The Animation List Discussion & Suggestions (Genre Project)

[matrixschmatrix]

Watching more Disney:

Pinocchio is really something, and a hell of a step up from Snow White both in animation and in characterization- and it's got more consistent and funnier business going on than most of the Disney shorts I've seen, enough so that I think I had more honest laughs in this one than in any of the other Disney features I've watched thus far. I'm a bit uncomfortable with some of the messaging, though: the main memory I had of this from seeing it as a kid was being absolutely terrified at the turning-to-donkeys sequence in Pleasure Island, and it's not less unsettling as an adult, particularly with the strong implication that these like 10 year old kids deserve their fate. The human voiced donkeys getting whipped in particular is goddamn nightmare fuel, and I'm not surprised it stuck with me.

That said, I really like that Jiminy feels like a real and charmingly flawed character, rather than than a nagging voice heard off that always knows best and never stops scolding. Pinocchio himself is a slightly stronger lead than most of Disney's, though that's not saying much- I've never seen a series of films so relentlessly focused on everything but the title character. I like the feeling of a non-traditional family that develops with not only Geppetto and Pinocchio, but Figaro and Cleo as well- there's a real life and joy to the scenes with them partying together, one that does a lot to overcome the sourness of the moralizing in some of the rest of the movie. I also particularly like the way in which we're shown Geppetto's kindliness, as its manifested in a loving nature and a kindliness towards even inanimate objects, in a way that feels as motherly as patriarchal, and he keeps Pinocchio's quest from feeling purely like one about straying from and returning to The Law of The Father. I can absolutely see why this one is a frequent favorite in the Disney oeuvre, though for me it doesn't reach the artistic heights of Fantasia nor the pure visual beauty of Sleeping Beauty.

Dumbo feels very much in the Pinocchio mold, from the very-similar sidekick to the lead's quest to reunite with a parent figure, but it doesn't feel like a retread- Dumbo is almost an infant, with the effect that the movie seems to have no interest in blaming him for much of anything, which I quite like. It's so brisk that it feels almost like an extended short, particularly as the Pink Elephants segment could be more or less excised without sacrificing any of the narrative (though it would me sacrificing the high point of the movie- I literally don't think I've seen three minutes of Disney animation as inventive or willing to mess with the medium anywhere else; as a purely avant garde short it could stand well enough on its own, but dropped into a traditional narrative it feels like a spectacular explosion of weird) but it's quite powerful, particularly in its depiction of the horrible, conformist elephants that refuse to accept Dumbo as a being worthy of life or respect.

The crows were more tolerable than I'd feared, and I think it's an issue where the caricature itself is problematic, rather than one of the film actually treating that caricature as villainous or stupid- indeed, the crows are relatively quick to be Dumbo's allies, and their singing and dancing is actually among the most entertaining in the movie. That doesn't stop the section from feeling ill-considered at best (a blackface caricature named Jim Crow, for real?) but I think it's something I wouldn't be overly worried about showing to a black kid; as minstrelsy on film goes, it's relatively harmless, and it seems like that particular set of signs and signifiers is far enough removed from our culture at this point that it's not going to feel as dehumanizing as it might for a more modern stereotype. It's something worth discussing (and according to the commentary, the makers were aware that it had some racist elements even in the 40s), but not the worst thing in the world.

[matrixschmatrix]

Oh, and with reference to Knives' point- one of the hard things about watching Disney features, to me, is to understand how I should see it in terms of director, actor, cinematographer and so forth, as it doesn't line up with how such things work in live action. One of the interesting things that comes out of the commentaries is the idea that certain animators would get essentially type cast as actors, expected to create certain kinds of performances or scenes, but that while sometimes a single animator would work out more or less everything for a given character, other times they would bounce around depending on the mood of the piece. Just crediting the whole project to some particular sequence or supervising director seems hopelessly inaccurate, and while declaring the auteur of the things the studio as a whole seems accurate enough, it doesn't really help for comparing them internally.

On the other hand, if this helps break me of some lazy habits of thought, maybe it will be a good thing.

[knives]

I don't know if you read up that giant thing I posted, but I go into this pretty thoroughly if that helps. There's some superstars in animation that really need to be acknowledged (my beloved Natwick for instance). I don't think we should call animation studios autuers anymore than live action studios. After all MGM films tend to have a very distinctive voice Universal and so on.

