animation Archives - Page 2 of 3 - Ramblin' with Roger

Puss in Boots: The Last Wish

DreamWorks

Trying to support the local cinema, my wife and I went to the Madison Theatre to watch Puss In Boots: The Last Wish. Once again, the film was NOT on the marquee but was listed online.

I had seen the first two Shrek movies, the second (2004) of which introduced our feline hero. But I had not watched the third Shrek film (2007) nor the first Puss In Boots (2011).

First, the new movie often looks marvelous. There’s an IMBd review that addresses this. It “goes full Into the Spiderverse once a fight breaks out. Glorious 12 frames per second, hyper stylized with all the filters and gimmicks necessary to elevate the big set-pieces to something truly special and memorable.” This is different from what was used in previous films.

Second, the storyline works at one level for kids – and there were about a dozen of them during that week after Christmas – and quite another for the adults.

If you saw the trailer, you know the cat has only one of his nine lives left. But if he can find the Wishing Star…

First, Puss In Boots (voiced once again by the wonderful Antonio Banderas) has to regain his mojo, helped by an unlikely cat, er, dog Perrito (Harvey Guillen). He also has to deal with rivals for the prize, including his old companion Kitty Softpaws (Salma Hayek).

More rivals

Others seeking the Wishing Star are Goldie (Florence Pugh) and the Three Bears (Olivia Colman, Ray Winstone, Samson Kayo), and the amoral Jack Horner (John Mulaney). But the greatest threat to Puss is the Wolf (Wagner Moura) and what he represents.

Puss in Boots: The Last Wish is visually impressive but, more surprising, quite touching in dealing with mistakes and misunderstandings made in relationships. It’s no surprise that it was nominated for various awards and 96% of the Rotten Tomatoes critics liked it.

It is my favorite 2022 movie so far.

Favorite animated television show?

moose and squirrel

That Greg Burgas fellow has done it again, compelling me to think on one of his damn Questions of the Week. “What’s your favorite animated television show?”

Initially, I was thinking about programs I grew up with that had two or three segments, such as Rocky and Bullwinkle, which featured Fractured Fairy Tales and Mr. Peabody. A great show, BTW.

Or the various Warner Brothers packages featuring Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, and the like, which among other things, were early lessons in classical music. I was a sucker for the Popeye the Sailor cartoons from Fleischer Studios, less so the later ones.

Or all of the Hanna-Barbera shows such as Yogi Bear, Huckleberry Hound, Quick Draw McGraw, and my favorite, Top Cat, whose close friends got to call him TC. When I was five and a half, I had an uncontrollable bloody nose and went to the hospital for two or three days. The positives were ice cream and H-B cartoons.

Animated shows that took the full half-hour were rare early on. The Flintstones (1960-1966) was the first prime-time TV animated series, a Big Deal in the day.

D’oh!

Like many people, I watched The Simpsons regularly and enthusiastically early on. I even have three or four DVD sets, but none are after season eight. It’s now on season 73; Nah, it started in 1989. Incidentally, D’oh is a sound mark registered by the US Patent and Trademark Office. The registration is similar to Darth Vader’s breathing noise and the Law and Order “Chung Chung” sound effect.

To the degree I appreciate SpongeBob SquarePants, I blame Fred Hembeck. His enthusiasm for the show in the early 2010s was infectious. I have a soundtrack that is modeled after The Who Sell Out album.

My daughter watched Peppa Pig, which I found baffling at first but grew to at least tolerate. She also watched The Loud House and Kim Possible, among others, which were OK. But Teen Titans Go got on my nerves.

On my own, I tried Bojack Horseman, Pinky and the Brain, Family Guy, Futurama, and American Dad, which were fine, but they didn’t STICK. The Boondocks I watched a bit longer.

The winners

But if I were to pick three shows, they would be:

3. King Of The Hill – I found Hank, the “straight-laced propane salesman in Arlen, Texas,” oddly relatable. At some level, though, I WAS the kid, Bobby Hill. Tom Petty voiced the character Lucky in 24 episodes.

2. Phineus and Ferb – Greg said, “the jokes are stupendous, the special episodes are a ton of fun… and the songs are just brilliant.”

1. Gravity Falls – My daughter was singing “We’ll Meet Again,” and I wondered why. Now I know. I’ve seen every episode of the show. “Twin siblings Dipper and Mabel Pines spend the summer at their great-uncle’s tourist trap in the enigmatic Gravity Falls, Oregon.” Like Greg, I love the voice actors Jason Ritter and Kristen Schaal, and Linda Cardellini as Wendy.

