Title: Geri’s Game (1997)
Director: Jan Pinkava
Time: 5 minutes
Availability: Online through Pixar’s site / iTune’s Store here.
Review:
Starting with “Luxo Jr.” in 1986 Pixar has created an winning streak of high-profile CG shorts, of which my favorite is “Geri’s Game.” Geri is an elderly chess player who squares off against his doppelganger in a scenic park. Moving back and forth around the board, a bespectacled version of Geri matches wits with his naked-eye twin and the combat soon heats up. With his strategies failing and checkmate looming, the glasses-wearing Geri fakes a heart attack, taking in his rival long enough to turn the tide (180 degrees). The loser must begrudgingly pay their usual wager, though of course, there is really only one Geri.
After a long hiatus from animated shorts, “Geri’s Game” made a huge leap forward for Pixar, demonstrating human movement, expression and depth along with the original goal of getting the clothing to look right. I think this one still plays well today though CG has reached all new levels of realism. Other popular Pixar shorts include “Tin Toy,” “For the Birds,” and “One Man Band.” In the last decade, the company traditionally presents an original short along with each new feature.
Title: 9 (2005)
Director: Shane Acker
Time: 11 minutes
Availability: On YouTube here.
Review:
A zippered-up doll creature in a post-apocalyptic junkyard/toy-graveyard witnesses the deaths of his fellow kind at the hands of an insectoid-crab robot. Left alone in the rubble, #9 (each of his people is numbered on their backs and their pelts are stitched onto their killer) hatches a risky revenge, tricking the monster with the help of a soul-compass, a dummy and a carefully engineered deathtrap. “9” is one of the best-looking CG shorts yet made, making ample use of texture, shadow and a dense mise-en-scene to show off a sci-fi tinged world that feels immediately real.
The academy overlooked this one for reason of their own, but computer graphics showcase SIGGRAPH made no hesitation awarding this short their top prize. The film has been so successful that a feature length adaptation has been green lit with Acker in the director’s chair and an all-star voice cast that includes John C. Reilly, Jennifer Connelly, Elijah Wood, Crispin Glover, Martin Landau and Christopher Plummer. Focus Features is hoping to get it into theaters this year, but don’t be surprised if it slips to next.
Title: Elephants Dream (2006)
Director: Bassam Kurdali
Time: 11 minutes
Availability: Available as a free open-source download from the homepage here along with all the productions files or on YouTube here
Review:
Elderly, eccentric Proog leads his young skeptical accomplice Emo through a massive, unpredictable facility known only as The Machine. Each room of The Machine can vary widely from the next. They are connected by vast systems of passageways, catwalks and elevator shafts festooned with wires and populated by exotic robotic creatures. Proog expertly navigates the dangerous environment, but fails to impress his protégé. It becomes ever more obvious that Emo does not even see The Machine and that the vision presented to the viewer is only in Proog’s imagination.
“Elephants Dream” is a landmark in CG cinema, funded by donations and created entirely* with open source software (freely available programs whose code can be modified by any user): Blender as the 3D modeling suite and Linux as the operating system. The end result is a staggering demonstration of visual effects that outdoes most of the output from mammoth animation studios. Despite the gorgeous presentation, many viewers were disappointed with the highly abstract plot that leaves interpretation very open-ended. I, for one, see this as a plus, flexing the wider artistic choice available to independent production.
BONUS!!! (Extra review provided to shed some light into the obscure depths of internet-only CG shorts)
Title: The End (2005)
Director: Michel Samreth, Maxime Leduc and Martin Ruyant
Time: 6 minutes
Availability: On YouTube here.
Review:
A scarecrow is put on trial and condemned for the crime of friendliness towards a crow. His ragtag peers throw him in a decrepit cell where he awaits a fiery death sentence. To add injury to insult, the crow returns and rips hay from his body for its nest. Exasperated at this last straw (myeh), the scarecrow collapses, awaking later to a very pleasant surprise. The B&W CG visuals are not as polished as some of the big studio output, but the bold character design manages to be creepy and sympathetic at once.
Burdened by a generic name and a total lack of publicity, I’m not surprised how hard it was to dig up information about this short. It was made by the talented students of France’s Supinfocom, a prestigious French animation school whose members put out a wealth of impressive material completely below the radar. You can add this to the long list of great shorts adrift in the swirl of obscurity along with The Black Heart Gang’s gorgeous gem “The Tale of How” (2006) which could just as equally have held this spot on my overview (follow the links and go watch that one as well).
Monday, April 14, 2008
Saturday, April 12, 2008
Poor Little Animated Shorts: Claymation Edition
Title: Dimensions of Dialogue (1982)
Director: Jan Svankmajer
Time: 12 minutes
Availability: Available on “The Collected Shorts of Jan Svankmajer” DVD and in two parts on YouTube (low quality).
Review:
“Dimensions of Dialogue” is divided into three parts. The first, “Exhaustive Discussion,” features three Giuseppe Arcimboldo-style heads made out of food, kitchenware and office supplies respectively. They take turns eating each other and variously crushing, mashing, chewing, tearing and decimating the contents of one another before vomiting, eventually reducing each other to indistinguishable homogenous profiles. In “Passionate Discourse,” a clay man and woman quite literally become one during sex, spawning an amorphous baby that they scorn. The child causes to fight, returning them to a churning mass of clay once more. In “Factual Conversation,” the least of the three segments, two busts emit complimentary items from their mouths (such as pencil and sharpener, shoe and shoelace, tooth and toothbrush) though they eventually cycle through every possible permutation at the expense of logic.
One of the seminal works of claymation, “Dimensions of Dialogue’s” brilliance hasn’t faded in the previous decades even as claymation and CG have become ever more complicated. Svankmajer’s early work with stop-motion would influence his entire career and find its way into nearly all of his feature films, which include “Alice,” “Conspirators of Pleasure,” “Little Otik” and “Faust.” Though you can find this one on the internet, I encourage anyone who wishes to see it to check their library or use Netflix and enjoy a pristine transfer.
Title: Closed Mondays (1974)
Director: Will Vinton and Bob Gardiner
Time: 8 minutes
Availability: Available on YouTube here.
Review:
An elderly drunk wanders into a closed art museum (that advertises the “usual crap”) on a Monday evening. He experiences what might be hallucinations in which the artwork comes to life before his eyes, brought on either by his inebriated state or extreme Stendhal Syndrome. An abstract painting puts on a curious musical show of beating colors while a giant cat-like robot installation, once activated, undergoes a series of independent mutations beyond the understanding of even its “inferior creators.” While initially dismissing the art with phrases like “pshh” and “what the f?” the old man becomes increasingly distressed, eventually trying to escape through a painting of a window. Lunging for the door to escape, he steps onto a pedestal and learns the true cost of entering a museum that is Closed Mondays.