[matrixschmatrix]

I did read that, and I should clarify that in saying that the studio can be seen as the auteur, I mean Disney specifically, not animation in general- I'm fully aware that there's auteurist director's animation, and I think that's generally true of stuff that comes out of Pixar, as well as some of my favorites (Chomet's work, Secret of Kells). Disney's early features have a sort of Selznick thing going, where brilliantly talented though a lot of the people working on the features were, the overall voice and hand behind the thing always feels like the producer's- in this case, Disney himself. And while that's much less true by Sleeping Beauty, by which time Disney himself was pretty hands-off, there's a lot of house style and inertia just in terms of who got hired for what that keeps a tonal consistency up through at least like the 70s stuff.

Or at least that's the impression I'm getting from the commentaries and extras and so forth- obviously, they're biased in Disney himself's favor.

[knives]

They are very very biased to fit with the official history that the company states hence the lack of information on Dick Anthony etc. Disney was very Selznick like up to his death, but no more so on Snow White than on Sleeping Beauty. There were a lot of free floating units with some room to push (though not a great deal as Avery and Tashlin admitted to after their stays with the company). Some guys like Jack Kinney got to do basically whatever they wanted, but most of the time Disney did carefully review things. This is a long way to say that he would okay things for final cut and suggest things for the script, but didn't sit in the animation room or anything like that. Colours, mis-en-scene, design, and other like things were developed separate from him though he okayed them.

[matrixschmatrix]

Right, which to me reads as a classic example of producer-as-auteur, as with Selznick in Gone With the Wind. Particularly for something like Fantasia, which doesn't even have a supervising director- if you want to view it as a unit rather than purely an anthology, I can't see whom one could designate the creator other than Disney himself.

Incidentally, does anyone else giggle every time the name Dick Huemer comes up?

[zedz]

One of the great things about animation is the way that the role of 'director' can extend from the most auteurist of auteurs (a single person doing absolutely everything, and even forsaking the mechanical process of photography) to the most anonymous or amorphous of administrators. You also have really interesting instances of creative groups and collaborations and 'brand auteurism' - which is what classic-era Disney may boil down to, even though it's easy enough to trace individual creative personalities in specific characters and sequences. A film like Pinocchio bears the traces of so many formative personalities (even Walt's!) that it poses quite an exciting challenge to conventional auteurism.

[Michael Kerpan]

An interesting case of para-auteur (quasi-auteur) in animation -- Yoshitoshi Abe. Abe had an art school background and was fond of a few important manga artists, but had no particular background in animation when hired to do the character designs for Serial Experiment Lain. While obviously his input was not "primary", it is hard to imagine Lain being particularly successful with more conventional (TV) anime character designs. From this point on, Abe had a more central role in projects. For Niea_7, he came up with the story and the character designs. For Haibane Renmei, he did everything (except the actual animation and direction) -- story, script, character designs and entire visual environment. For Texhnolyze, he worked on a story devised by his producer, designing not just the visual form of the characters but also developing the characters themselves, he also designed the whole visual environment (and the environment in Texhnolyze is central in this, rather like Blade Runner).

While I love all the Abe-related shows, I have to confess that Niea_7 (about a sad and lonely student whose life is invaded by an alien free-loader) is variable in quality, particularly during the first half of the series, but becomes quite powerful by the end. This is worth seeing but would not make the cut for top animated mini-series. I would argue that the other three series are worthy of consideration.

Lain (now looking spectacularly improved in its Blu-Ray reincarnation) covers the sort of territory that Matrix does -- but did it a year or so earlier (and more hauntingly). Haibane Renmei (my favorite series) is a mix of Murakami (particularly Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World) and Kore-eda (After Life, plus a bit of Maborosi). Texhnolyze is one of the best looking series ever -- a post-apocalyptic dystopia -- deep underground (with artificial day and night). Very grim and brutal -- but beautiful ugliness (some of the time).

[matrixschmatrix]

The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad surprised me with how much I enjoyed it. I remember the Sleepy Hollow piece from when I was a kid, and it was something that worked well enough that it stayed with me- but I wasn't prepared for how much better it worked when paired with Mr. Toad, which I don't think I had seen. Mr. Toad is a marvel, slyer and more anti-establishment than I've seen in a Disney piece, combining some of the rich characterization that usually comes with feature length with the zip and fast action that Disney usually only gets out of its shorts. And the Sleepy Hollow half works almost like a Chaplin short, giving Crane a marvelous grace and sense of style to rival anything I've seen in animation, and keeping the thing alive until it gets to the climactic sequence that was the one part that really lodged itself in my mind.

