanied by drum and fiddle music. It’s much better than it sounds.
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Thigh Line Lyre Triangular (1961, Stan Brakhage)
Arrrrgh, another birthing movie! Why did nobody warn me? Apparently the title is Brak-code for “vagina.” Once I got over the initial shock, this is excellent. Hand-processed frames over live-action film, intense.
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by ·Comments Off on Looney Tunes: Back In Action (2003, Joe Dante)

I was expecting that this would be very bad, and was hoping to find a few inspired moments or some cool animation to pick out of the wreckage, but then I liked the whole movie so now I don’t know what to write. I don’t get why Brendan Fraser has to be in every single live/animation hybrid flick, but he and Jenna Elfman were just fine in this. Lotta jokes at the expense of movie studios, the Warner Brothers (played by Don & Dan Stanton from Terminator 2 and Gremlins 2), Brendan Fraser, product placement and movie conventions.

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Timothy Dalton plays the star of a suspiciously James-Bond-like franchise, and is just-fired studio security guard Fraser’s father. Fraser heads to Vegas with also-just-fired Daffy Duck while studio exec Elfman in league with Bugs looks for them. Note Dick Miller as Fraser’s security coworker.
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Tim Dalton turns out to be an actual spy, working against the evil Acme corporation (headed by Steve Martin, who is acting strangely Mike Myers-like in this screenshot.
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Good to see Joan Cusack as a secret government scientist (not to mention Robbie the Robot).
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Roger Corman cameos, believably enough, as a film director.
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Kevin McCarthy reprises his Body Snatchers role – in black and white!
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Of course the plot is a thin excuse for a thousand gags and highlight scenes for every major Looney Tunes character. Yosemite Sam and Wile E. Coyote work for Acme, Tweety and Sylvester are Fraser’s neighbors, Marvin Martian is captive in Cusack’s lab, Pepe Le Pew appears in a sidetrack to Paris (where there are Jerry Lewis movie posters all over). Super fun movie… I’m actually so impressed that this was so good, after I’d heard everywhere what a failure it was. Even Dante seems to be making excuses for it in recent interviews (I’m guessing the terrible Scooby/Shaggy cameo is one of the last-minute studio changes he complains about).

Some highlights: a split-screen phone call where the screen effect smashes Daffy:
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And a romp through famous paintings at the Louvre… here’s Elmer as Munch’s The Scream:
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Turns out the movie wasn’t as universally hated as I’d thought. According to Slate, writer and director were fed up with the studio by the time the movie came out, and neither them nor any of the stars participated in the DVD extras. The NY Times and AV Club sure disliked it, but good reviews were posted by J. Rosenbaum (“I had a ball”) and G. Kenny (“comedy of the year”). After reading a couple appreciations I am anxious to rewatch and look for some of the hundreds of gags I missed. I guess it comes down to how much fun you’re willing to have with it. For instance, some reviewers cringed at Steve Martin trying to be funny again, and called him out as a fraud (as if he’s Robert De Niro in Rocky & Bullwinkle), while others bothered to notice that Martin completely succeeded… David Edelstein:

Steve Martin, moreover, is a miracle. Determined not to be upstaged by his flamboyant Warner costars, he has concocted a “supertwit” that is at times at least their equal. His red hair parted in the middle, he staggers around the set in sneakers and an ill-fitting suit, jerking his torso, windmilling his arms—stopping his gyrations only to saunter up to one of several repulsed women, convinced that he is catnip to the ladies. This is the old Steve Martin, the whirligig genius of The Jerk (1979), The Man With Two Brains (1983), and All of Me (1984). To see him this way after at least a decade of domesticated dreck is to love all the more the liberating influence of Warner Bros. cartoons.