This 1974 academy award winner for best animated short manages to celebrate and mock art at the same time, while telling a brief little story full of character and humor and never resorting to repetition. If you enjoy this one, you might also like “The Critic” (which took the 1963 Oscar) about a cranky Jewish man in the audience of an avant-garde animated short who loudly makes derogatory comments much to the chagrin of the other patrons. It was written by none other than Mel Brooks nearly five years before he went into feature filmmaking.
Title: More (1998)
Director: Mark Osborne
Time: 6 minutes
Availability: Available to watch on Osborne’s website here.
Review:
In a grey-scale alternative world of sad-eyed clay figures and urban uniformity a lowly worker toils a factory while dreaming of an invention that will bring back the innocence of his childhood. He eventually succeeds in transferring the glowing energy within himself into a pair of goggles. The new spectacles render the world in pulsating Technicolor hues, becoming an overnight sensation and getting him named “Greatest Inventor Ever.” However, rising to the status of manufacturing mogul only puts him in charge of the pitiable factory grunts he once worked next to and fails to bring him real happiness. Discovering that the light inside him has gone out, he peers out of his skyscraper office at the children whose joy he can never truly recapture.
Mark Osborne claims to have envisioned the entire story in his head whilst listening to New Order’s “Elegia.” It’s certainly understandable that the overpowering musical accompaniment should be so key to “More’s” emotion resonance. A definite labor of love, Osborne’s near-perfect elegiac mediation on the loss of innocence under capitalist society was made for IMAX, but couldn’t find an audience until he uploaded it to iFilms and got it played on MTV2 (where I first saw it). It’s a personal favorite of my own and is often hailed as the greatest stop-motion short of all time by my generation, yet it shockingly failed to clinch the academy award the year it came out.
Director: Jan Svankmajer
Time: 12 minutes
Availability: Available on “The Collected Shorts of Jan Svankmajer” DVD and in two parts on YouTube (low quality).
Review:
“Dimensions of Dialogue” is divided into three parts. The first, “Exhaustive Discussion,” features three Giuseppe Arcimboldo-style heads made out of food, kitchenware and office supplies respectively. They take turns eating each other and variously crushing, mashing, chewing, tearing and decimating the contents of one another before vomiting, eventually reducing each other to indistinguishable homogenous profiles. In “Passionate Discourse,” a clay man and woman quite literally become one during sex, spawning an amorphous baby that they scorn. The child causes to fight, returning them to a churning mass of clay once more. In “Factual Conversation,” the least of the three segments, two busts emit complimentary items from their mouths (such as pencil and sharpener, shoe and shoelace, tooth and toothbrush) though they eventually cycle through every possible permutation at the expense of logic.
One of the seminal works of claymation, “Dimensions of Dialogue’s” brilliance hasn’t faded in the previous decades even as claymation and CG have become ever more complicated. Svankmajer’s early work with stop-motion would influence his entire career and find its way into nearly all of his feature films, which include “Alice,” “Conspirators of Pleasure,” “Little Otik” and “Faust.” Though you can find this one on the internet, I encourage anyone who wishes to see it to check their library or use Netflix and enjoy a pristine transfer.
Title: Closed Mondays (1974)
Director: Will Vinton and Bob Gardiner
Time: 8 minutes
Availability: Available on YouTube here.
Review:
An elderly drunk wanders into a closed art museum (that advertises the “usual crap”) on a Monday evening. He experiences what might be hallucinations in which the artwork comes to life before his eyes, brought on either by his inebriated state or extreme Stendhal Syndrome. An abstract painting puts on a curious musical show of beating colors while a giant cat-like robot installation, once activated, undergoes a series of independent mutations beyond the understanding of even its “inferior creators.” While initially dismissing the art with phrases like “pshh” and “what the f?” the old man becomes increasingly distressed, eventually trying to escape through a painting of a window. Lunging for the door to escape, he steps onto a pedestal and learns the true cost of entering a museum that is Closed Mondays.
This 1974 academy award winner for best animated short manages to celebrate and mock art at the same time, while telling a brief little story full of character and humor and never resorting to repetition. If you enjoy this one, you might also like “The Critic” (which took the 1963 Oscar) about a cranky Jewish man in the audience of an avant-garde animated short who loudly makes derogatory comments much to the chagrin of the other patrons. It was written by none other than Mel Brooks nearly five years before he went into feature filmmaking.
Title: More (1998)
Director: Mark Osborne
Time: 6 minutes
Availability: Available to watch on Osborne’s website here.
Review:
In a grey-scale alternative world of sad-eyed clay figures and urban uniformity a lowly worker toils a factory while dreaming of an invention that will bring back the innocence of his childhood. He eventually succeeds in transferring the glowing energy within himself into a pair of goggles. The new spectacles render the world in pulsating Technicolor hues, becoming an overnight sensation and getting him named “Greatest Inventor Ever.” However, rising to the status of manufacturing mogul only puts him in charge of the pitiable factory grunts he once worked next to and fails to bring him real happiness. Discovering that the light inside him has gone out, he peers out of his skyscraper office at the children whose joy he can never truly recapture.
Mark Osborne claims to have envisioned the entire story in his head whilst listening to New Order’s “Elegia.” It’s certainly understandable that the overpowering musical accompaniment should be so key to “More’s” emotion resonance. A definite labor of love, Osborne’s near-perfect elegiac mediation on the loss of innocence under capitalist society was made for IMAX, but couldn’t find an audience until he uploaded it to iFilms and got it played on MTV2 (where I first saw it). It’s a personal favorite of my own and is often hailed as the greatest stop-motion short of all time by my generation, yet it shockingly failed to clinch the academy award the year it came out.
Thursday, April 10, 2008
Poor Little Animated Shorts: Experimental Edition
Title: Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (1987)
Director: Todd Haynes
Time: 43 minutes
Availability: Available only in bootleg format.
Review:
Todd Haynes (Far From Heaven, Velvet Goldmine, I’m Not There) launched his career with this unusual short, a biopic on the tragic anorexia death of musician Karen Carpenter told using Barbie doll reenactments. His illegal appropriation of tracks by The Carpenters and his unflattering depiction of her family led to Richard Carpenter successfully suing Haynes and having all the original copies except one destroyed. Despite this controversy and several questionable liberties with the facts, “Superstar” is a remarkably sensitive and even heartfelt study, clearly taking Karen’s side and somehow managing to keep the cascade of irony in check.
No amount of official censure could ever truly kill Haynes’s debut cult opus, and the documentary has led a healthy life in the black-market alleys behind America’s art houses. The picture deserves its reputation, setting the tone for later projects that tap kitsch, irony and parody as a form of loving tribute rather than jeering snub. The project still triggers debates on topics as diverse as eating disorders (Haynes is said to have carved the Barbie doll plastic away layer by layer throughout the film), celebrity status, feminism, music rights and middle-class hypocrisy. Though not technically a stop-motion film, it’s still must-see puppetry.