It's a shame that the feature is one of the Disney poor relations, as the print quality could really use some help, but it's nonetheless top-tier Disney for me. Is it a contender for anyone else's list? If so, would you be inclined to vote for the whole, or to consider it as two messily conjoined shorts?

[dustybooks]

I'm probably voting for the whole film. It's certainly my favorite of the "package features."

[matrixschmatrix]

Yeah, I just finished Fun and Fancy Free, and while it's not bad it certainly doesn't feel like it holds its own against the golden age features the way Ichabod and Mr. Toad does- I just have very low tolerance for Edgar Bergen, I guess.

[Dansu Dansu Dansu]

Thanks for your Yoshitoshi Abe write-up, MK. I've only seen Lain, which I enjoyed, but I watched it in the shadow of Haibane, so it suffered in comparison because it wasn't what I wanted to see. I should give it a fair shake sometime. Texhnolyze has been in my Netflix queue for a while, so hopefully this list will be my excuse to watch it. I've never even heard of Niea 7, so thanks for the heads up!

By the way, our opinions of Haibane are practically identical. Years ago, I showed it to a friend in English since she disliked subtitles, and while she loved it, I couldn't believe how inferior it was to the Japanese track. Also, it's the only non-Ghibli anime soundtrack I own, so needless to say, I agree about the superb score as well.

The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad surprised me with how much I enjoyed it. I remember the Sleepy Hollow piece from when I was a kid, and it was something that worked well enough that it stayed with me- but I wasn't prepared for how much better it worked when paired with Mr. Toad, which I don't think I had seen. Mr. Toad is a marvel, slyer and more anti-establishment than I've seen in a Disney piece, combining some of the rich characterization that usually comes with feature length with the zip and fast action that Disney usually only gets out of its shorts.

I've always thought this film was much better than its reputation. I'm happy you said Mr. Toad is anti-establishment because a general contempt for society is the only theme I can see that connects the two films. In Sleepy Hollow, the middle class is mocked as a contest for sex and consumption (a play on words, since food is directly linked to money through the woman's father), with Ichabod's teachings of culture only a pretense. I don't know how intentional this connection is, especially since Mr. Toad had been in development for ages and the postwar years were all about packaging random parts as full-length films, but it's an effective double feature when seen from that angle. Still, Mr. Toad has Ichabod beat, though it's absolutely amazing how much of Sleepy Hollow was borrowed for Beauty and the Beast.

[matrixschmatrix]

Ha, yes, I was noticing how Gaston-esque a figure Brom Bones was, and it's funny that he's apparently intended to be a semi-likable figure here, though I suppose it gets away with it largely because Ichabod is surely no less of a jerk. I like that connection between the two halves- the expression of non-conformity is certainly different, as Sleepy Hollow gets at it through satire while Toad is a figure the narrator more or less straightforwardly admires for his resistance to bourgeois values, but I think the tone of both pieces is enlivened by a casual contempt for institutional norms. I think I agree that the Wind in the Willows half is the better (how often do you get a fuck-the-police sentiment in any children's cartoon?) but I'm still fairly convinced that the whole is more than the sum of the parts.

The linking of the two within the film may be the laziest thing I've seen coming out Disney yet, though- it's basically Bing Crosby saying 'haha, yes, that was a good story, here's another', and that's it.

[Matt]

They were originally each meant to be separate features, but the production of Mr. Toad was delayed and interrupted by the war and Sleepy Hollow wound up far too short to be a feature. So Disney stuck them together, rather awkwardly. But Sleepy Hollow is probably my 2nd favorite Disney production, and one that had a huge impact on me as a child.

[matrixschmatrix]

Right, and you can see the joins in a lot of the package features- but at least they made some kind of an effort on Fun and Fancy Free, making a whole framing thing with Jiminy Cricket. You can still see the joins without too much trouble, but for The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad, they didn't even come up with some sort of a name to join the two together (and the name we've got might well be the awkwardest in the Disney canon.)

Out of curiosity, what's your number one favorite Disney production?