Greg said Phineas and Ferb could be repetitious, but I’ve seen six episodes in a row without going crazy. Conversely, I was on a bus heading for Indiana, helping to chaperone a church group, when someone showed a half dozen episodes of Scooby Doo, Where Are You! Talk about the same plot over and over! Painful.

The Flying House by Winsor McKay, adapted by Bill Plympton

The FantaCon 2013 program is now available on Kindle.

I knew of the early 20th Century American cartoonist Winsor McKay from his Little Nemo strip, which has been collected in books. However, I was less familiar with his other work. “Dream of the Rarebit Fiend was a newspaper comic strip by… McCay which began September 10, 1904. As in McCay’s signature strip, Little Nemo, the strip was made up of bizarre dreams… Rarebit Fiend was printed in the Evening Telegram, a newspaper published by the Herald. For contractual reasons, McCay signed the strip with the pen name ‘Silas’.

“The strip had… a recurring theme: a character would have a nightmare or other bizarre dream, usually after eating a Welsh rarebit (a cheese-on-toast dish). The character would awaken from the dream in the last panel, regretting having eaten the rarebit. The dreams often revealed the darker sides of the dreamers’ psyches… This was in great contrast to the colorful, childlike fantasy dreams in Little Nemo.”

McKay’s 1921 film The Flying House fits into the rarebit category. You can see the first half of it on the right-side panel adjacent to the Wikipedia article. In 2011, animator Bill Plympton restored the film, using Kickstarter to fund the project. The film was colorized, and actors Matthew Modine and Patricia Clarkson provided voices.

The short film is, oddly, timely for a pre-Depression piece. The man says at one point: “I want to pay my debts but I’ll be hanged if I will let those money sharks grab my dough.”

I participated in the Kickstarter and got a copy of the DVD. Plympton and his team first cleaned up the original film, so it’s not scratchy. Then not only did they colorize it, using the palette of McKay’s work, they removed the word balloon but added the music. One can compare the two versions. There are also some extras. Animation critics talk about McKay and the specific work; unfortunately, they are credited on the DVD but not on the packaging, so the only one I can mention without looking it up is Leonard Maltin.

I was happy to help something that would not have existed if not for supporters like myself. If you’re interested, you can order it here.

Gene Kannenberg Jr notes that this 1989 video of Tom Petty’s Runnin’ Down A Dream was a tribute to “Little Nemo in Slumberland” by Winsor McCay. Odd, too: I like this song (and LOVE the album from which it comes), but I have zero recollection of seeing it before.

Speaking of comics-related material, the FantaCon 2013 program is now available on Kindle. I put together the bibliography of FantaCo publications, 1979-1988, which is why I’m listed as an author on the item.

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs at the Norman Rockwell Museum

“It was prophesied that nobody would sit through a cartoon an hour and a half long,” Walt Disney said. “But we had decided there was only one way we could successfully do Snow White—and that was to go for broke.”

The day after our trip to Tanglewood, we decided to go to the Norman Rockwell Museum. It was showing “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs: The Creation of a Classic,” which had opened on June 8 and would be available through October 27, 2013.

The exhibition “features more than 200 works of art including conceptual drawings, early character studies, detailed story sketches, and animation drawings. Also featured are delicate thumbnail layout watercolors, meticulously rendered pencil layouts, rare watercolor backgrounds, colorful cels, and vintage posters all illustrating how Walt Disney advanced the creation of an entirely new art form.

“The exhibition is organized by sequence through the progression of the movie, featuring some never-before-seen works of art.” Among the most interesting were the deleted scenes such as the soup-eating segment, which had a song attached to it, the bed building scene, and a fantasy sequence of Snow White dancing in the stars. These were fine scenes but detracted from the narrative. Dopey had a long piece when Snow “died” which also was scrapped.

It was fun looking at Marge Champion modeling for the dancing scene with Dopey and Sneezy and drawing water from a well. The exhibit, which can usually only be seen at the Disney Family Museum in San Francisco came to Massachusetts because of the historic friendship and respect between Rockwell and Disney.

One cannot overstate the importance of Snow White. “It was prophesied that nobody would sit through a cartoon an hour and a half long,” Disney said. “But we had decided there was only one way we could successfully do Snow White—and that was to go for broke—shoot the works. There could be no compromise on money, talent, or time.” He also suggested that it was not aimed at children, and that, indeed, children under the age of seven or eight ought NOT see it; instead, it was targeted at the childlike part of the adult heart.

