by ·Comments Off on Cartoons watched April 2024

The Emperor’s New Clothes (1953, Ted Parmelee)

Everyone pretends they can see the emp’s “invisible clothes” until a kid gives the game away. The writing and dialogue is odd, Emp’s face-symmetry oval is visible, UPA maybe not firing on all cylinders here.

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The Unicorn in the Garden (1953, William Hurtz)

A pleasant man finds a unicorn eating his flowers one morning, wakes up his shrew wife to show her. She calls the cops instead to have him committed, but when they arrive he acts cool and she’s hopping around talking unicorns so they nab her instead.

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Steamboat Willie (1928, Walt Disney)

My favorite out-of-copyright Disney short… but wait, why did I not know that this movie is a cavalcade of animal cruelty? Mickey throws things at a parrot, a cow is force-fed, A goose and a goat and pigs are turned into musical instruments, a cat is swung by its tail, a baby pig is kicked. On top of this the ship captain aggressively chews tobacco and Minnie gets lifted by her undies. On the plus side, Mickey invents the Anvil Orchestra.

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A Corny Concerto (1943, Robert Clampett)

Two mini-musicals as Elmer conducts Strauss.
McKimson, Tashlin, and Stalling – all the boys turned out for this one.

1. Porky and his dog hunt Bugs in time to the music.

2. A quacking swan rejects the grey duck until he violently rescues her babies from a vulture.

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Felix in the Ghost Breaker (1923, Otto Mesmer)

Why does the Felix DVD open with a text crawl telling us that after Mickey Mouse stole Felix’s merchandise sales, producer Pat Sullivan’s wife “fell or jumped from a hotel window?” Why not add that Pat had a history of incompetence, was a convicted child rapist, and drank himself to death the following year? Anyway, we’ve all decided to give New Jersey’s own Otto Mesmer the credit for Felix and these films, and Otto continued the Felix legacy for another sixty years.

A ghost is tormenting a farmer and his animals, Felix leads it away with a bottle of rum (which ghosts love) then holds it at gunpoint (future note: Felix is armed) until the farmer arrives for the scooby doo ending. When did ghost breaking become busting… there were Ghost Breaker films through 1940, and Ghost Busters and Chasers in the early 1950s, then busting became the default after the famously unprofitable 1984 film.

In the 1920s Felix looked like a snaggletoothed black cat – I’m more familiar with his 1930s character model.

Useful meme for later this election year:

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Felix in Hollywood (1923, Otto Mesmer)

That’s more like it – now Felix is pranking people. He makes his wannabe-actor owner rich through shoe sales, then the owner is off to Hollywood to find a job in the movies. Felix does get another gun… his magic bag of tricks wasn’t invented until the 1950s but he disguises himself as a black bag to stow-away to Hollywood, where he meets caricatures of nobody I recognized (reportedly Gloria Swanson, Ben Turpin, Tom Mix, and Cecil De Mille) and poses with Chaplin. These are mildly meta, then, since he’s already in a movie, and in the previous one the ghost came towards camera and threatened the viewers.

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Face Like a Frog (1988, Sally Cruikshank)

Absolutely wild all-things-possible animation at a frantic pace, like a PG-rated 1980s Superjail. I guess a frog gets seduced into entering a spooky house, then escapes through the basement. I was gonna say this has insane music for a short, turns out it’s by Danny Elfman, same year as Beetlejuice.

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Quasi at the Quackadero (1976, Sally Cruikshank)

Quasi (pronounced KWAH-zee) lives a decadent life in bed watching TV programs of other people doing work. Anita and Rollo take him to a psychic carnival, plotting to lose him there, and succeed in knocking him down a “time hole” into the dinosaur age. All the best animators come from New Jersey. The score composers wrote a book called “The Couch Potato Guide to Life” which is also about getting warped from watching too much TV.

After Quasi’s disappearance, Chairy found a new home in Pee Wee’s Playhouse:

The roll-back-time mirror also rolls back your clothing:

And with that I’ve seen all of Jerry Beck’s 50 Greatest Cartoons, and written up all but nine in the book – five of those being Tex Avery shorts. Now to rewatch those nine, and find the sixty-ish runners-up. A man’s life work (watching cartoons on the couch) is never finished.

by ·Comments Off on Cryptozoo (2021, Dash Shaw)

Paper-cutout people make out in a lovely owl forest. The man dreams of breaking past a line of police and storming the D.C. Capitol – this is set in Vietnam-era, but January 2021 is funny timing for such a sentiment. A burst of nudity, profanity and violence after they scale a fence and the man is impaled by a unicorn, and I was ready to write this off as low-rent edgelord animation, but the movie changes course dramatically – I got caught up in it, and gotta admit with its scale, ambition and budget, the animation gets the job done.