[Matt]

Sleeping Beauty. The design, based on medieval tapestries and illuminated manuscripts, is unlike any other animated movie.

[movielocke]

That said, I really like that Jiminy feels like a real and charmingly flawed character, rather than than a nagging voice heard off that always knows best and never stops scolding. Pinocchio himself is a slightly stronger lead than most of Disney's, though that's not saying much- I've never seen a series of films so relentlessly focused on everything but the title character. I like the feeling of a non-traditional family that develops with not only Geppetto and Pinocchio, but Figaro and Cleo as well- there's a real life and joy to the scenes with them partying together, one that does a lot to overcome the sourness of the moralizing in some of the rest of the movie. I also particularly like the way in which we're shown Geppetto's kindliness, as its manifested in a loving nature and a kindliness towards even inanimate objects, in a way that feels as motherly as patriarchal, and he keeps Pinocchio's quest from feeling purely like one about straying from and returning to The Law of The Father.

I think it's sometimes lost in the enthusiasm to castigate the infamous 'disneyfication' process, that some of their adaptations were actually substantial improvements on the source material, Pinocchio is a prime example where the Disney version is far superior to the Collodi original text. Those elements you highlight are some areas where Disney very cleverly softened the harsh moralizing and lesson-teaching of the original.

[matrixschmatrix]

Yeah, the original is very much The Law of the Father and nothing but. I don't know that I have a real problem with the Disney-fying of most of the source texts early on, though I think I like Alice in Wonderland and Peter Pan more in their original forms- certainly, I can't think of anything that seems as wrong-headed as the changes wrought to The Hunchback of Notre Dame or Pocahontas (where it feels doubly uncomfortable, as it's a rare real-life story run through the Disney device.)

[dustybooks]

I just finished my preliminary top 50 and then noticed that TV specials are eligible. Eep. (My fault for not reading more carefully.) I have no idea what I'm going to knock off -- I'm surprised how many things I love I already was unable to fit, sadly including both Sleeping Beauty and Ichabod and Mr. Toad. I'm also worried I may be overcorrecting a bit, because my natural tendency is to favor artistry over humor* and so I've made a point to include at least half a dozen cartoons I just think are hilarious -- but when it's at the expense of Sleeping Beauty I'm not sure that's the right choice.

Rewatching "Rooty Toot Toot" a couple of times tonight really brought home what a wonderful entity UPA once was. It's one of the only cartoons that achieves that modernist visual look but also manages some magical and totally bonkers character animation. Really a great film, and John Hubley's best by a longshot for me.

* Edit: rereading this I realize it sounds like I'm implying artistry and humor are mutually exclusive which I don't believe at all, but it's late and at the moment I can't seem to figure out how to say what I'm trying to say here, so please forgive me.

[Lemmy Caution]

Animation blog has some commentary and links to interesting old and new animation, including a few posts down a write up and link to Hubley's Flat Hatting short a sort of safe flying film from 1946.

[matrixschmatrix]

So. Bambi.. I've been watching Disney cartoons for like two weeks straight, and this is the first time one has failed to grip me. The animation is certainly pretty enough- though so painterly that it feels like it's hardly moving- but the close physical representation of nature makes it feel ironically like the worst kind of anthropomorphization, the kind Disney so often went on to do in their documentaries, where human traits and narratives are laid on to real seeming animals rather than either creating human stories with animal characters, or allowing that animals to exist in their own way. In most Disney movies, it's not odd when predators and prey get along- but here, seeing an owl palling around with mice and squirrels and tiny birds seems almost insulting, as though I don't know how nature works. It's sanitized. The irony being, of course, that Bambi is most famous for a moment of predatory destruction, and I think part of why that moment is such a violation (and why it feels unfair to me) is that we're evidently in the Garden of Eden up until it happens, as the lions are lying down with the lambs (or would be if they were around.)

I'm also a bit uncomfortable with the sort of stages of life story we get, insofar as it maps on to human terms- the cut from Bambi's mother's death to his sudden near-adulthood implies a link between the two which I don't like, and the modelling of fatherhood (as a distant protector rather than any kind of intimate, with no apparent relationship with the mother) is surely unpleasant, as is the combat for the woman's hand scene. Obviously, these are deer and not people, but equally obviously we're meant to read Bambi's life as a mirror of our own, and I don't really like the 'natural' story it implies. It feels heteronormative and patriarchal in a way that something like Pinocchio seemed very neatly to dodge.

