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Splendid Animation
| Article
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20022 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
12 / 1992 |
1,989 Words |
| Author
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Frank Thompson
Frank Thompson is the associate producer of Wild Bill
Wellman: A Hollywood Maverick, which airs this spring on
Turner Network Television. He is the author of Lost Films,
recently published by Citadel Press, and William A.
Wellman. |
Anyone who thinks that the technology of art and entertainment is in a constant state of advance hasn't considered the art of animation. The distressingly puerile and witless toy commercials that pass for cartoons these days could only hold the attention of children who haven't been brought up to expect much out of what they watch.
Seeing these stiffly drawn and humorless embarrassments, those of us born in the 1950s and after might think that cartoons have always been this inane. After all, we were raised on cost-cutting, made-for-television mediocrities like Hanna-Barbera's Flintstones and Scooby-Doo.
If we write off animated film, however, we dismiss some of the liveliest, most ingenious art of our century. True, a single painting by Monet is a masterwork. But is twenty-four pictures per second--creating an illusion of movement and life, and thrilling an audience or convulsing it with laughter--just kids' stuff? I think not.
In the days before television, cartoons were not aimed specifically at children. A night at the movies usually consisted of two feature films, a short, a cartoon, and preview trailers. Audiences young and old welcomed Bugs Bunny with the same enthusiasm with which they greeted Humphrey Bogart or Jimmy Cagney. And rightly so. The humor that came from the Warner Brothers animation department was cynical, complex, and biting. Adults recognized levels of comedy that went over the heads of children, but kids adored the fast, colorful action. Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, Elmer Fudd, the Road Runner, and Wile E. Coyote remain as popular today as they have been for the past half century. And nostalgia has nothing to do with it. These characters and the films they live in are just plain funny.
Max and Dave Fleischer imbued their Popeye films with a sly and raucous hilarity. Their Betty Boop cartoons were so sexy that they reportedly helped bring about the censorious Production Code in 1934. Sometimes astonishingly surreal, the Fleischer films can be downright disturbing. In the Betty Boop version of Snow White (1933) the seven dwarfs carry Snow in an ice coffin through a scary cave while a ghost walks behind wailing out (in Cab Calloway's voice) the "St. James Infirmary Blues." The moaning, funeral music, the creepy designs on the wall, and the overwhelming aura of dread make this sequence quintessential Fleischer. These films are definitely not kids' stuff.
Neither are the berserk inventions of animation's
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