Did I mention that when we went, it was FREE? It was part of Free Fun Fridays of cultural venues. “Highland Street is giving out a total of $650,000 in grants to open up 60 venues across the state for one Friday,” 10 in the Boston area, but the rest across the state of Massachusetts.

MOVIE REVIEWS: 2012 Academy Award Nominated Animated Shorts

Morris Lessmore is a film that will be embraced by librarians and book lovers alike.

It was a Monday holiday. The daughter was at a friend’s house. But the Wife and I had a narrow window if we wanted to see a movie. In the time frame we had, we could really only go to the Spectrum and see the Oscar-nominated short animation films. My wife was wary because she had heard that a couple of these films were quite violent. In fact, only one was.

Dimanche/Sunday (Canada – 9 minutes)
Every Sunday, it’s the same old routine! The train clatters through the village and almost shakes the pictures off the wall. In the church, Dad dreams about his toolbox. And of course later Grandma will get a visit and the animals will meet their fate.
And the train is HUGE! But I didn’t see the point. I suppose there was violence in this story, but it was rendered so banally that it wasn’t particularly affecting.

A Morning Stroll (UK-7 minutes)
When a New Yorker walks past a chicken on his morning stroll, we are left to wonder which one is the real city slicker.
The winner of the BAFTA, the British equivalent to the Oscars, this shows the changes of people over time. THIS film is the one with quite violent images. Great last joke, though.

Wild Life (Canada – 14 minutes)
Calgary, 1909. An Englishman moves to the Canadian frontier, but is singularly unsuited to it. His letters home are much sunnier than the reality. Intertitles compare his fate to that of a comet.

This was visually beautifully rendered, with the backgrounds as paintings. Yet the connection with the comet (or more specifically, a painting of a comet) just didn’t work for me; the story would have stronger without it.

The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore (USA – 17 minutes)
Inspired, in equal measures, by Hurricane Katrina, Buster Keaton, The Wizard of Oz, and a love for books, [it] is a poignant, humorous allegory about the curative powers of story. Using a variety of techniques (miniatures, computer animation, 2D animation) [the directors] present a hybrid style of animation that harkens back to silent films and MGM Technicolor musicals…old fashioned and cutting edge at the same time.
I instantly recognized the architecture of New Orleans. The movie also borrows from Pleasantville. It is a film that will be embraced by librarians and book lovers alike. My pick as the best of the five AND the one I think will win. My wife actually cried.

La Luna (USA- 7 minutes)
[This] is the timeless fable of a young boy who is coming of age in the most peculiar of circumstances. Tonight is the very first time his Papa and Grandpa are taking him to work…
This is the PIXAR short that will open for the movie Brave coming out this summer. Wonderfully whimsical.

There were four additional films, deemed HIGHLY COMMENDED, shown on the program, probably because the show would have otherwise been less than an hour long. I’ve linked to their individual webpages because the initial link does not.

Hybrid Union (4 minutes) by Serguei Kouchnerov
In the imaginary land of Cyberdesert, Plus and Minus struggle with a dependency on an outdated source of energy. The mysterious self-sufficient Smart presents a new challenge for Plus and Minus and forces them to form an alliance – The Hybrid Union!
I understood where it was trying to go, but wasn’t moved.

Skylight (Canada – 5 minutes) by David Baas
[It] is a mock animated documentary about the ecological plight of penguins in the Antarctic, possibly foretelling cataclysmic results for the rest of the world.
It is pretty much a one-joke story, and the faux jerky camerawork was more irritating than innovative.

Nullarbor (Australia – 10 minutes) by Alister Lockhart
An animated road movie set across the vast and barren landscape of Australia’s Nullarbor Plain.
On a boring road, a young man can be arrogant and a bit stupid to boot. Liked it well enough. Probably not for small children, since it has a few mean images.

Amazonia (USA – 5 minutes) by Sam Chen
In the dangerous world of the Amazon Rainforest, finding a meal proves to be an impossible task for a little tree frog named Bounce. His luck changes when he meets Biggy, a blue-bellied treefrog who takes him under his guidance and shows him the ways of the jungle in this animated journey set to Beethoven’s Symphony No.8.
The music is incredibly important to the success of this film. And a great punch line. I would have nominated this over Sunday/Dimanche.