Title: A Walk Through H (1978)
Director: Peter Greenaway
Time: 40 minutes
Availability: The Early Films of Peter Greenaway: Volume 2
Review:
“A Walk Through H” is a narrated journey across 92 maps, arranged in a gallery for an ailing Peter Greenaway by his enigmatic fictitious alter-ego Tulse Luper. The maps serve as a visual motif upon which to meditate on the act of journeying, both literally and metaphorically. The landscapes are primarily surrealist fantasies and the narration is an elaborate game, but the tone is pitched towards playful profundity. “There will be plenty of time to decide what H is,” claims Tulse Luper, “along the way,” though the underlying implication is that it could stand for either heaven or hell, making the whole exercise an allegory for the commute between life and death.
While not as influential as Greenaway’s “Vertical Features Remake,” I find this short somewhat more satisfying and watchable. It has many of the traits most commonly associated with Greenaway’s work: sly narration, a systematic pattern, the number 92, the mysterious influence of Tulse Luper, self-reflexivity and subtle absurdist humor. It opens and closes with live-action sequences and uses stills of fake maps (which often look nothing like maps at all) for the bulk of its “story,” but I consider it an experimental kin of animation.
Title: Zorn’s Lemma (1970)
Director: Hollis Frampton
Time: 59 minutes
Availability: Available to watch legally online at UBUWEB here.
Review:
“Zorn’s Lemma” is divided unequally into three parts. It opens on solid black leader while a narrator reads alphabet rhymes from the Bay State Primer for puritanical children. The central core of the film runs through the alphabet showing each letter. It then loops through the letters over and over again, each time using different representations of the letters and replacing one of them with a found-text that starts with that letter (each from a different sign and never repeating a word). Once all the letters have become words, the cycle repeats, this time transforming the words into short video clips. The final passage is a long, nearly continuous take of two people walking through the snow towards the horizon while women alternate reading one word at a time from The Theory of Light.
Frampton’s “Zorn’s Lemma” made waves in the experimental New York underground circuit and influenced the coming generation of structuralists and formalists. His strict alphabetic organization was daring in its day, and the high contrast it makes with the first and last section of the film has led to plenty of academic speculation. The middle passage, however, is what truly defines the work and lends it a hypnotic, even tense, rhythm. I include it as animation, although others would say it clearly is not, because of the way he breaks down the imagery into a series of 24 (j and v are combined) single-second still/clips, artificially animating the alphabet in a way that consciously evokes projection speed. This is probably my favorite avant-garde short.
Director: Todd Haynes
Time: 43 minutes
Availability: Available only in bootleg format.
Review:
Todd Haynes (Far From Heaven, Velvet Goldmine, I’m Not There) launched his career with this unusual short, a biopic on the tragic anorexia death of musician Karen Carpenter told using Barbie doll reenactments. His illegal appropriation of tracks by The Carpenters and his unflattering depiction of her family led to Richard Carpenter successfully suing Haynes and having all the original copies except one destroyed. Despite this controversy and several questionable liberties with the facts, “Superstar” is a remarkably sensitive and even heartfelt study, clearly taking Karen’s side and somehow managing to keep the cascade of irony in check.
No amount of official censure could ever truly kill Haynes’s debut cult opus, and the documentary has led a healthy life in the black-market alleys behind America’s art houses. The picture deserves its reputation, setting the tone for later projects that tap kitsch, irony and parody as a form of loving tribute rather than jeering snub. The project still triggers debates on topics as diverse as eating disorders (Haynes is said to have carved the Barbie doll plastic away layer by layer throughout the film), celebrity status, feminism, music rights and middle-class hypocrisy. Though not technically a stop-motion film, it’s still must-see puppetry.
Title: A Walk Through H (1978)
Director: Peter Greenaway
Time: 40 minutes
Availability: The Early Films of Peter Greenaway: Volume 2
Review:
“A Walk Through H” is a narrated journey across 92 maps, arranged in a gallery for an ailing Peter Greenaway by his enigmatic fictitious alter-ego Tulse Luper. The maps serve as a visual motif upon which to meditate on the act of journeying, both literally and metaphorically. The landscapes are primarily surrealist fantasies and the narration is an elaborate game, but the tone is pitched towards playful profundity. “There will be plenty of time to decide what H is,” claims Tulse Luper, “along the way,” though the underlying implication is that it could stand for either heaven or hell, making the whole exercise an allegory for the commute between life and death.
While not as influential as Greenaway’s “Vertical Features Remake,” I find this short somewhat more satisfying and watchable. It has many of the traits most commonly associated with Greenaway’s work: sly narration, a systematic pattern, the number 92, the mysterious influence of Tulse Luper, self-reflexivity and subtle absurdist humor. It opens and closes with live-action sequences and uses stills of fake maps (which often look nothing like maps at all) for the bulk of its “story,” but I consider it an experimental kin of animation.
Title: Zorn’s Lemma (1970)
Director: Hollis Frampton
Time: 59 minutes
Availability: Available to watch legally online at UBUWEB here.
Review:
“Zorn’s Lemma” is divided unequally into three parts. It opens on solid black leader while a narrator reads alphabet rhymes from the Bay State Primer for puritanical children. The central core of the film runs through the alphabet showing each letter. It then loops through the letters over and over again, each time using different representations of the letters and replacing one of them with a found-text that starts with that letter (each from a different sign and never repeating a word). Once all the letters have become words, the cycle repeats, this time transforming the words into short video clips. The final passage is a long, nearly continuous take of two people walking through the snow towards the horizon while women alternate reading one word at a time from The Theory of Light.
Frampton’s “Zorn’s Lemma” made waves in the experimental New York underground circuit and influenced the coming generation of structuralists and formalists. His strict alphabetic organization was daring in its day, and the high contrast it makes with the first and last section of the film has led to plenty of academic speculation. The middle passage, however, is what truly defines the work and lends it a hypnotic, even tense, rhythm. I include it as animation, although others would say it clearly is not, because of the way he breaks down the imagery into a series of 24 (j and v are combined) single-second still/clips, artificially animating the alphabet in a way that consciously evokes projection speed. This is probably my favorite avant-garde short.
Monday, April 7, 2008
Review of Going My Way
Fantasy and science-fiction before the 1950’s, both on the page and on the screen, was not particularly noted for its sophistication. For this reason, 1944’s “Going My Way” is all the more impressive, due to its psychological depth and restrained tone, opting for social commentary over swords and sorcery, little green men or giant rampaging monsters. It rightly remained the only science-fiction/fantasy film until 2003’s “Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King” to ever win a best picture academy award and it snagged six other Oscars as well. It had a rare appeal to a conservative moral majority who accepted the satirical, whimsical tone at face value and a progressive minority which appreciated its studied critique of middle-class wish-fulfillment.
It’s a credit to director Leo McCarey’s multi-layered ambiguity and labyrinthine subtleties that critics today still debate whether it should be classified as sci-fi or fantasy. (Some even go so far as to question whether it should be considered a genre film at all!) The sticking point seems to hinge upon the film’s surreal utopian setting and whether it should be interpreted as a parallel universe or merely a dream, with evidence pointing to the latter.