Lauren Grey is a globetrotting zoo agent, capturing mythical creatures (cryptids) and giving them nice captive zoo-bound lives, fighting off enemy agents who want the cryptids for private sale… the zoo’s real motives are questioned as its moneyed owner fucks a bigfoot in her castle tower, tables are turned, the traumatized woman from the beginning releases the most dangerous caged beasts, and all hell breaks loose.

by ·Comments Off on Black Moon (1975, Louis Malle)

“All is illusion. Set us free of this world.”

A badger on the road is run down by a small orange car driven by Lily, hiding her identity beneath a hat and bulky coat, driving through the midst of a literal battle of the sexes (with tanks and machine guns). She runs from her car after being discovered, chills for a while with snakes, millipedes and mantises before spying a unicorn then following a woman on horseback and a group of naked children running with a pig towards an old house in which she finds a bottomless glass of milk, a semi-talking piglet and rat, and an old woman with a C.B. and an alarm clock collection. So it kind of sounds like a kids’ movie, if not for all the nudity and brutal warfare, and were there some dialogue or a condescending narrator to help the viewer along.

Enter two more characters named Lily, a brother and sister played by Joe Dallesandro (the year after Dracula) and Alexandra Stewart (Mickey One, The Fire Within), both of whom I liked very much. Maybe it’s because they’re so silent, while the main Lily (Cathryn Harrison, who was 15 and had already appeared in Altman’s Images and Demy’s Pied Piper) and the old woman (Therese Giehse, in Malle’s Lacombe Lucien the year before) were hampered by the dubbing in their dialogue scenes.

nearly the full cast:

The old woman dies amidst an alarm clock catastrophe, but is alive again when the siblings come up to feed her (she sucks one Lily’s breast while Joe Lily tickles her ear). Main Lily remains in the old woman’s room for a while. A bird flutters around the room (prefiguring a later scene), and the woman talks with her rat friend (named Humphrey) and her radio, watches and mocks the girl, who eats the ant-infested christmas cheese and braves bureau snakes to flip through a photo album. Meanwhile the war outside makes itself known from time to time, and Lily finally escapes to seek the unicorn. She gets no help from the siblings, finally manages to hold an unsatisfying chat with the unicorn after ripping up some flowers as they scream in pain.

Lily plays piano while the children, some of them clothed now, sing along operatically, then is frightened by a painting of a male swordsman chopping a hawk in half while a woman weeps. Enter a hawk through the window, and Joe Lily with a sword. I hope that beautiful hawk (and the badger, and the lamb, and the snake) wasn’t actually hurt or killed by the film crew. This leads to a painful-looking sibling battle. Finally, Lily, alone in the woman’s room except for the unicorn, baring her breasts to feed it.

If there’s meaning to all this, it’s not readily apparent. The old woman outright tells Lily that she imagined the unicorn and the war, but the woman herself disappears at times. If Lily herself, or anything at all, is supposed to be “real” and imagining these events, perhaps while playing outside, or playing piano, the movie presents no evidence of this. Lily, or Louis anyway, has your mid-1970’s fascination with nature and nudity (see also: Wicker Man, Holy Mountain, Deliverance). The internet figures it’s somehow related to Alice In Wonderland, as must be every fantasy story with a young girl lead.

Luis Buñuel’s daughter-in-law helped with the dialogue, shot by Bergman buddy Sven Nykvist. “Old Lady” Therese Giehse died before this came out. I thought it was a funny misprint when the IMDB said “Director Paul Verhoeven died during the eulogy he delivered for her,” but it’s true – and this was a different Paul Verhoeven.

Movies I’ve seen by Louis Malle include noirish jazzy thriller Elevator to the Gallows, zany comic Zazie dans le metro, suicide drama The Fire Within, epic travel doc Phantom India, and now this 70’s fantasy with little story or dialogue. None of these things is like the other. I guess Malle was one of those filmmakers who liked to constantly try new things, not one who always made variations of the same movie.