I don't know, I'm probably being nitpicky and looking for fault in a way I wouldn't if I'd been properly absorbed in the world of the movie, but the first half seemed more than anything just boring to me. It picks up in the second, after Bambi ages- the animation becomes freer, more willing to apply cartoonish touches in some places and impressionist ones in others (I really enjoyed the animation of the fight and the fire), even as I'm not any more taken with the story itself. I know it's a really beloved movie, and I don't particularly want to shit on something people care about, but I guess to me that this movie says "Disney" in a way that fits with my most negative images of the brand, and which I had been finding less fitting than I recalled for a lot of my other viewings.

(It may clarify my feelings about this that I really hate The Lion King, too.)

[dustybooks]

Bambi is the only one of the "first five" that I feel slipping away a little each time I see it. I still love it (and emotionally I feel it's more successful than pretty much any subsequent Disney feature), but it has problems -- I'm a little uncomfortable with much of what you mentioned, plus that jarring shift from the death sequence to the sweetness and light of springtime. That's too much like being cynically punished for falling under the film's spell.

[Mr Sausage]

I'm also a bit uncomfortable with the sort of stages of life story we get, insofar as it maps on to human terms- the cut from Bambi's mother's death to his sudden near-adulthood implies a link between the two which I don't like, and the modelling of fatherhood (as a distant protector rather than any kind of intimate, with no apparent relationship with the mother) is surely unpleasant, as is the combat for the woman's hand scene. Obviously, these are deer and not people, but equally obviously we're meant to read Bambi's life as a mirror of our own, and I don't really like the 'natural' story it implies. It feels heteronormative and patriarchal in a way that something like Pinocchio seemed very neatly to dodge.

I don't mind this very much because it's clear where the conventions are from: older myths and legends. There you'll find stories in which the father looms large and heroic (signaling the son's heritage and destiny), but is therefore at a remove--think Herakles and his father, Zeus. Although it also plays into a common feeling of children being in awe of their father. And, of course, a scene of battle in which a woman/queen/princess/whomever is won in marriage is old and common indeed.

These values seem so odd and atavistic because they are. Disney is just using the archetypal story patterns of romance--and not for insidious social ends, but because audiences, children especially, respond to them on a primal level by now. It's stuff you could've found in The Sword and the Stone. Stories in which nature is anthropomorphized are more naive, and therefore lend themselves to directly archetypal forms of narrative.

So this stuff no more bothers me when it's talking deer than when it's knights and sorcerers. They're just familiar story patterns.

[matrixschmatrix]

Well, fair enough, but as movielocke pointed out, Disney is fully capable of taking that kind if material and changing it in subtle ways that make it more fitting for an audience that has different expectations and lives in a different world, as they did with Pinocchio. Bambi particularly bugs me since it seems pitched at the tiniest of children, even as compared to other Disney stuff- I feel as though implied life modelling in that kind of story bears a weight of inquiry that it might not in something pitched at a more knowing audience.

[Mr Sausage]

Well, fair enough, but as movielocke pointed out, Disney is fully capable of taking that kind if material and changing it in subtle ways that make it more fitting for an audience that has different expectations and lives in a different world, as they did with Pinocchio. Bambi particularly bugs me since it seems pitched at the tiniest of children, even as compared to other Disney stuff- I feel as though implied life modelling in that kind of story bears a weight of inquiry that it might not in something pitched at a more knowing audience.

Granted, it's been a while since I've seen Bambi, but I'm not sure that there's any more implied life modeling in that film than in any other. There may even be less, just by virtue of it being so archetypal. What's being modeled here isn't life but other narratives. And I think kids generally understand that gap between their own lives and the mythical, heroic ones they see on-screen or read in books. They can admire the story without also feeling that they are destined to inhabit it. Even very young kids seem to understand with a movie like this (or The Sword in the Stone) that what they're seeing takes place on a plane they don't inhabit. Kids get fantasy.

As a curiosity, if this same story had been about knights in a fantastical semi-mediaeval setting, dragons included, and had been pitched at kids as well, would you have found these conventional elements as bothersome or would you have accepted their appearance more easily in that setting?

This is not by way of defending Bambi--I'd probably hate it if I saw it again. But these elements are far less troubling to me. I appreciate where they come from.