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Revenger (1958, Dusan Vukotic)

Scarf Guy catches his wife cheating, goes to the gun store and imagines every possible scenario, none of them especially good, so he buys a butterfly net. That part must’ve made more sense in the original Chekhov story. Getting around to watching more by Vukotic after enjoying Cow on the Moon and Cowboy Jimmy.

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The Playful Robot (1956, Dusan Vukotic)

A nutty one with excellent music. Scientist in a sort of Wallace-automated Jetsons laboratory creates a sentient humanoid robot then tells it to clean the lab while he naps. Instead it creates two smaller child robots so it can also nap, but they focus more on messing with each other. Not sure why a flying saucer bird hatches from an egg at the end, but the scientist wakes up and isn’t at all displeased by this messy racket.

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The Struggle (1977, Marcell Jankovics)

Very good and short, feels like Bill Plympton turned classical. A muscley sculptor chisels away at a block while it chisels away at him, until the block has become a muscley human figure and the sculptor is old and busted. I still remember Marcell’s Sisyphus animation 15 years later. Won the (short) palme d’or.

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Eyetoon (1968, Jerry Abrams)

Blobby abstract art flickers, fast-motion driving demo, geometric and psychedelic patterns, sex drugs and rock & roll – for the first half it can’t decide what it wants to be, then it settles on being an avant-porno for the second half.

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Cab Calloway’s Hi-De-Ho (1934, Fred Waller)

Cab, even more of a goofball than expected and making the most of his floppy hair, rehearses with his pajama-wearing band in the sleeper car of a train, then they perform at the Cotton Club. Train Porter Sam buys a radio to keep his Chicago hotwife entertained while he’s away, Cab finds out the hotwife is alone and entertains her in person. Corny and hardly technically perfect, but there aren’t a lotta opportunities to see Cab dancing to his own songs.

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Senor Droopy (1949, Tex Avery)

Wolf the star bullfighter is trouncing the bull, who then turns the tables. Nobody takes Droopy seriously, then the bull disrespects his dream girl and he gets mad. It’s Tex Avery, it’s Droopy, it’s good.

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Chumlum (1964, Ron Rice)

A parade of double-and-more-exposures. Ron got Jack Smith and the Warholites to dress up and act freaky with percussive music by an ex-Velvet. It’s only 20 minutes and at least five of that is a girl swinging in a hammock chair. I’m sure it’s very transgressive but nobody appears to be having much fun except maybe Ron in the editing room.

Chuck Stephens in Cinema Scope:

A hallucinatory micro-epic filmed during lulls in production of Smith’s Normal Love … a movie so sumptuously and serenely psychedelic it appears to have been printed entirely on gauze … a thousand and one Lower East Side nights melting together in a cosmic slop of languid poses and limp half-dances, a smoke-fragile erotica that climaxes and dissolves the moment it hits your eye … it was only in the crazy crucible of Chumlum that Smith’s frittering, flailing “play” out in front of the camera seemed to find a mostly-in-focus chemical twin behind the lens.

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Los Angeles Plays New York (2016, John Wilson)

John Wilson shot and edited a piece for a fashion guy who refuses to pay, so… he sues his friend Clark, standing in for the MIA fashion guy, after filming a fake fashion short with Clark as the supposed client, and they get booked on a boring new Judge Judy-affiliated court show and bring in a hidden camera. John then worries whether this short film violates his agreement with the TV studio and they’ll sue him over it, so he claims it can’t be released… then how am I watching it?

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Mr. Hayashi (1961, Bruce Baillie)

A great idea to make three-minute sun-bathed interview/portraits, there should be a thousand more of these. This one’s with Mr. Hayashi, part-time gardener – that’s about all we learn about him.

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To Parsifal (1963, Bruce Baillie)

Bruce’s Leviathan – he rides a fishing boat and watches water and birds. After the halfway point he moves to land, exploring the railroad and its surrounding vegetation and insect life, all while listening to Wagner.

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Mass for the Dakota Sioux (1963, Bruce Baillie)

Death/applause intro, then a hazy drift of city superimpositions. Long take tailing a motorcycle in San Francisco (not a known habitat of the Dakota Sioux) over the titles with church music. He does play with focus in a purposeful way (the ol’ rack from a distant American flag to nearby barbed wire) but sometimes the picture is so soft and blurry that you wonder if he remembered to focus at all. Parades, war, advertisements filmed off a TV with shaky reception. Repeated applause, motor vehicles, and bananas. Shots from X: The Man With X-Ray Eyes! The city pays little mind as a dead man is removed from the sidewalk to an ambulance, and the sea and the motorcycle roll on.