I’m getting a little ahead of myself, so I’ll stop and fill in the plot summary for those who haven’t yet seen the film:
Father O’Malley (Bing Crosby), a confused, but generally good-natured idealist, wanders into a parallel universe (or enters into a dream) in which he has been appointed the youthful new priest of a fantastical utopian parish. He negotiates a friendly rivalry with the former padre, the curmudgeonly Father Fitzgerald, while encountering several humorously outrageous inversions of real world woes: a street gang that becomes a charitable choir, a vicious landlord who transforms into a noble military volunteer and a runaway prostitute turned charming fiancé, etc. As the grip of the fantasy world tightens, it moves further from reality, occasionally spinning off into musical numbers.
“Going My Way” owes much of its basic format to “Alice in Wonderland” and “The Wizard of Oz” (which has since overtaken the other film in stature), with its story of a naïve protagonist who becomes lost in a wonderland that is both exciting and alien. However, McCarey’s film shies away from the Technicolor excess of “The Wizard of Oz” film and the hallucinogenic chaos of “Alice in Wonderland” in favor of an uncanny mirror world that is all the more unsettling because it is so deeply grounded in our own. While other auteurs dabbled in dystopic shadow-worlds (consider the contemporaneous film noirs), McCarey takes us into quite the reverse: a parallel universe of impossibly glaring light. It is a light whose satiric intensity is a searing indictment of 1940’s society with its legislated morality, war propaganda, stifling self-censorship, denial of social problems and lack of universal civil rights.
What makes “Going My Way” even more unusual than flight-of-fancy odysseys made before and since is the lack of a firm framing device to anchor O’Malley’s story. McCarey doesn’t give us the Kansas farm and deus ex tornado of “The Wizard of Oz” or the sleepy hillside and endless rabbit-hole of “Alice” nor even (explicitly) the usual setup of a hospital patient fading in and out of an uneasy dream-state. O’Malley is thrust into his fantasy world without context, leaving the viewers to piece together the truth from the over-the-top morality, delirious cheeriness and subtler clues. Even more disturbing is O’Malley’s attitude towards the thinly-masked fiction. Rather than embarking on the usual episodic journey home (learning life lessons along the way) he enthusiastically accepts the lie, clearly preferring the hollow wish-fulfillment to the abrasive complications of reality. His inability to struggle out from the dream dooms him to repeat the fantasy scenario indefinitely, as hinted by the devastating final scene in which O’Malley is reassigned to a new parish with an identical description and situation.
It’s easy to argue that the edgy choice to forgo a framing device was merely a matter of necessity. The Hays Office would never have allowed McCarey to get away with his daring social critique if he’d spelled out his intentions. Still, I can’t help wondering whether Bing Crosby’s superlative star power might have prevented the Hollywood blacklist if he’d openly displayed his cynicism towards the moral majority.
Personally, I think the absent frame is more than just a fear of production code reprisal. It’s an artistic choice that enhances the puzzle-box structure of the film and its underlying message: we are a prisoner of the lies we live. The most reasonable interpretations [mild SPOILERS until end of paragraph] is that O’Malley is a dying patient, a comatose member of the white male Christian hegemony whose feverish brain is haplessly trying to assemble a version of heaven that fits his short-sighted prejudices and egotistical preoccupations. Bing Crosby’s perpetual dopey grin is perhaps the clearest evidence of his medicated state while the church fire near the end of the film appears to be a clear stand-in for the “burning” fever that threatens to destroy his fantasy world.
McCarey is ruthless in laying bare O’Malley’s psychology. Evidence of probable childhood abuse comes in the guise of Father Fitzgerald, an explicit father figure who wields a cane (kept largely tame in the mirror world), refuses to pass the torch to O’Malley and resists the young man’s attempts at progress. A short scene involving Fitzgerald’s drinking habit and references to an absent maternal figure, hint at the household conditions of O’Malley’s real world youth.
Meanwhile, a fixation with a former flame reveals a history of rejection while a flirtatious runaway exposes O’Malley’s frustrated sexual preoccupation. The material is heavily sublimated, with O’Malley displacing his sexual desires into music and song and projecting himself as a priest (insights into his past, including much camaraderie with an even less likely priest suggest that he is really nothing of the sort) as a rationalization for his impotence. One particularly memorable example of this repression at work is when O’Malley forces an attractive aspiring nightclub performer to sing without moving anything below the neck (even to sway or snap!).
Most scathing of all is the depiction of O’Malley’s pathetic ego, which McCarey arguably takes a little too far. Our “hero” not only imagines himself to be a literal messiah figure, bringing salvation to a community in crisis, but also a rock star (Bing Crosby, who had 383 top-30 hits, was the 1940’s equivalent) whose talent is a financial success. He is admired by all the boys in the local gang (an idea so out of place that it sends up red flags about a friendless, bullied past) and by women of every age and background.
The harmful aspect of this “idealized” wish fulfillment is evident in the regressive values and strict homogeny that O’Malley simulates in his dream world. Notice the lack of racial minorities. Notice how women bend to the will of the male cast members, with marriage offered as the only acceptable choice. Listen to the constant refrain that righteousness can be achieved only through the Catholic church, which demands regular attendance and frequent donations. One can hardly overlook the hypocrisy of O’Malley’s self-serving justice, in which the police allow him to gorge on stolen goods while violently pursuing others who commit identical crimes, or even infractions as minor as vagrancy.
It’s hard for modern viewers to imagine that the mainstream critics and audience of 1944 were largely blind to the anti-establishment subtext of “Going My Way.” Yet the truth is that its Best Picture victory was as much a matter of unwitting conservatives sharing in O’Malley’s fantasy without perceiving its terrible ironies as it was liberals overjoyed to see a film cut through the choking miasma of bourgeois contentment. Today, the film deserves to be openly acknowledged in its proper place: as a film that provocatively challenges viewers to reject escapism, isolationism and solipsism and to face their personal demons with honesty. It asks us to turn back from O’Malley’s path towards the false utopia of whitewashed paternal theocracy and to engage with the complicated moral ambiguities and vibrant multiculturalism of the modern life.
Walrus Rating: 2.5
It’s a credit to director Leo McCarey’s multi-layered ambiguity and labyrinthine subtleties that critics today still debate whether it should be classified as sci-fi or fantasy. (Some even go so far as to question whether it should be considered a genre film at all!) The sticking point seems to hinge upon the film’s surreal utopian setting and whether it should be interpreted as a parallel universe or merely a dream, with evidence pointing to the latter.
I’m getting a little ahead of myself, so I’ll stop and fill in the plot summary for those who haven’t yet seen the film:
Father O’Malley (Bing Crosby), a confused, but generally good-natured idealist, wanders into a parallel universe (or enters into a dream) in which he has been appointed the youthful new priest of a fantastical utopian parish. He negotiates a friendly rivalry with the former padre, the curmudgeonly Father Fitzgerald, while encountering several humorously outrageous inversions of real world woes: a street gang that becomes a charitable choir, a vicious landlord who transforms into a noble military volunteer and a runaway prostitute turned charming fiancé, etc. As the grip of the fantasy world tightens, it moves further from reality, occasionally spinning off into musical numbers.