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Pol Pot’s Birthday (2004, Talmage Cooley)
In 1985, the scrappy dictator’s men throw him a super-weak budget surprise birthday party, with grey cake and music on an old tape player. Awkward conversation ensues… P-P gets peed on by a dog and “Walking On Sunshine” plays over the credits. Kim Rew got paid?
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Meet King Joe (1949, John Sutherland)
More generic propaganda with no direct sense of purpose. Joe is “the king of the workers of the world” because here in America, competition and investment in infrastructure make our jobs easier with more disposable income than anywhere else. Take that, dirt-poor chinaman! Statistics to be proud of: “Americans own practically all the refrigerators in existence. Bathtubs? We’ve got 92% of them.”
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Hymn to Merde (2009, Leos Carax)
I agree that Merde/Lavant is wonderful to watch, but Carax doesn’t seem to know what to do with him. Protracted death-sentence courtroom drama wasn’t it, nor is a lo-res music video of him singing a Kills song translated into his own head-slapping language.
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.tibbaR (2004, Leo Wentink)
Eerie music and nervous sound effects accompany time-remapped footage of lab rabbit breeding. I never know why anything is happening in short films anymore.
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Go! Go! Go! (1964, Marie Menken)
So damn jittery it gave me an eye-ache, exactly what I was getting away from the computer in order to avoid. All nervous time-lapse footage shot around the city. Some real nice high-angle shots of construction sites and traffic patterns, superimpositions on a wedding, lots of boats and bridges. Color/picture looked perfect on my tube TV.
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The Spook Speaks (1940, Jules White)
Not-at-all-good short full of corny sound effects and sub-stooges gags, but it’s better than the others I’ve watched on these DVDs since it has a roller-skating penguin. Buster’s costar Elsie Ames (she was in most of these shorts, then showed up 30 years later in Minnie & Moskowitz for some reason) is terrible, but then, Buster is terrible too. Thanks Sony for slapping warnings and disclaimers and legal shit before every short on the disc. They must’ve known it wouldn’t get tiresome because we’d only watch one before quitting.
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Who Am I? (1989, Faith Hubley)
Things morph into other things, illustrating the five (or six or seven) senses. Short!
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Blake Ball (1988, Emily Hubley)
Didn’t love the narration in this one. The woman who says “some are born to sweet delight/some are born to endless night” (without the preceding lines) has got nothing on Nobody. I guess all the lines are the words of William Blake, but they’re not making much of an impact, and I never figured out Blake’s connection to all the baseball stuff. There’s more five senses stuff anyway. A bit too laboriously new-agey, but some great moments (like below).
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O Dreamland (1953, Lindsay Anderson)
Boy did I ever botch the Free Cinema box set, buying it then deciding I didn’t want to watch it after all and letting it sit on the shelf for years. Finally checked this out and I kinda really like it. Could do without the evil laughing clown all over the soundtrack. Kind of like Jean Vigo’s À propos de Nice which, given If….‘s resonance with Zero For Conduct, proves Anderson saw a Vigo retrospective at some point.