Horizon at the bottom of frame? That’s interesting:

by ·Comments Off on Animated Shorts watched May 2020

The Lion and the Song (1959, Bretislav Pojar)

Accordion player wandering the sand dunes finds an oasis and amuses the desert creatures with a pantomime dance, with his cape representing his lost love. Lion is more hungry than amused, eats our man, then dies of internal accordion-related pains. Czech stop-motion puppetry, obviously very good even in my old SD copy.

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My Green Crocodile (1967, Vadim Kurchevsky)

A crocodile who adores flowers meets a beautiful cow, and they fall in love based on their shared interests, though the other crocs and hippos scoff at their relationship. When autumn arrives, the cow declares their love is gone with the flowers and leaves, so the croc in desperation climbs a tree and transforms himself into a green leaf. The narrator seems to approve of this action, though it feels like a downer ending. Loved the harpist moon.

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Film Film Film (1968, Fyodor Khitruk)

Opens with a slideshow/montage music video, then goes into a comic parody of the process of feature filmmaking. After the tormented, sporadically inspired, often suicidal screenwriter creates a perfect script, the valium-popping director takes a hundred meetings, modifying the script each time. And so on – equipment problems, child actors, a tense premiere. 2D animation with a few cool bits and a sixties-rockin’ theme song. I wouldn’t have pegged this as the same guy who started making Winnie the Pooh shorts the next year.

how a cinematographer works:

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How A Sausage Dog Works (1971, Julian Antonisz)

Some animation techniques using gels and layers and liquids that I don’t think I’ve seen before. Narrator with a high, irritating voice, untranslated. Based on the title, I might’ve assumed the vision of a dachshund full of gears with a heart in the middle, but I didn’t predict the dachshund being squished underfoot by the devil. Without translation, I don’t have a clear idea of what is happening here, but it looks like pure lunacy, and I love it.

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Apel (The Roll-Call, 1971, Ryszard Czekala)

Shadowy semi-figures – smeary motion-blurs and tops of heads.
Not much of a roll call – the only words are Down/Up/Fire – a military commander or prison guard yells commands at a mass of bald figures. After one refuses to obey and is killed, all the rest refuse to obey and are killed. Not the most uplifting little movie but it has a cool look I guess?

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Crane’s Feathers (1977, Ideya Garanina)

Convincingly Japanese-looking stop-motion tale of the Crane Wife. I do love cranes, and ten-minute tragedies. Does our lead guy hang his head low at the end? You bet he does.

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King’s Sandwich (1985, Andrey Khrzhanovskiy)

Weird intro, steampunk imagery over the sound of a workout video. So far, all the stop-motion shorts – the Lion, the Crocodile and the Crane – have featured butterflies. This is 2D animation with a nude man and a sausage dog and a cigar-smoking cat dancing with a busty cow – but no butterflies… oops, I watched this thinking it was Khrzhanovskiy’s Butterfly from 1972. This one’s the story of a fussy king who just wants butter for his bread, despite the gigantic queen and the dairymaid trying to convince him to try marmalade instead, while shadowy security agents lurk absolutely everywhere. Bleepy electronic soundtrack.

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Repeat (1995, Michaela Pavlatova)

Sketchbook 2D with crosshatch texture. Tight repeating behaviors: a man taking his dog for a walk, a wife feeding her husband, an interrupted tryst, a dramatic breakup, repeating and colliding until the dog brings the whole thing to a halt, wakes everyone up from their motion loops, leading to an orgy, before it all starts again.

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Adagio (2000, Garri Bardin)

A stop-motion funeral procession through a terrible storm by origami monk crows. All seems hopeless until a white Jesus-crow leads the way. When the white crow displays his magical powers of cleanliness, the others beat the shit out of him, but after his dramatic resurrection, they all worship him with white-crow billboards. Kind of a dour little movie with halfway decent origami.

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Deputy Droopy (1955, Tex Avery)

The one where two safecrackers have to be quiet, Droopy torments them into making noise, so they keep running out to a nearby mountain to unleash their yells. Droopy’s attacks range from silly (get ’em to sit on a snapping lobster) to quite violent (wailing on ’em with a spiked board while their feet are stuck in glue). Anticlimactic hearing-aid joke at the end.

Don’t know if it counts as a short film, but we watched Spike Lee’s NYC pandemic montage, psyched that he has a new feature out in a couple weeks.