Via Cartoon Brew comes news that Disney animator Andreas Deja has started a blog. The truly exciting part about this announcement is that he plans on posting odds and ends he’s collected during three decades working at the studio; treasures like the pencils by Ollie Johnston and Frank Thomas for Cinderella shown above. I’ve watched that clip at least a dozen times already, and I’m sure I’ll watch it a dozen more before the end of the day.

Only someone from The Greatest Generation would have the gumption to perform an impromptu concert upon washing up on a deserted island.

I picked up Fantagraphics’ Mickey Mouse collection last night, a book I’ve been waiting to own since I first read about Floyd Gottfredson in The Comic Book Book over 25 years ago. I’ll try to write up a proper review at a later date. For now, I present one of the cartoons mentioned in the collection, The Castaway; notable for showcasing a gag that originated in the comic strip.

It’s certainly interesting seeing Mickey Mouse separated from his regular milieu. I wonder if the comic strip had more of an influence then just the gag. Other than that, it’s pretty standard early Mickey, with a few funny pieces of business like Mickey’s shriek and the ape’s look of confounded concentration.

This was a favourite on the playground when I was a kid, due almost entirely to the Snowman’s highly quotable lines. I wonder if Chuck Jones got a perverse pleasure out of knowing that children everywhere were repeating a bastardized homage to Of Mice And Men.

Despite that, upon revisiting it I can’t say that The Abominable Snow Rabbit has much else going for it. You can kind of tell that this was made when Warner Bros. animation was on the decline. In fact, this was Jones’ final cartoon involving Daffy, so it’s fitting that outside of the voice work his expressions are the best thing about the short. I think that because he was such a louse there was so much more you could do with Daffy as opposed to Bugs, who was usually so unflappable.

Popeye cartoons are my second favourite behind Looney Tunes. They remind me of martial arts movies in that they may seem stupid, but really they’re just speaking almost entirely in a visual language that many viewers might not appreciate.

I love that this cartoon does away with any kind of motivation for the fights and makes the violence just a part of the trashy lifestyle of Popeye, Bluto and Olive. When they’re brawling in the woodpile at the beginning they seem like little kids scrapping for no good reason, and in the end, when they’re all happily feeding each other spinach and smacking each other around out of sheer boredom, it resembles nothing less than an orgy of violence in an insane asylum.

I’m slowly making my way through Walt Disney’s Nine Old Men by John Canemaker, and thought I’d share a moment from the chapter on Eric Larson.

In On Ice (1935), Mickey and Minnie skated through a long scene with big, open-mouthed smiles on their faces because, said Larson, “they were happy.” Walt sat glumly watching, then abruptly said to Larson, “Can’t they ever shut their damned mouths?”

Animation is serious business, kids. Every frame of every scene is placed under heavy scrutiny by a number of people. I don’t think there’s a single scene I’ve worked on that I haven’t watched at least a dozen times at regular speed, slowed to a crawl and even backwards before submitting it. And even though most adjustments wouldn’t be consciously noticed by the viewer, and may not seem necessary, they do contribute to the overall feel of the thing. Sometimes a scene will seem off without revisions, even if the audience isn’t able to put their finger on why, exactly.

There are plenty of obvious reasons why studios produce animation, but there are a few advantages over live-action most people wouldn’t consider. Mouth movements tend to be less intricate, usually making it easier to dub cartoons into different languages. Anthropomorphized animals can transcend cultural differences. And they just seem to age better. By this point there aren’t many people alive who actually lived through the events that Looney Tunes referenced, but most people get by just fine.

I was curious what, if anything, was made public on this date sometime in the past. It turns out Winter Storage was released on June 3rd, 1949, 62 years ago. I tend not to think too much about dates when looking at these cartoons, because when I do it usually blows my mind. There’s nothing terribly remarkable about Winter Storage, other than it being better than most commercial animation being produced today. It’s like discovering that Flash Gordon serials are actually newsreels and they had something in the past which we’ll never regain.

According to Cartoon Brew, today is the 20th anniversary of the premiere of Liquid Television. Unfortunately, Liquid Television didn’t air up here, so I never got to watch it when it first aired, though I was aware of its existence. It’s one of those things which would have probably changed my life if I had caught it. I’d most likely be working for the NFB now if I did.

I watched a season’s worth of shorts trying to decide which one to post here, and, while there were quite a few contenders, I finally decided on Hello, Dad… I’m In Jail. I defy anyone to find anything that more thoroughly encapsulates the early ’90s than this video.

It looks like I spoke too soon when talking up the craziness of yesterday’s selection. I thought for sure that the best thing Hell’s Heels would have going for it would be its title, but it turns out it’s one of the weirdest, most primitive cartoons I have ever seen. Nothing makes any sense, from the patchwork plot to the twitchy animation and on to the gags that aren’t funny the first time let alone the second or third. It really does seem as if it were all just thrown together, but I’ll be damned if I can’t be won over by a cartoon with this many gratuitous skeletons in it.

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.