“Going My Way” owes much of its basic format to “Alice in Wonderland” and “The Wizard of Oz” (which has since overtaken the other film in stature), with its story of a naïve protagonist who becomes lost in a wonderland that is both exciting and alien. However, McCarey’s film shies away from the Technicolor excess of “The Wizard of Oz” film and the hallucinogenic chaos of “Alice in Wonderland” in favor of an uncanny mirror world that is all the more unsettling because it is so deeply grounded in our own. While other auteurs dabbled in dystopic shadow-worlds (consider the contemporaneous film noirs), McCarey takes us into quite the reverse: a parallel universe of impossibly glaring light. It is a light whose satiric intensity is a searing indictment of 1940’s society with its legislated morality, war propaganda, stifling self-censorship, denial of social problems and lack of universal civil rights.
What makes “Going My Way” even more unusual than flight-of-fancy odysseys made before and since is the lack of a firm framing device to anchor O’Malley’s story. McCarey doesn’t give us the Kansas farm and deus ex tornado of “The Wizard of Oz” or the sleepy hillside and endless rabbit-hole of “Alice” nor even (explicitly) the usual setup of a hospital patient fading in and out of an uneasy dream-state. O’Malley is thrust into his fantasy world without context, leaving the viewers to piece together the truth from the over-the-top morality, delirious cheeriness and subtler clues. Even more disturbing is O’Malley’s attitude towards the thinly-masked fiction. Rather than embarking on the usual episodic journey home (learning life lessons along the way) he enthusiastically accepts the lie, clearly preferring the hollow wish-fulfillment to the abrasive complications of reality. His inability to struggle out from the dream dooms him to repeat the fantasy scenario indefinitely, as hinted by the devastating final scene in which O’Malley is reassigned to a new parish with an identical description and situation.
It’s easy to argue that the edgy choice to forgo a framing device was merely a matter of necessity. The Hays Office would never have allowed McCarey to get away with his daring social critique if he’d spelled out his intentions. Still, I can’t help wondering whether Bing Crosby’s superlative star power might have prevented the Hollywood blacklist if he’d openly displayed his cynicism towards the moral majority.
Personally, I think the absent frame is more than just a fear of production code reprisal. It’s an artistic choice that enhances the puzzle-box structure of the film and its underlying message: we are a prisoner of the lies we live. The most reasonable interpretations [mild SPOILERS until end of paragraph] is that O’Malley is a dying patient, a comatose member of the white male Christian hegemony whose feverish brain is haplessly trying to assemble a version of heaven that fits his short-sighted prejudices and egotistical preoccupations. Bing Crosby’s perpetual dopey grin is perhaps the clearest evidence of his medicated state while the church fire near the end of the film appears to be a clear stand-in for the “burning” fever that threatens to destroy his fantasy world.
McCarey is ruthless in laying bare O’Malley’s psychology. Evidence of probable childhood abuse comes in the guise of Father Fitzgerald, an explicit father figure who wields a cane (kept largely tame in the mirror world), refuses to pass the torch to O’Malley and resists the young man’s attempts at progress. A short scene involving Fitzgerald’s drinking habit and references to an absent maternal figure, hint at the household conditions of O’Malley’s real world youth.
Meanwhile, a fixation with a former flame reveals a history of rejection while a flirtatious runaway exposes O’Malley’s frustrated sexual preoccupation. The material is heavily sublimated, with O’Malley displacing his sexual desires into music and song and projecting himself as a priest (insights into his past, including much camaraderie with an even less likely priest suggest that he is really nothing of the sort) as a rationalization for his impotence. One particularly memorable example of this repression at work is when O’Malley forces an attractive aspiring nightclub performer to sing without moving anything below the neck (even to sway or snap!).
Most scathing of all is the depiction of O’Malley’s pathetic ego, which McCarey arguably takes a little too far. Our “hero” not only imagines himself to be a literal messiah figure, bringing salvation to a community in crisis, but also a rock star (Bing Crosby, who had 383 top-30 hits, was the 1940’s equivalent) whose talent is a financial success. He is admired by all the boys in the local gang (an idea so out of place that it sends up red flags about a friendless, bullied past) and by women of every age and background.
The harmful aspect of this “idealized” wish fulfillment is evident in the regressive values and strict homogeny that O’Malley simulates in his dream world. Notice the lack of racial minorities. Notice how women bend to the will of the male cast members, with marriage offered as the only acceptable choice. Listen to the constant refrain that righteousness can be achieved only through the Catholic church, which demands regular attendance and frequent donations. One can hardly overlook the hypocrisy of O’Malley’s self-serving justice, in which the police allow him to gorge on stolen goods while violently pursuing others who commit identical crimes, or even infractions as minor as vagrancy.
It’s hard for modern viewers to imagine that the mainstream critics and audience of 1944 were largely blind to the anti-establishment subtext of “Going My Way.” Yet the truth is that its Best Picture victory was as much a matter of unwitting conservatives sharing in O’Malley’s fantasy without perceiving its terrible ironies as it was liberals overjoyed to see a film cut through the choking miasma of bourgeois contentment. Today, the film deserves to be openly acknowledged in its proper place: as a film that provocatively challenges viewers to reject escapism, isolationism and solipsism and to face their personal demons with honesty. It asks us to turn back from O’Malley’s path towards the false utopia of whitewashed paternal theocracy and to engage with the complicated moral ambiguities and vibrant multiculturalism of the modern life.
Walrus Rating: 2.5
Sunday, April 6, 2008
Poor Little Animated Shorts: Feline Edition
Title: Bad Luck Blackie (1949)
Director: Tex Avery
Time: 7 minutes
Availability: On Google video and YouTube here.
Review:
A tiny white kitten finds herself endlessly harassed by a sadistic bulldog, until a chance alley encounter with Bad Luck Blackie, a black cat who happily accepts commissions to incur bum luck on animal abusers. Simply by trotting past causes some grave misfortune to befall his victim, usually in the form a heavy object that befalls on their head. The dog is subjected to a rather senseless succession of cranial injuries including my personal favorite: he wields a lucky horseshoe to counteract the bad karma only to get conked on the noggin by three horseshoes from heaven… and the horse. When the villain contrives to paint Blackie white, it’s up to the kitten to save the day.
“Bad Luck Blackie” is the undisputed king of things-falling-on-people’s-head comedy, a joke that manages to stay funny despite repetition because of the brisk pace and surprising variation. There is a lot of graphic wit selling the physical comedy, including visual echoes on leitmotifs like stairs and B&W color, but the main driving force behind this being my favorite Tex Avery short is the fun-loving, zany violence (and the clear implication that Blackie is a hobo cat).
Title: The Cat Came Back (1988)
Director: Cordell Barker
Time: 7 minutes
Availability: Available to watch online at the National Film Board here.
