"Do You Want it Parted on this Side?"

From fine art daydreams to real world nightmares comes this Screen Song cartoon released December 5, 1931: My Baby Just Cares For Me. It's weird going through those Screen Song discs (alas some in the lowest-fi 16mm possible) that while some cartoons, like 'You're Driving Me Crazy', get watched a lot others somehow get glossed over. I always skipped over 'My Baby Just Cares For Me'. Maybe it was the Bosko-ness of the jockey's face that lead me to believe it was only a string of crude stereotype gags. Such cartoons are not all that common in the Fleischer cannon (less so then, for instance, Warners' cartoons) but they do happen. How wrong I was! I have unearthed the Greatest Cartoon Ever Made. Prepare yourself...

Meet Bimbo's half brother: Bingo. If you are walking down the street in a Fleischer cartoon your feet should come out of your shoes. This much is certain.

Trash piles were enchanted places in those early Fleischer cartoons.

Did I leave my web-cam on?

"Do you want it parted on this side?"

"Noooooo"

A portrait of this man should hang over every cartoonist's desk with the word 'Genuis' superimposed.

This scene defies description. I have no idea who animated it but it seems he must have been going through something heavy. Or maybe somebody handed him a model sheet of a hippo. Who knows?

Great scot!

sputter...

I wanna wake up now! I wanna wake up now!

Moral of the story: tongues are vital.

Stereotypes? Yes. Demented? Very. Your journey is just beginning...

Fine art and cartoons

If 'Gertie The Dinosaur' (1914, McCay's second film) wasn't the first personality animation it was a milestone in it's development.

Last week the academy made an announcement that further defined exactly what constitutes an animated feature. Reading some of the replies it occurred to me that another debate, what exactly is a cartoon, is still raging today after over 100 years of the comic strip and 99 years after McCay first released his pioneering animation Little Nemo! I don't have the answer but I thought I'd transcribe the first half of McCay's letter to cartoonist Clare Briggs from 1926. Most of you probably already have this on your book shelf somewhere but it's a great early insight to the issue ...

Letter From Winsor McCay to Clare Briggs: 1926

The greatest contributing factor to my success was an absolute craving to draw pictures all the time. This was in me-I did not decide that I would draw pictures anywhere and at any time. I didn't say to myself, "I must keep in practice or I must improve my drawing." I just couldn't stop drawing anything and everything. I did not do this just to amuse someone else or show how good I could draw. I drew alone to please myself. I never cared at all whether anyone else liked my drawing, nor did I get discouraged when I made a bad one. I never saved my drawings. I would give them away to anyone who wanted them or I would throw them away. I drew on fences, blackboards in school, old scraps of paper, slates, sides of barns-I just could not stop-like a whistling boy. As I said before, this was not a set plan to be a great artist. I had no ambition to be anything-I drew to amuse myself, like the harmonica playing kid I used to know who is now a great musical director and arranger. I do not think I had any more talent for drawing than other kids had, but I think it was the interest I had in making them that brought out what perfection I have. I am just as interested today in drawing as I was when I was a kid-and that is some time back-but much as it might surprise those who know me, I never thought in my whole life of what I was going to be paid for the drawings I was making. I just drew and drew, the pay came automatically. I would never be where I am if I had not kept drawing all of the time, no matter how much talent I might have had.

Clare Briggs Old Gold ad from 1927. "Hasn't a cough in a carload" - now that's the kind of scientific research I can get behind! Click to enlarge.

McCay answers the age old question - which is better: skating or booze?

I never realized there were two different cuts of 'Little Nemo' (1911). As those who have seen it will know, the first half of the film consists of McCay demonstrating how he draws the Little Nemo characters (Impie, Nemo and Flip) with the second half consisting of the animation. The Cinematheque Quebecoise version (which was most recently issued on the 'Winsor McCay: Master Edition' DVD is missing the scene below wherein McCay is seen quickly thumb nailing the characters in charcoal at large scale. This is the Blackhawk version which is available on the Kino disc "Landmarks of Early Cinema".

The importance of an art education should be important, of course, but you cannot educate a man in music and make him a great composer unless he has the feeling of of music in him. If a man or a woman have no artistic feeling within, all the art education in the world will not make artists out of either of them, but they might be better artists than a cartoonist would be who had been educated in cartooning but had no humor in him. A cartoonist must act his characters. He must feel within him the characters he draws. He cannot draw a man laughing unless he laughs himself. He cannot draw an angry man unless he is angry himself. By this I mean he must feel the way clear to his fingertips just as the figure he is making is depicted. A man might go out and paint a beautiful landscape or a beautiful picture of the human figure, but he is copying nature. Men who paint or draw from life-roses, skies, objects of this and that, still life etc.-are merely copying what they see. They are called artists. The cartoonist must create, he must seein his mind a situation, maybe full of life and comedy, maybe still of dramatic or tragic. He must draw it with all the feeling he has in him-without models or other aids artists call to hand.

The Blackhawk version also differs from the Quebecoise version in what's missing. Namely all the footage between these two frames - including the dramatic truck in to the animation camera holding drawing 1. Another difference, of course, is that the Quebecoise version comes from a partially hand colored print whereas the Blackhawk version is totally B&W. On the other hand, the Blackhawk version has a bit more of Flip moving the cigar in his mouth immediately following 'Watch Me Move'. Maybe someday these two will get combined (and registered - a problem with the color section of the Quebecoise print) to give

us the full 'Little Nemo'.

