| |
What's Showing
Film Comment Selects
Young Friends of Film
Independents Night
Open-Captioned
Calendar
Upcoming Programs
Past Programs
Furman Gallery
Theater Rental
Theater Information
Press Office
Sign up for filmlinc email bulletin
|
|
Our survey of Cartoon Musicals,
curated by the great Greg Ford, continues with a
mix of enshrined classics and rarities, show-stoppers
all. Thereís a program of immaculately restored shorts
featuring everyoneís favorite animated vixen, Betty
Boop, and the Fleischers’ other classic character
creation, Popeye. We’re also presenting their
criminally underrated feature Hoppity Goes to Town,
which had the supreme misfortune of a December 7,
1941, release date, and a generous helping of Fleischer
musical creations, including such live action/cartoon
hybrids as Dinah and Down Among
the Sugar Cane as well as
Poor Cinderella, Betty Boop’s sole
excursion into the world of color. Thereís a program
of rarely seen 30s and 40s work from Universal’s
Walter Lantz, and we’re rounding it off with
Canadian animator Richard Williams’s even rarer 1977
feature Raggedy Ann and Andy. This is a perfect way
to spend your holidays.
|
Adults accompanied by a kid get in for $5!
|
| |
In a battery of infectiously rhythmic,
beautifully restored black-and-white cartoon shorts
from the early 30s, Max and Dave Fleischer’s indefatigably
flirty flapper Betty Boop displays an awesome musical
versatility, whether single-throatedly bringing back
vaudeville (Stopping the Show), coyly defending
her virtue as a singing circus bareback rider (Boop
Oop A Doop), performing a native hula (Betty
Boop’s Bamboo Isle), warbling improbable
campaign promises (Betty Boop for President),
or leading her tenement neighbors in a hymn to local
trash collection (Any Rags). Louis Armstrong’s
hit tune of the same name inspires I’ll
be Glad When You’re Dead You Rascal You,
Don Redman’s single I
Heard provides the track for
a Betty masterpiece about a hallucinatory day shift
at the coal mines, while Cab Calloway’s signature
ballad “St. James
Infirmary” serves as the springboard for the Fleischers’
neatly ghoulish version of Snow White. In marked
contrast to the anything-moves supernaturalism of
Betty’s
universe are the considerably more concretized full-color
Popeye two-reelers from 1936, Popeye
the Sailor Meets Sinbad the Sailor and Popeye
the Sailor Meets Ali Baba’s Forty Thieves,
these groundbreaking productions here viewed in freshly
remastered prints. Operetta-like musical stylings
carry the day in these two films’ impressively
mounted production numbers. Baritone Bluto’s all-sung
and oft-reprised boastful odes to his own villainy,
penned by in-house scorers Sammy Timberg and Tot
Seymour, tend to dominate the proceedings, though
Popeye gets his licks in with trademark under-the-breath
mutterings wittily ad-libbed by voiceman Jack Mercer.
|
Wed Dec 28: 2:30
Wed Dec 28: 6:30
Sat Dec 31: 8:30
|
Universal Pictures’ animation
godfather Walter Lantz, whose industry renown and
public name-recognition sometimes approached that
of cartoondom’s other Walt, headed a house with inhabitants
like Woody Woodpecker, Wally Walrus, Buzz Buzzard
and Andy Panda. But our Lantz musical sampler starts
back in the 30s with Oswald,
the Lucky Rabbit, and
the one-of-a-kind Depression-era musical Confidence (1933)
where Oswald teams with a singing and dancing FDR
to boost public morale. Oswald’s final theatrical
short-subject Egg-Cracker Suite (1943),
rigorously choreographed to Franz Von Suppe’s “Poet
and Peasant Overture,” provided a better preview
of Lantz’s ultimate
vision for his studio’s musical ethos. To direct,
he hired two especially adept ex-Disney animators:
Dick Lundy, who was justly famed for animating the
3 Little Pigs’ dance, and Shamus Culhane, likewise
acclaimed for doing the 7 Dwarfs’ march. Next, Lantz
divvied up the catalogue into two distinct categories:
the “Swing Symphonies,” which sampled modern
Big Band sounds and welcomed input from contemporaneous
artists like trombonist Jack Teagarden, and the more
classically oriented “Musical Miniatures.” Standouts
included The Greatest Man in
Siam (1944), Sliphorn
King of Polaroo (1945), Apple
Andy (1946), Bandmaster (1947)
and Kiddie
Koncert (1946). Culhane, in his
book Talking Animals and Other
People, vividly recalls
the creation of Woody’s Rossini-activated movements
for The Barber of Seville: “…flourishing
a wickedly gleaming razor, Woody starts shaving in
a sprightly but not unusually fast speed. The tempo
more than doubled in the reprise, and following the
phrasing note for note, I had Woody repeat all his
former antics at a frenzied pace. Some of the shots
were six exposures long, or a quarter of a second.