Review:
This animated retelling of the vintage 1893 song “And the Cat Came Back” describes Mr. Johnson’s failed attempts to get rid of a rather destructive and tenacious cat. He tries abandoning it in the woods and even drowning it in a sack, but upon returning home he always finds the feline hard at work dismantling his property and lacerating his livelihood. The animation style is not particularly attractive, using the stout character design and wavy uncertain lines typical of Richard Condie and Cordell Barker, but the unkempt, dynamic visuals fit the manic music and mini-tragedy arc.
The National Film Board of Canada has helped produce many popular animated and stop-motion shorts including “The Big Snit” and “Every Child.” They also provided a lucrative home for experimental shorts auteur Norman McLaren, whose "Pas de Deus" and “Neighbours” (a personal favorite, dealing with escalating Cold War politics) should have gotten full reviews, but you can at least watch them through the links. “The Cat Came Back” is a good example of some of NFBC's best output, setting a catchy song to a memorable story and aiming for a broad appeal despite moments that might offend the sensitive (humane society alarmists in this case).
Title: Cat Soup (2001)
Director: Tatsuo Sato
Time: 35 minutes
Availability: Available on the self-titled DVD.
Review:
“Cat Soup” is a spirit-quest about a young cat named Nyatta who tries to pull back his sister from Death himself. He succeeds only in splitting her soul in twain and must take his zombified sibling on a journey through a phantasmagorical underworld to revive her. His adventures take him to a circus presided over by God, a desert where a liquid elephant marches and a dinner where he’s not on the guest list but the menu. Except for the plushie-potential character design this short defies most anime conventions (and even there the vacuous giant-eyes are more of a mockery than a rehash) and stands out as a creative tour de force that dips into ancient myths and contemporary psychoses with equal imagination.
“Cat Soup” was brought to my attention by “Mad Dog” Mora, and it has since maintained a place in my all-time pantheon of great films (not limited to animation or shorts). Few works ever break the mold so completely and do so while never sacrificing execution just for the sake of novelty. The DVD may cost a pretty penny, but the film itself is worth it and the disc case keeps up the experimental gimmickry with its pink gel-filled cover on which you can push around suspended character cutouts.
Director: Tex Avery
Time: 7 minutes
Availability: On Google video and YouTube here.
Review:
A tiny white kitten finds herself endlessly harassed by a sadistic bulldog, until a chance alley encounter with Bad Luck Blackie, a black cat who happily accepts commissions to incur bum luck on animal abusers. Simply by trotting past causes some grave misfortune to befall his victim, usually in the form a heavy object that befalls on their head. The dog is subjected to a rather senseless succession of cranial injuries including my personal favorite: he wields a lucky horseshoe to counteract the bad karma only to get conked on the noggin by three horseshoes from heaven… and the horse. When the villain contrives to paint Blackie white, it’s up to the kitten to save the day.
“Bad Luck Blackie” is the undisputed king of things-falling-on-people’s-head comedy, a joke that manages to stay funny despite repetition because of the brisk pace and surprising variation. There is a lot of graphic wit selling the physical comedy, including visual echoes on leitmotifs like stairs and B&W color, but the main driving force behind this being my favorite Tex Avery short is the fun-loving, zany violence (and the clear implication that Blackie is a hobo cat).
Title: The Cat Came Back (1988)
Director: Cordell Barker
Time: 7 minutes
Availability: Available to watch online at the National Film Board here.
Review:
This animated retelling of the vintage 1893 song “And the Cat Came Back” describes Mr. Johnson’s failed attempts to get rid of a rather destructive and tenacious cat. He tries abandoning it in the woods and even drowning it in a sack, but upon returning home he always finds the feline hard at work dismantling his property and lacerating his livelihood. The animation style is not particularly attractive, using the stout character design and wavy uncertain lines typical of Richard Condie and Cordell Barker, but the unkempt, dynamic visuals fit the manic music and mini-tragedy arc.
The National Film Board of Canada has helped produce many popular animated and stop-motion shorts including “The Big Snit” and “Every Child.” They also provided a lucrative home for experimental shorts auteur Norman McLaren, whose "Pas de Deus" and “Neighbours” (a personal favorite, dealing with escalating Cold War politics) should have gotten full reviews, but you can at least watch them through the links. “The Cat Came Back” is a good example of some of NFBC's best output, setting a catchy song to a memorable story and aiming for a broad appeal despite moments that might offend the sensitive (humane society alarmists in this case).
Title: Cat Soup (2001)
Director: Tatsuo Sato
Time: 35 minutes
Availability: Available on the self-titled DVD.
Review:
“Cat Soup” is a spirit-quest about a young cat named Nyatta who tries to pull back his sister from Death himself. He succeeds only in splitting her soul in twain and must take his zombified sibling on a journey through a phantasmagorical underworld to revive her. His adventures take him to a circus presided over by God, a desert where a liquid elephant marches and a dinner where he’s not on the guest list but the menu. Except for the plushie-potential character design this short defies most anime conventions (and even there the vacuous giant-eyes are more of a mockery than a rehash) and stands out as a creative tour de force that dips into ancient myths and contemporary psychoses with equal imagination.
“Cat Soup” was brought to my attention by “Mad Dog” Mora, and it has since maintained a place in my all-time pantheon of great films (not limited to animation or shorts). Few works ever break the mold so completely and do so while never sacrificing execution just for the sake of novelty. The DVD may cost a pretty penny, but the film itself is worth it and the disc case keeps up the experimental gimmickry with its pink gel-filled cover on which you can push around suspended character cutouts.
Thursday, April 3, 2008
Poor Little Animated Shorts: Interesting Anomalies
Title: Minnie the Moocher (1932)
Director: Max Fleischer
Time: 8 minutes
Availability: Available on YouTube here
Review:
“Minnie the Moocher” is an oddity that is better seen than described. This early Betty Boop cartoon features the flapper running away from her overbearing parents with her dog/boyfriend Bimbo. They take refuge in a cave haunted by a ghostly tentacled walrus (lending it special meaning for this blog) who is actually a rotoscoped Cab Calloway singing his drug-reference-inflected scat jazz hit “Minnie the Moocher.” Some friendly beasties join in the opium-fogged merriment before Betty flees back to her home, sweet home.
This is vintage Betty Boop before the Production Code came and spoiled everybody’s fun, making the now-iconic sex symbol lengthen her miniskirt and stop dating a dog. (Betty was originally a poodle, but since she’d evolved into a human as the cartoon went on the Hays Office was afraid it would teach kids that bestiality was OK.) Somehow the censors missed the references to marijuana, opium and cocaine in Calloway’s song (used in both a live-action intro and the phantom walrus’s subterranean shuffle), leaving the way clear for one of the earliest catchy, tripped-out toons. Incidentally, I had trouble finding very many examples of rotoscoping (animating on top of live-action film stock) that I liked, but another good example is Petrov’s “Firing Range” (1975).
Title: Coal Black and de Sebben Dwarfs (1943)
Director: Bob Clampett
Time: 7 minutes
Availability: If you think for one moment that Warner Brothers will ever release this officially, you don’t know public relations departments. Pick your favorite bootleg method or try this site.