by ·Comments Off on Shorts watched July 2009

Koko’s Earth Control (1928, Dave Fleischer)
Koko the Clown walks the planet with his dog until they find the Earth Control station. The dog willfully and maliciously pulls the end-of-the-world switch and then acts all panicked when the world begins to end. What did he think would happen? Fun mix of live-action (tilt camera while people pretend to fall to the side, the dog skittering atop an animation table) and animation (earthquakes, volcanoes, the sun melts the moon).
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Dutch Bird (2004, Kirk Weddell)
Ridiculous comedy – old man is sad and alone, so his friends convince him to go out again by pranking him with a story about drugged racing pigeons. On my TV the color was way off, which was really the main interest in the movie. In the below shot, everyone had green skin against a pinkish sky. It was eerie – as the 20 minutes stretched on and on, I liked to imagine that green-faced aliens had gotten a hold of The Full Monty and Waking Ned Devine and were producing Brit-com films of their own. Sadly, getting screenshots on my PC the color turned out normal.
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Tale of Tales (1979, Yuri Norshteyn)
At least two jury competitions have named this the greatest animated film of all time. It is really good, but we all wished it’d been half its 30 minute length, and its symbolism was extremely obvious. Not that I ever get less-than-obvious symbolism, so that’s not something I ought to complain about. Wild Things are playing jump rope and a little dog kidnaps a baby, and there’s war and peace and what not. Supposedly the director has been working on his film of Gogol’s The Overcoat ever since – for 30 years. He must be the Jeff Mangum of Russian animated films.
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Harpy (1978, Raoul Servais)
Kind of an absurd, funnier Tales from the Darkside episode. Guy saves a poor harpy from being beaten to death by an angry man and takes it home. But it keeps eating and eating and making his life hell. Finally it eats his legs off when he tries to escape, so he attempts to beat it to death, it gets saved by another man, etc. Same ending as Argento’s Jenifer, then. Mostly appealing for the crazy harpy visuals. The Belgian director has also made films called Siren and Pegasus, must find those sometime.
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Grasshoppers (1990, Bruno Bozzetto)
Cute, no-frills cartoon that looked like something out of Mad Magazine. Civilization rises out of the grass only to fight war after war after war, represented by a few dudes at a time, not by whole armies. The kind of thing that would’ve played on O Canada if it wasn’t Italian.
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Out of Print (2008, Danny Plotnick)
A dude yearns for the days when cult movies were actually rare and you could only get crappy unwatchable dubbed versions if you knew a guy who knew a guy. As someone who enjoys being able to see cult movies easily and in relatively good quality, I don’t see the dude’s point.
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World Cinema (2007, Joel Coen)
Llewelyn from No Country stops at an arthouse movie theater playing Rules of the Game and Climates. Gets advice from the ticket guy, watches Climates and likes it. Having seen Climates myself I’m not sure this is too realistic. Also not sure why it was cut from the DVD of To Each His Cinema.
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by ·Comments Off on Shorts watched June 2009

Poyraz (2006, Belma Bas)
Rural people sure live quaint and handsomely photographed lives!
Nuri Bilge Ceylan was thanked in the credits

Why Play Leapfrog (1949, John Sutherland/MGM)
Let’s hear it for capitalism! Clever cartoon describes why inflation is okay and raw material costs don’t mean much. A boring explanation of why America is so darned great that ends by telling factory workers to be more efficient and come up with smart cost-saving ideas which will lead to greater pay increases.

Balance (1989, Christoph & Wolfgang Lauenstein)
Ominous stop-motion – five mute guys with numbers on their shirts and telescoping fishing poles in their shirts are on a balanced platform suspended in space. One catches a sort of music box and the others get greedy, leading to a fight which ends with one guy on the far end of the platform from the box.

Broken Down Film (1985, Osamu Tezuka)
It’s a popeye-like cowboy cartoon except that the film’s projection problems (hair in the gate, scratches, countdown leader, etc) are part of the story. Cute.

and a few from the Unseen Cinema box set…

Paris Exposition Films (1900, James White)
Some one-minute films at the Eiffel Tower a decade after its construction. Best part is this guy on the left side of the screenshot. People were walking up to the camera and this guy saw his chance for stardom, so he prepares himself for some manuever (maybe a backflip) but blows it, stopping instead to shake hands with an acquaintance offscreen as the film runs out.
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Captain Nissen Going Through Whirlpool Rapids, Niagara Falls (1901, Edison Co.)
It takes longer to type the title than to watch the film, which is of some submarine-looking craft bobbing in a river. Found a wonderful tale online of Nissen’s stupid death four years later, but unsure if it’s true.
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Down The Hudson (1903, Frederick Armitage & AE Weed)
Much more interesting than the submarine thing – New York riverfront over a hundred years ago. I assume lots more of this stuff will be on disc five.
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The Ghost Train (1903)
Oooh, someone learned to invert the black/white image AND to matte a moon into the upper corner. This is one of my favorites because it is neat-looking and twenty seconds long. If only you could say the same for Transformers 2.
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Westinghouse Works, Panorama View, Street Car Motor Room (1904, Billy Bitzer)
Long factory tracking shot reminds me of the beginning of Manufactured Landscapes. Unlike in ML, all the workers stop and look at the camera.
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In Youth, Beside the Lonely Sea (1925-ish)
Crazy three-panel layout illustrating the poem told with text above and below the picture. Lots of ghostly superimpositions. This was so damn cool I had to lay down for a while.
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