In one scene the tempo was so fast that I split Woody
into multiple images, all yelling ‘Figaro!’”
|
Wed Dec 28: 4:30
Wed Dec 28: 8:30
Fri Dec 30: 1:00
Fri
Dec 30:5:00
|
Max and Dave’s drastically underrated
second feature film, more or less of a musical and
the very first animated feature-lengther either by
the Fleischers or by Disney to be based on an all-new
story, dates alarmingly well both artistically and
tonally, easily surpassing the Brothers’ earlier
effort to retool Gulliver’s
Travels to the commonly
denominated needs of a general audience. The filmís
original title Mr. Bug Goes
to Town accurately implies
a Capra-esque slant to the plot, but this narrative
about an all-insect community and the distribution
of wealth therein seldom turns insufferably Capra-corny.
The fortunes of Bugville are largely tied to the
fate of a human songwriter who lives nearby, this
secondary character not the film’s sole pretext for
the inclusion of new tunes (tunes written by Frank
Loesser and Hoagy Carmichael, no less) that include
“Castle in the Air,” “Boy, Oh Boy!” and “Katy
Did/Katy Didn’t,” the
latter occasioning a nightclub-set, near-abstract
“jitterbug” bit
wherein hero Hoppity gets lit up like a neon sign.
The film’s most compelling imagery, however, is seen
in certain establishment shots and in the spectacular,
literally riveting finale that shows the hastened
construction of a huge skyscraper, the filmmakers
herein striking a perfect visual balance between
layout and animation to achieve a convincingly microcosmic
insect’s-eye-view of things, anticipating by decades
the CGI-animated Pixar hit A
Bug’s Life.
|
Thurs Dec 29: 2:30
Fri Dec 30: 7
Sat Dec 31: 4:30
|
It is altogether peculiar
that Canadian-born animation director Richard Williams’s
first full-length motion picture, the lush, very
family-friendly Raggedy Ann
and Andy: A Musical Adventure
(1977), adapting the Ann/Andy tales of Johnny Gruelle,
should so seldom be revived in repertory or seen
on home-video or DVD, especially in light of the
later smashing box office and critical success achieved
by Williams in his Oscar-winning direction of the
cartoon sequences for Robert Zemeckis’s megahit Who
Framed Roger Rabbit? (1988). Williams, by the
mid-70s, had crafted a string of well-regarded commercials,
TV-specials and serialized animation segments for
feature films, his work actually seeming to benefit
from a certain aesthetic distance and intellectual
self-consciousness. If today it seems that Raggedy
Ann and Andy represents a precise “missing link,”
an exact midpoint between character animationís past
and present, it is probably because Williams deliberately
handpicked legendary animation artists for his crew,
beginning with his choice of veteran Tissa David
to animate Raggedy Ann herself. Emery Hawkins, a
noted fluid animator of screwball action in old-time
Woody Woodpecker and Bugs Bunny films, was chosen
to animate the blob-like “Greedy,” a surreal,
liquidy, screen-consuming personality utterly without
peer. Art Babbitt, who so brilliantly put Disney’s
Goofy through his slapstick paces in the 30s and
so delicately executed the Tchaikovsky mushroom dance
for Fantasia (1940), here is tapped to animate
the Camel with Wrinkled Knees performing “Song Blue,”
which is arguably the film’s most outstanding sequence.