Review:
So White is a well-endowed laundry girl who is swept off her feet by Prince Chawmin to go jitterbugging downtown. Her petulant employer, a rich queen, is not particularly smitten with the idea and hires Murder Incorporated to deal with it. (The motto on the side of their black van reads “We rub out anybody $1.00, Midgets – half-price, Japs – free.”) The hired killers are all easily seduced by So White, so the queen has to bump her off with a poisoned apple. Afterwards Prince Chawmin tries to revive her with a kiss, but he lacks the dy-no-mite to recharge her batteries. A goofy American soldier is more successful.
“Coal Black and de Sebben Dwarfs” is one of the better known cartoons from the Censored Eleven, a group of shorts deemed too racist to be unleashed upon audiences in the 1960’s and never since circulated except at rare festival screenings. While the rampant racist, sexist and politically incorrect material is enough to offend almost any watchdog group, it still has a loyal and loving following. Clampett, while misguided, intended the film to be a tribute to his favorite African-American jazz and swing musicians, some of whom provided the ending music. I can’t say I like this short, but I think that Warner Brother’s attempt to pretend it never happened isn’t the right solution.
Title: Mothlight (1963)
Director: Stan Brakhage
Time: 4 minutes
Availability: Beautifully restored on Criterion’s “By Brakhage – Anthology” DVD.
Review:
Always redefining the way we look at the world, Stan Brakhage broke all the rules with “Mothlight,” a film which he created by taping hand-plucked moth wings, leaves, reeds, grass and flowers directly to the celluloid and then projecting it. The barrage of fast-flashing earthy debris doesn’t tell a story or even cohere as symbolism, but it can be stimulating to the receptive viewer.
Brakhage is hands-down more experimental than even the directors in my Experimental Edition, but his work is so foreign that I can’t recommend it to any but the most open-minded enthusiasts (although in this case it only requires 4 minutes of your time). Amongst Brakhage’s other innovations that could arguably be considered animation are scratching directly into the film stock (a painstaking method that shows some real dedication), pouring chemical mixes onto raw footage and hand painting onto it. Outside of “animation” he provoked interest and outrage with home movies of his wife giving birth in a bathtub and cadavers being autopsied. His longer works such as “Dog Star Man” and “Scenes from Under Childhood” are considered by many to be masterpieces.
Director: Max Fleischer
Time: 8 minutes
Availability: Available on YouTube here
Review:
“Minnie the Moocher” is an oddity that is better seen than described. This early Betty Boop cartoon features the flapper running away from her overbearing parents with her dog/boyfriend Bimbo. They take refuge in a cave haunted by a ghostly tentacled walrus (lending it special meaning for this blog) who is actually a rotoscoped Cab Calloway singing his drug-reference-inflected scat jazz hit “Minnie the Moocher.” Some friendly beasties join in the opium-fogged merriment before Betty flees back to her home, sweet home.
This is vintage Betty Boop before the Production Code came and spoiled everybody’s fun, making the now-iconic sex symbol lengthen her miniskirt and stop dating a dog. (Betty was originally a poodle, but since she’d evolved into a human as the cartoon went on the Hays Office was afraid it would teach kids that bestiality was OK.) Somehow the censors missed the references to marijuana, opium and cocaine in Calloway’s song (used in both a live-action intro and the phantom walrus’s subterranean shuffle), leaving the way clear for one of the earliest catchy, tripped-out toons. Incidentally, I had trouble finding very many examples of rotoscoping (animating on top of live-action film stock) that I liked, but another good example is Petrov’s “Firing Range” (1975).
Title: Coal Black and de Sebben Dwarfs (1943)
Director: Bob Clampett
Time: 7 minutes
Availability: If you think for one moment that Warner Brothers will ever release this officially, you don’t know public relations departments. Pick your favorite bootleg method or try this site.
Review:
So White is a well-endowed laundry girl who is swept off her feet by Prince Chawmin to go jitterbugging downtown. Her petulant employer, a rich queen, is not particularly smitten with the idea and hires Murder Incorporated to deal with it. (The motto on the side of their black van reads “We rub out anybody $1.00, Midgets – half-price, Japs – free.”) The hired killers are all easily seduced by So White, so the queen has to bump her off with a poisoned apple. Afterwards Prince Chawmin tries to revive her with a kiss, but he lacks the dy-no-mite to recharge her batteries. A goofy American soldier is more successful.
“Coal Black and de Sebben Dwarfs” is one of the better known cartoons from the Censored Eleven, a group of shorts deemed too racist to be unleashed upon audiences in the 1960’s and never since circulated except at rare festival screenings. While the rampant racist, sexist and politically incorrect material is enough to offend almost any watchdog group, it still has a loyal and loving following. Clampett, while misguided, intended the film to be a tribute to his favorite African-American jazz and swing musicians, some of whom provided the ending music. I can’t say I like this short, but I think that Warner Brother’s attempt to pretend it never happened isn’t the right solution.
Title: Mothlight (1963)
Director: Stan Brakhage
Time: 4 minutes
Availability: Beautifully restored on Criterion’s “By Brakhage – Anthology” DVD.
Review:
Always redefining the way we look at the world, Stan Brakhage broke all the rules with “Mothlight,” a film which he created by taping hand-plucked moth wings, leaves, reeds, grass and flowers directly to the celluloid and then projecting it. The barrage of fast-flashing earthy debris doesn’t tell a story or even cohere as symbolism, but it can be stimulating to the receptive viewer.
Brakhage is hands-down more experimental than even the directors in my Experimental Edition, but his work is so foreign that I can’t recommend it to any but the most open-minded enthusiasts (although in this case it only requires 4 minutes of your time). Amongst Brakhage’s other innovations that could arguably be considered animation are scratching directly into the film stock (a painstaking method that shows some real dedication), pouring chemical mixes onto raw footage and hand painting onto it. Outside of “animation” he provoked interest and outrage with home movies of his wife giving birth in a bathtub and cadavers being autopsied. His longer works such as “Dog Star Man” and “Scenes from Under Childhood” are considered by many to be masterpieces.
Wednesday, April 2, 2008
Poor Little Animated Shorts: Children's Edition
Title: The Wrong Trousers (1993)
Director: Nick Park
Time: 30 minutes
Availability: In the “Wallace and Gromit” box set.
Review:
The second short in the “Wallace and Gromit” series (the others being “A Grand Day Out” and “A Close Shave”), “The Wrong Trousers” is arguably the best. Wallace, an eccentric inventor, has purchased a pair of robotic trousers to automate walks for his dog, Gromit. The unwanted gift strains the relationship between pet and master and things only get worse when Wallace takes on an enigmatic boarder, a penguin who may be planning a daring diamond heist. The art is notable for its exquisitely crafted claymation work, years in the making for a mere 30 minutes worth of footage but absolutely packed with in-jokes, atmosphere and personality.
