Toon Time

Fringe animation is one more area, where our access blows out with the arrival of YouTube. Cartoon material which might have been known only to a handful of specialists and marginal VHS bootlegger customers is now available with a few computer keystrokes. When the workload is getting oppressive I find myself searching Oscar nominees or the contemporaries of Paul Grimault. A random selection might include this lot.

1929's Hell's Bells is directed & designed by Ub Iwerks with music by Carl W. Stalling and uncle Walt doing uncredited voice work as Cerberus. Skeleton Dance is well known making it into most every compilation and documentary on animation. Hardly noticed is the studio's follow-up which is slicker livelier and funnier, having the work done on the prototype to sharpen skills.  The crew, has lifted its game - perceptibly smoother and more bizarre animation. 

Among the infernal creatures, a pair of calf demons bring blazing milk to Satan who feeds one of them to this three head pet (each face reacting) triggering a chase after the sibling. Early B&W design is at a peak and we get the studio's characteristic use of classical music coming into play with "Dance of the Marionettes" and "Hall of the Mountain King" in the score.

Not to be left out, Third Reich studios had Kurt Stordel turn out animation including the twelve-minute Agfacolor A Fairy Tale in 1939 Germany.

In this unfamiliar toon. the bee, the dwarf and the frog go walking to the tree inn where they are served nectar in a flower. However, a snake menaces them and has to be scared off by a hedgehog. Further perils include a spider wrapping a pair of the team in cocoons, which a fairy shows the dwarf how to unwind that night on a bird call cue and a king who wants to lock them up for failing to entertain him till the dwarf and frog meet a fairy bride with whom they can fill their promise to him – kind of sadistic for its target kiddie audience.

One of the attempts to break the Disney monopoly repeats the picture book subject matter but is fairly crude and strong on repeats, as well as outstaying its welcome. While inferior to the American model this one is not without novelty value and even charm.

When we get to WW2, Hugh Harmon made the 1945 Personal Cleanliness for the troops. Here slovenly private McGillicuddy, voiced by Mel Blanc, ignores washing & other hygiene messages. His socks are revolting - disturbing shots of critters stabbing and sawing at his toes. Finally, cannibals carry him off to the cook pot, not to eat him but to give him a bath.

Low cost black and white production would still connect with its target audience and remains entertaining for current viewing.

The big shake-up came with limited animation, popularised by TV, and United Productions of America hit their stride with a run of relishable one reelers like 1951's now classic Rooty Toot Toot involving all their usual suspects - Stephen Bostoutov, John Hubley, Art Babbitt, Paul Julian - in a Frankie and Johnny up-date represented by a nice copy.

By the nineteen sixties the Disney model was well out of fashion and, when we get to Roberto Gavioli's Festival aimed La lunga calza verde/ The Long Green Glove, advertising art was dominant. This one is a highly stylised history of Italy - war with Austria, industrialisation, unification. - backed by its popular music.

I had a special connection with that one having scoured Rome's Porte Portese market and come up with  a solitary reel of what I thought would be a travel movie, only to find I had part one of this state of the art animation. I got forty years out of using that in survey programs until its Ferraniacolor went orange, that's without ever seeing the second reel till now.

Is it really twenty years since Bill Plimpton made Footprints, which would have been a world-beater if it had a smarter ending? Plimpton man (dumpy, bald, glasses) wakes to the sound of shattering glass and picks up his gun to investigate,  searching the barren landscape with wide angle drawn changes of viewpoint, imagining the monsters which left foot prints outside his door. 

While Plimpton was out here giving a sixteen millimeter frame of one of his movies mounted in a viewer to anyone who participated in his Q&A, he claimed to be the only person who had ever drawn a feature film.

And currently, we get the work of English animator Steve Cutts, who has taken on the lessons the generation of Raoul Servais, Phill Mulloy and the rest, to produce work with his own surreal bitter vision.

His exceptional short (very) 2020 The Turning Point is a glimpse of a world engulfed by pollution. The first shock is an elephant in a bus shelter and we follow a bottle (Cutts did work for Coca-Cola) down the drain to the wasteland where locals are choking on plastic. TV monitors and posters warn that people are an endangered species and there are only 10,000 left. Animal eco-protestors face dog police while we see survivors freezing on ice flows or choking on waste.

The drawn imagery is striking enough to be really disturbing. A small masterpiece.

Barrie Pattison 2024