Then-hot kids’ composer
Joe Raposo, who wrote dozens of tunes for PBS’s Sesame
Street, contributes some 16 original Raggedy Ann
ditties.
|
Thurs Dec 29: 4:15
Sat Dec 31: 2:30
|
Where Disney’s and Iwerks’s
earliest Hollywood sound cartoons always strove for
a certain organic oneness and absolute unity between
music and picture, the Fleischers’ New York City-made
“Screen Songs” — evolved from vintage
sound-synchronization experiments predating even
Steamboat Willie — were
often content to let music and image stream in merely
parallel courses only to intermittently interact
and humorously comment upon one another. Hence the
singalong lyrics to In My Merry
Oldsmobile dutifully
appear on-screen only to morph amusingly into perky
pictograms that read in a rebus-like fashion. Paramount
Pictures’s song-publishing wing, knowing a good music-sales
opportunity when they saw it, were soon supplying
the Fleischers with copyrighted tracks and even on-camera
film-clips of contracted entertainers. Before long
Ethel Merman, the gorgeous Lillian Roth and the inimitable
Mills Brothers would invite audience-members to “follow
the bouncing ball” (another clever Max Flesicher-copyrighted
concept, by the way) in historically fetching live-action/cartoon
hybrids like Dinah, You
Try Somebody Else and Down
Among the Sugar Cane, here unspooled in luminously
reconstituted prints. Among the “Screen Songs,” especially
exuberant is Grim Natwick, Al Eugster, Ted Sears,
Seymour Kneitel and Willard Bowsky’s no-holds-barred
animation to the catchy jazz score of Swing,
You Sinners, the hallucinatory “nightmare” of
a guilt-ridden chicken thief: the Fleischers’ propensity
to anthropomorphize everything is best unveiled in
the picís midnight
barnyard crescendo as various spooks, a “pawnbroker”
ghost and an odd frog hobgoblin harass the main character
non-stop, and eventually a haystack, a scythe, and
a nearby sack of grain all join in the fray. And
not to be ignored is the similarly music-centered,
deluxe “Color Classics” skein that encompasses
ultra-rarities like the seldom-viewed A
Car-Tune Portrait (1937), animated by Dave Tendlar.
In the “Classics” outings,
the Fleischers’ still-ingenious mechanical inventiveness
comes into play in their construction of actual,
three-dimensional miniature sets for their cel-painted
figures to work against — there’s Poor
Cinderella’s
very realistic-feeling fairy-tale backdrop which
Betty Boop (in her only color film) traverses in
her coach, and the seemingly 3-D lunar landscape
trod upon by blissed-out “funny animal” newlyweds
in Dancing on the Moon.
|
Fri Dec 30: 3
Fri Dec 30: 8:45
Sat Dec 31: 6:30
|
Providing
more than just a coda is the spectacular off-centeredness
of our final musical Warner Bros. cartoon compilation
known as “Looney Esoterica and Merrie Marginalia,”
the pure exoticness of George Pal’s awesome
musical “Puppetoons” herewith restored
into full 35mm color-corrected splendor by the UCLA
Film Preservation folks, and the downright genius
of Oskar Fischinger, abstract expressionist animator
extraordinaire and visual re-interpreter of classical
music par excellence. How refreshing to insert, for
a change, an adults-only entry into the Cartoon Musicals
sweepstakes with the gauche South Park: Bigger,
Longer and Uncut (1999). And as for our richly
ambitious “Independently Musical” show,
it is so bursting at the seams with variegated visionary
cartoon material that, at press time, programming
changes down the road seem practically inevitable
— so check for future updates and emendations
there. That having been said, these final five shows
will have to serve as a wrap on the subject of ‘toon
tunes as far as I’m concerned, even though,
after twenty-two separate programs over the last few
months, we’ve still barely scratched the surface
— which only goes to prove what a huge field
of study melody-synchronized animation truly is and
what an enormous topic the history of animation truly
is. – Greg Ford
|
|
A third and final package of twelve
music-skewed WB animated shorts isolates famous stars’
first-time-out experiences in given musical roles:
hence Friz Freleng’s Stage
Door Cartoon (1944) showcases
Bugs Bunny’s debut assumption of the parts of song-and-dance
man, concert pianist and orchestra conductor (all
in one cartoon) while Robert McKimson’s Hillbilly
Hare (1950) offers the rabbit’s fiendish, nonpareil
impersonation of a square-dance caller as he ultimately
promenades a pair of Ozarkian adversaries straight
off a cliff. Also off the beaten path are Tex Avery’s
Cinderella Meets Fella, Frank Tashlin’s
anti-nicotine extravaganza Wholly
Smoke (1938), Ben
Hardaway and Cal Dalton’s Katnip
Kollege (1938) and
Freleng’s
celebrity-studded Curtain Razor (1949).