Aardman Animations have been responsible for almost all the claymation out of Britain for the past 30 years. Nick Park is their star athlete, easily outpacing his colleagues and collaborators as the face of English stop-motion on the success of his Wallace and Gromit trilogy and “Chicken Run.” Despite ventures into feature filmmaking his best work is still to be found in his original trio of W&G shorts. “The Wrong Trousers” and “A Close Shave” both won academy awards while “A Grand Day Out” lost to “Creature Comforts,” which was directed by none other than Nick Park. Despite the short running time he maintains a ludicrously high volume of inventive gags, stirring action and character development. Even those who normally pass on British humor are likely to find the duo irresistible. A fourth episode is currently in production now, titled “A Matter of Loaf and Death” and due out later this year.
Title: The Old Mill (1937)
Director: Wilfred Jackson
Time: 9 minutes
Availability: You can find it on YouTube, but be mindful that Disney takes its copyright issues seriously.
Review:
An owl, a pair of pigeons, a colony of bats and an assortment of other animals spend the night in an abandoned windmill while a raging storm threatens their harmony. The gale bring the aging wooden gears to life, but the crumbled stone and rotting shingles may not survive the night, to say nothing of the innocent creatures within. Eschewing marketable anthropomorphized characters and well-worn fairy tale plots, this gorgeous Disney short predates the company’s growth into a soulless behemoth and feels fresh and honest even after 70 years.
Disney’s Silly Symphonies (rivals of Warner Brothers Looney Tunes and Merry Melodies) include some of the best animated music videos from the first half of the 20th century and are fondly remembered by viewers of several generations. Of the 75 symphonies, there are better known (“The Skeleton Dance”), more influential (the debut of the three-color Technicolor process in “Flowers and Trees”) and more acclaimed (“The Band Concert”), but none that I’ve seen surpassed “The Old Mill” for my money. The bare-bones story is naively unmarketable by today’s standards, but the realistic presentation, full colors and complicated weather effects showed a technical mastery that looked forward to “Snow White and the Seven Dwarves” that same year.
Title: The Dot and the Line: A Romance in Lower Mathematics (1965)
Director: Chuck Jones
Time: 10 minutes
Availability: On YouTube here.
Review:
Though exorbitant costs kept me away from the recent adaptation of Edwin Abbott Abbott’s “Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions,” one can thankfully still resort to this wonderful Norton Juster adaptation. Amongst its many references to the earlier work is a winking play on words which changes the meaning of romance from an adventure to a relationship, in this case a major crush on the part of a line for a “perfectly curved” dot. The only problem is that the circle would much rather live the wild life with a crazy jumble of squiggles than hang out with the straight and narrow. It isn’t until the line hones his skills as the basis for beautifully graphed equations that he can win the girl (eloquently punned in the film’s famed final line).
A cult treasure amongst math nerds, “The Dot and the Line” deserves a wider audience amongst children, not because of its after-school special lesson, but because of its implicit celebration of two things most kids hate: math and abstract art. This short diverges from Chuck Jones’s iconic imagery, yet the humor and wordplay and still unmistakably present as is his unremitting resolve to optimize even the most absurd premise. Robert Morley provides the somewhat overly prim narration.
Director: Nick Park
Time: 30 minutes
Availability: In the “Wallace and Gromit” box set.
Review:
The second short in the “Wallace and Gromit” series (the others being “A Grand Day Out” and “A Close Shave”), “The Wrong Trousers” is arguably the best. Wallace, an eccentric inventor, has purchased a pair of robotic trousers to automate walks for his dog, Gromit. The unwanted gift strains the relationship between pet and master and things only get worse when Wallace takes on an enigmatic boarder, a penguin who may be planning a daring diamond heist. The art is notable for its exquisitely crafted claymation work, years in the making for a mere 30 minutes worth of footage but absolutely packed with in-jokes, atmosphere and personality.
Aardman Animations have been responsible for almost all the claymation out of Britain for the past 30 years. Nick Park is their star athlete, easily outpacing his colleagues and collaborators as the face of English stop-motion on the success of his Wallace and Gromit trilogy and “Chicken Run.” Despite ventures into feature filmmaking his best work is still to be found in his original trio of W&G shorts. “The Wrong Trousers” and “A Close Shave” both won academy awards while “A Grand Day Out” lost to “Creature Comforts,” which was directed by none other than Nick Park. Despite the short running time he maintains a ludicrously high volume of inventive gags, stirring action and character development. Even those who normally pass on British humor are likely to find the duo irresistible. A fourth episode is currently in production now, titled “A Matter of Loaf and Death” and due out later this year.
Title: The Old Mill (1937)
Director: Wilfred Jackson
Time: 9 minutes
Availability: You can find it on YouTube, but be mindful that Disney takes its copyright issues seriously.
Review:
An owl, a pair of pigeons, a colony of bats and an assortment of other animals spend the night in an abandoned windmill while a raging storm threatens their harmony. The gale bring the aging wooden gears to life, but the crumbled stone and rotting shingles may not survive the night, to say nothing of the innocent creatures within. Eschewing marketable anthropomorphized characters and well-worn fairy tale plots, this gorgeous Disney short predates the company’s growth into a soulless behemoth and feels fresh and honest even after 70 years.
Disney’s Silly Symphonies (rivals of Warner Brothers Looney Tunes and Merry Melodies) include some of the best animated music videos from the first half of the 20th century and are fondly remembered by viewers of several generations. Of the 75 symphonies, there are better known (“The Skeleton Dance”), more influential (the debut of the three-color Technicolor process in “Flowers and Trees”) and more acclaimed (“The Band Concert”), but none that I’ve seen surpassed “The Old Mill” for my money. The bare-bones story is naively unmarketable by today’s standards, but the realistic presentation, full colors and complicated weather effects showed a technical mastery that looked forward to “Snow White and the Seven Dwarves” that same year.
Title: The Dot and the Line: A Romance in Lower Mathematics (1965)
Director: Chuck Jones
Time: 10 minutes
Availability: On YouTube here.
Review:
Though exorbitant costs kept me away from the recent adaptation of Edwin Abbott Abbott’s “Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions,” one can thankfully still resort to this wonderful Norton Juster adaptation. Amongst its many references to the earlier work is a winking play on words which changes the meaning of romance from an adventure to a relationship, in this case a major crush on the part of a line for a “perfectly curved” dot. The only problem is that the circle would much rather live the wild life with a crazy jumble of squiggles than hang out with the straight and narrow. It isn’t until the line hones his skills as the basis for beautifully graphed equations that he can win the girl (eloquently punned in the film’s famed final line).
A cult treasure amongst math nerds, “The Dot and the Line” deserves a wider audience amongst children, not because of its after-school special lesson, but because of its implicit celebration of two things most kids hate: math and abstract art. This short diverges from Chuck Jones’s iconic imagery, yet the humor and wordplay and still unmistakably present as is his unremitting resolve to optimize even the most absurd premise. Robert Morley provides the somewhat overly prim narration.
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