ChuckJones Tagged Articles at Cinematical
100 Great Animated Short Film Directors
Filed under: Animation », Shorts », Lists »
Among all the other inequalities in cinema, one of the oldest is the general preference for feature-length films over shorts. Very few short films are considered essential masterpieces, and even fewer animated short films have that title. It's even more difficult if you consider that a whole generation of us grew up watching hours upon hours of cartoons on television (with commercials), without the knowledge or experience to discern that some of them might have been actual works of genius or art. How many times, for example, did I watch Chuck Jones's What's Opera Doc? (1957) without really contemplating or even noticing the detail and the imagination that went into it. I didn't know at the time that I would eventually go on to call it the Citizen Kane of cartoons.
Now the blog Shooting Down Pictures has compiled an essential list of 100 Important Directors of Animated Short Films, which -- at the very least -- gives us a starting point. The introduction specifies that the list is simply 100 important directors, and not THE 100 most important directors. The very first comment on the list was: where's Mike Judge? And the listmakers replied by saying that these filmmakers are primarily theatrical and not television-based. (That explains the lack of Rocky & Bullwinkle, too.) The list of directors was originally created when the folks behind the great movie-list website They Shoot Pictures, Don't They? decided to make a list of the 250 greatest short films, which never materialized.
RvB's After Images: Herman, Katnip and Other Gloomy Tunes
Filed under: Animation », Classics », After Image »
Recently down for a week to pick up some kultcha in the "hateful megalopolis," as R. Crumb described Los Angeles, I caught a recurring cabaret night of bad cartoons titled Cartoon Dump! hosted by Jerry Beck, an internationally known authority on animation. Frank Conniff, best known as TV's Frank from Mystery Science Theater 3000, was on hand in costume as "Moodsy," a clinically depressed owl. The slim comedienne Erica Doering played Compost Brite! the cute, lisping dumpster-diving elf who had retrieved from the garbage a bunch of stinky cartoons that the world might be well without. Beck and Company dug up some real lulus. Hard to top was the opening from the 1950s, Paddy the Pelican.
You knew you were in for it right from the cackling theme song, seemingly a version of "The Irish Washerwoman" performed by a demented Canadian goose in duet with an electric organ. The graphics and apparently improvised dialog was like something a brain damaged-child might have come up with if you handed him a microphone and a crayon. You owe it to yourself to leave a few bars of that "Paddy" soundtrack on a friend's cellphone. They'll be looking over their shoulders for months afterwards to see if there's someone stalking them.
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