We go to the furthest extremes, time-wise, reaching
the chronological outer limits with Warners’ most
latterday musical specimens, such as Chuck Jones’s
“Behind the Music”–type
exposé of the scandalous love-life of a torch-singing
giraffe in Nelly’s Folly (1962) and
Greg Ford and Terry Lennon’s quasi-notorious “musicalis
interruptus” Blooper
Bunny (1991). Lastly, honoring audience requests
for way-out, hard-to-find black-and-white antiques,
we’ve liberated Robert Clampett’s “Porky
Pig” songfests
Naughty Neighbors and the antic, arctic Polar
Pals,
the latter immortalizing the hit “Let’s Rub
Noses Like the Eskimoses.”
|
Sun Jan 1: 2
Mon Jan 2: 1
Mon Jan 2: 6:45
Wed Jan 4: 2:45
|
Amidst studio hype for three-dimensional animation
rendered solely by computers, the recent releases
of Corpse
Bride and the Wallace and
Gromit movie hint that a less cyberoptic, more
traditional “hands-on” approach, involving actual
manipulation of tangibly sculpted 3-D figures, is
making an unlikely comeback. What better time to revisit
the famous, expertly crafted “Puppetoons” of
Hungarian-born, multiple Oscar-winner George Pal,
harking back to the whole “solids animation” genre
to which he, in the U.S., could almost exclusively
lay claim: so effortlessly fluid seems the movement
of his “Puppetoon” characters
that the entire painstaking animation process, whereby
each individual frame required a different, separately
hand-carved miniature wooden statue, is difficult
to comprehend. As befits our ongoing “Cartoon Musicals”
theme, we are stressing George Pal’s more melodically
inclined Puppetoons, such as Tubby the Tuba (1947),
the Big-Band-sound-infused Rhapsody
in Wood (1947),
guest-starring Woody Herman, A
Date with Duke (1947),
wherein a piano-playing Duke Ellington interacts with
a particularly sprightly, keyboard-hopping Pal puppet,
the parade-music-rattled Dr. Seuss adaptation And
To Think I Saw It On Mulberry Street (1944),
and Pal’s celestially appointed, Tchaikovsky-set spin
on “Sleeping
Beauty” called Sky Princess (1942),
which comes complete with a violin-playing prince.
Yet more “Puppetoons” follow, with no strings
attached.
|
Sun Jan 1: 4:15
Mon Jan 2: 3:15
Wed Jan 4: 1
|
From Len Lye on, an impressive
roster of independent animation practitioners have
proven beyond question that cartoon musicals are
by no means the exclusive province of big-time entertainment
corporations. This jam-packed international lineup
of iconoclasts in musicland from the 30s through
today not only spans decades but hops continents,
featuring styles that range from the Avant-Garde
to the Neo-Classical, music that ranges from folk
to jazz, and jazz that ranges from the Oscar Peterson
Trio to Harry Reser and His Syncopators. Animated
indie opi include Norm McClaren’s friskily patriotic
celluloid-scratchoff V For Victory (1941),
Mark Kausler’s compellingly immediate yet cartoonily
retro It’s
the Cat! (2004), Hector Hoppin’s and Anthony
Gross’s
Art Nouveau reverie of a dogged cyclist in pursuit
of two impetuous naked nymphs in Joie
de Vivre (1934),
John Schnall’s Ha! Ha!