I was too busy to do my usual 4th of July post. I even missed the Boston Pops which I never miss! Can't see how they could have topped Neil Diamond last year though. Oh, and click to enlarge this page from the 1945 Nemo reprint (originally published July 3, 1910)

This above page from the Fleischer Animated News addresses a similar issue as the McCay letter above. The responses are fascinating and I'm quite sure grist for lengthy debate. My opinion? These are all master entertainers. It's still interesting to think about the different contexts (letter to a young cartoonist/in-house newsletter), artistic mediums (comic strip/animation) as well as the difference in opinions. Click to enlarge.

Well, there you have it. I'd like to know if the original letter from Briggs to McCay still exists? I'd love to know it's contents! Stay tuned for part two. Okay, now clear out! We gotta squeeze in another five showings by 9! Don't make me take out 'Dutch Treat' again!

Better Play Safe!

Over at Popeye Animator ID, fellow cartoon clubhouse pal Bob Jaques is doing an entire week dedicated to Dave Tendlar. So, I thought I might respond in kind (but less substance) with a post on the Tendlar directed surreal masterpiece from 1936: "Play Safe"! If you are visiting here regularly I'm sure you've seen the film, which was released October 16 1936 and has languished on various PD videotapes and DVDs for decades. Recently, however, a very good (if a little splicey) 35mm print appeared in France and was later released to DVD (alas PAL only) on a compilation called 'Saved From The Flames'. It is from this print (although this one is a dub from French television) that I have opted to illustrate this post. You will understand why below...

A model from 'Dangerous Crossing': the working title of 'Play Safe'.

Whether or not the original title cards still exist for 'Play Safe' I can't say. It seems certainly possible. The best so far has been for the 'Somewhere In Dreamland' DVD set (above) which compiled all the Color Classic 16mm prints (some good, some awful) with recreated title cards and Paramount logos.

When the Color Classics were issued to television they suffered even worse than the Betty Boop cartoons which lost only their Paramount logos. This hideous 16mm red title card is how most of us got to know 'Play Safe' - issued on any number of poorly produced public domain videotapes and discs. Whether the same red card exists on the 35mm materials in existence in North America is again, to me, a mystery.

'Le Petit Mecano' was recently unearthed in France. Note the mistake: 'Play Safe' was released in red/green Cinecolor.

Above is a split screen demonstrating the difference between the oft reproduced 16mm PD print of 'Play Safe' and the 35mm from France. Below is the complete frame from the 35mm French print.

The kid wears a train conductor's hat, plays with a train set and reads books on trains while playing in a yard that opens directly onto busy rail tracks. And his only guardian appears to be a dog. Maybe the parents were spending the weekend in Atlantic City.

At first I thought this shot might be making use of the model train we later see criss-crossing through the mountains during a setback scene. However, on closer inspection it looks to me as though we are looking at a finely rendered series of painted cardboard cutouts placed horizontally under the camera. There are a lot of techniques going on in 'Play Safe' that are not immedietely noticeable.

When the Paramount cartoons were issued to French television, new voices were hired to re-dub the dialog. Fortunately there is almost no dialog in 'Play Safe' (and the music track was left alone) making this scene is the only real give away, aside from the title cards, that we are watching a foreign print. I believe the line replaced is: "Aw C'mon. I wanna watch the twain".

And, speaking of 'twains', this is what you get when you ask a bunch of New Yorkers to be cute 'n cuddly: an old man missing his dentures!

Another 'multi-media' shot. I believe the boy and EFX are cycles of cell animation while a card cutout of the boxcar is possibly being animated directly under the camera. All this while a BG pan is going!

Rail travel and it's dangers were on the minds of many depression era movie goers: the most famous of which was probably this 1933 Warner Brothers film.

Tendlar's trademark 'flutters' make a number of appearances in 'Play Safe'

By the mid-30's audiences must have lost patience with surrealism for it's own sake as was the case with the early Betty Boop and Screen Song cartoons. In later Fleischer cartoons such as 'Wotta Nightmare', the surrealism was limited to dream sequences. In many ways, however, 'Play Safe' is a call back to those earlier surreal cartoons.

This astonishing sequence is the first to make use of Fleischers' extrodinary 3D setback process. The effect is considerably flattened on 16mm. I've made these images large so you can have a better look.

Look how happy he is to be in a tangle of rail spikes, rivets and sharp steel girders! Nowadays you have to shell out 200 bucks for a videogame controller but, back in the 30's, all a boy needed was a iron bar and a hammer for hours of entertainment!

The Tendlar 'flutter'

Those dials are freakin' me out, man! Truly a great moment in Fleischers' animated history. Wish I could tell you who animated it! Eli Brucker does not, unfortunately, have a Tintype in any of my copies of The Animated News. I asked Fleischer guru Bob about him and all he could give me is that he would not cross the picket line during the Fleischer strike. The Tendlar crew around this time consisted of: Tendlar, Graham Place (who ended up with Waldman on the great 'All's Fair At The Fair"), Bill Sturm, Nick Tafuri, Harold Walker and Brucker.

BET-TER PLAAAY SAFE. (click to make big and scary)

Now that's what I call an antic!

A classic Fleischer 'Mystery Cave'.

It's this scene that tipped me off that I must be looking at a flat image. The dry brushing is clearly man-made.

Tendlar's 'flutter' nicely handled with dry brush.

And we end on a scene of pure hideous affection.

I originally ended this post with my usual malarky about the Color Classics being just as valid as the Silly Symphonies as works of art with their own reason for being blah blah blah etc. Frankly though, it doesn't really need saying - the cartoons do truly speak louder than any aggregate tome of contentions. Enjoy but blogger video (or Youtube or any other cheezy internet source) is no way to see this cartoon.