I spun the classic cartoon roulette during a break at work today and happened across a Fleischer Bros. cartoon I hadn’t seen before. Silly Scandals creeps up on you. Everything about this cartoon seems just a little off yet still relatively safe, from the play on Disney’s Silly Symphonies to Betty Boop’s dog ears to an unreconizable Bimbo. And just when you’re convinced you’ve finished watching a mildly amusing example of rugged ’30s animation, along comes that patented Fleischer insanity. I swear, if David Lynch had been making cartoons in the Golden Age of animation, he would have worked at Fleischer Bros.

In his Animator’s Survival Kit, Richard Williams talks about the time he went to a screening of The Jungle Book. Having gained just enough experience over the years to know how hard it is to work in the medium, Milt Kahl’s mastery over weight and character on display in made him reevaluate his aversion to Disney animation.

I had a similiar experience, though it wasn’t quite as dramatic. Donald Duck bouncing along with his entire body swaying back and forth is so far beyond anything I’ve done or will likely ever be allowed to do.

Every time I start a new job my interest in animation is renewed, and I spend my down time rereading my favourite book on the subject; Walt Disney’s Nine Old Men and the Art of Animation by John Canemaker. I love how Canemaker uses the lives of the Nine Old Men as a springboard for talking about the history of the entire studio and dozens of other animators, but most of all I appreciate that he includes the frustrations and disappointments they experienced in addition to the triumphs. It’s always reassuring to know that you’re not alone.

I finished the chapter on the first of the Old Men tonight, Les Clark. Canemaker mentioned that one of his most fondly remembered pieces of animation was of Tinkerbell in the original Disneyland opening, which I had never seen before.

I decided to revisit The Three Little Bops after coming across a promotional image found at this post over at Cartoon Brew. Mostly I wanted to confirm that The Three Little Bops were the parade of assholes I remember from my childhood.

I still had that gut feeling I had as a kid. Usually in Looney Tunes the antagonist desrves whatever the protagonists dish out, but in this case the Big, Bad Wolf just wants to play. His only crime is being square, and who among us hasn’t felt that way at one time or another. But upon further reflection I realized that I’m living in a world where people assume they’ll succeed just by showing up. I’ve worked with people who don’t even feel that they have to do that much. The Three Little Bops were only expecting The Big, Bad Wolf to pay his dues, even if paying your dues means you have to taste hellfire first.

We recently discovered a few arachnid visitors in our bedroom, so I thought I’d track down a spider-centric cartoon for today. Happily one of the first ones I found was a Fleischer Brothers production.

This has got to be one of the most horrific animated shorts I have ever seen. The spider itself has a wonderfully creepy design complemented by the Fleischers usual jazzy animation, but what really turns Cobweb Hotel into nightmare fuel are its victims, a collection of flies all squealing for help as they struggle uselessly against their prisons. Makes me wish that the Fleischers had matched the longetivity of Disney. Animation would have been a much darker place if they had persevered.

I just landed a sweet gig and I feel like celebrating with some cartoon goodness.

I love the look of black-and-white films made in the 60s, titles like Night of the Living Dead, Carnival of Souls, and The Flesh Eaters. While most films of the era were still adjusting to colour, those photographed in black-and-white were able to take full advantage of decades of innovation.

That’s the first thing to really hit me in Mickey’s Service Station, the second to last Disney short made in black-and-white. It’s all the finesse of animation from the dawn of the colour era combined with the pinnacle of commercial black-and-white gradation. It’s like it’s from another world.