Ha! (2001), Debra Solomon’s
Everybody’s Pregnant (1997), Jimmy
Picker’s pitch-perfect reimagining of Mayor Koch
as a crooner in the claymation time-capsule Sundae
in New York (1983), Paul Vester’s
lyrical Sunbeam (1980), Gene Deitch’s comically
disarming folk-song visualization The
Frozen Logger (1963),
Bill Plympton’s musically metamorphic physiognomies
in Your Face (1987), Nancy Beiman’s testament
to the woes of being a misfit set to ‘Fats’ Waller’s
comic song about same in Your
Feet’s Too Big (1984)
and George Griffin’s free-associative, hand-drawn
improv to the timeless Charlie Parker sax improv
Koko (1988).
|
Sun Jan 1: 6
Tue Jan 3: 9
|
The surprising effectiveness of the satiric ‘Broadway
show tune’–type score, co-penned by director
Trey Parker and composer Marc Shaiman, earned South
Park a totally unexpected “Best Song” nomination
from the Motion Picture Academy. The score was the
crucial trump card in the clever transference of the
smash Comedy Central cable-TV series from the small
screen to the large. The profane half-pints Stan,
Cartman, Kyle and the forever tragically killed-off
Kenny, Parker’s and Matt Stone’s raunchy
and scatalogical answer to Charles Schultz’s
much-beloved
“Peanuts” ensemble,
are rendered in the same shaky, intentionally crude
quasi-cutout fashion that is familiar to anyone who
ever caught South Park on TV. The film’s clipped
quippiness, shock jokes, now strangely dated political
targets (Saddam Hussein in Hell), its obsession with
censorship issues and the alternate expression and
suppression of taboo material are likewise imported
wholesale from the show’s earlier incarnation on the
tube. What’s new are the hilarious songs, suggestive
of the repertoires of Disney animated features from
the 80s and early 90s — absurd hymns to heroism,
hearth and home, feel-good inspirational anthems and
idiotic ballads of self-empowerment like “Mountain
Town,”
“Eyes of a Child,” “La Resistance,” “Shut
Yo Face,” “I Swear
It (I Can Change),” “Kyle’s Mom’s
a Bitch,” “Blame
Canada” and “What Would Brian Boitano
Do?”
|
Sun Jan 1: 8:30
Tue Jan 3: 1:30
|
The pioneering animated films of Oskar Fischinger
launched the whole tradition of intricate, frame-by-frame
musical synchronization, his bold precedents in audio/visual
linkage inspiring several sequences of Disney’s Fantasia and
echoing today in countless modern commercial and
non-commercial works. Our specially prepared assemblage
of over 20 key Fischinger titles, presented in association
with the Center for Visual Music, glimpses at Fischinger’s
earliest silent endeavors before plunging headlong
into his unmistakable universe of vibratory parallel
lines, comet-like spheroids and pulsating concentric
circles, favorite primal forms deployed in one-to-one
matchups with pieces by Brahms (1931’s Study #7),
Wagner and Grieg (1933ís
Kreise), Mozart (1935ís Muratti Privat cigarette
ad), Liszt (1937’s An Optical Poem), John Phillip
Sousa (1941’s American March), and Johann Sebastian
Bach (1947’s Motion Painting #1). Fischinger’s
technique, equally adept at interpreting then-contemporaneous
pop music (1936’s spectacularly colorful and jazzy
Allegretto), testifi es to the powerful effects that
can be wrought through pure abstraction. For those
never exposed to the brilliant, minimalistically
designed and hyperactive abstract shapes so artfully
manipulated on these celluloid canvases, prepare
yourselves for an intellectually stimulating, sometimes
emotionally overwhelming experience.
These prints were restored by the Academy Film Archive, Center for Visual Music and Fischinger Archive. The work to restore and preserve the films of Oskar Fischinger was generously supported by the Film Foundation and Sony Pictures Entertainment. |
Mon Jan 2: 5:00
Mon Jan 2: 9:00
|
|
|
